Okay so you're a literary genius. There is a much better article in Slate about this very same topic without all the name-dropping and condescension. What a bore.

Why does every person who think he/she is an authority on Nabokov and LOLITA, always mistakenly believe that Humber is a "middle-aged" man? He is approximately in his lower- to mid-thirties.

I found Allen Barra's article illuminating; I finally understand why my single reading of "Lolita", some years ago, left me cold. (I've always wondered.) But it's surely contradictory to say in one sentence that Nabokov denounced a repressive society in "Invitation to a Beheading" and in another that the author can't have had any social purpose in "Lolita" because he disliked ideas in literature. The fact that he would have sneered at Nafisi's praise is irrelevant; readers and critics have always found more in great literature than the writers of it ever intended, at least consciously, to say. My own feeling is that where Nafisi errs is in grouping a novel that has parody at its core with the great realist novels that teach empathy by exploring the moral world in its complexity--AND its ambiguity.

"Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions."

This could just be more artifice. Nabokov might have more readily sneered at Barra than at Nafisi.

He may not have intended a message, but that doesn't mean one doesn't come out.

Barra has read "Lolita" 4 times, and claims to understand that Nabokov's writing was intended as a "the springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion." And yet, he asks, about this book: "Can the soul live on parody alone? What kind of world would it be in which the only literature was parody and its only virtue irony?"

Which version of Lolita are you talking about, Mr. Barra? The sublimely beautiful artistic achievement that produces the highest sort of aesthetic bliss in an able reader? Or the one in which you consider it merely to be an exercise in "verbal dexterity"? Did your editors at Salon, desperate to derive some sort of "social" meaning from what is arguably the finest novel of the 20th century, put you up to it?

Although you ignore this, Nabokov was a deeply moral (but not moralistic - a very significant difference) writer - but on his own terms. He was, for instance, against cruelty. Which is a vastly different thing than using literature (!) to make some sort of comment on the social and political issues of the day. He proved his point that this can be done, didn't he, in choosing to write an immensely beautiful and wonderfully sympathetic book about a youngish man (not middle-aged, as identified above) engaged in an erotic relationship with a very young girl, which by definition is considered reprehensible by modern Western morality. Is it not a moral act to be sympathetic to even the most henious of criminals? And is this not one (of many) emotions produced by Lolita?

Lolita requires a finely calibrated understanding to fully appreciate. Mr. Barra, unfortunately, in a desperate attempt to judge Lolita on a basis alien to its intent, seems to have lost his. You are both worried and resentful that Nabokov might have held you in contempt. Perhaps it is because you know, at least in regards to Lolita, that he would be right to.

Saying *anything* about Nabokov is difficult -- his books are tangled, tricksy webs of deceit that everyone sees differently. Thanks, Allen, for throwing in.

Though I vigorously defend authorial agency, and the elusiveness of the joys literature, Allen Barra's effort to elevate Nabokov into a "new critical" Elysium where literature and writing are hermetic, isolated from social and political context, is anachronistic. Clearly, Nabokov styled himself as an advocate of a "higher" literary endeavor, but Azar Nifisi's reading reminds us that, regardless of intention (the irony that always boomeranged on new critics), the author, and the canon he embraces in the service of artifice and parody, is inevitably engaged with the world beyond the page. The best literature is anarchically democratic, a textual landscape where intention and design collide and rebound against discovery and accident. The notion of a totalitarian author, methodically hardwiring a machine of intention together, ignores the beautiful, threatening, and libidinous nature of human consciousness (and unconsciousness). If anything, Lolita's literary achievement is that it makes this element of the creative endeavor so apparent.

Nabokov seems to have too many inside jokes with himself...and its only the jokes he has tired of that he gives to his work. The real wink winking he reserves for himself alone.

-dimmezdale

www.mcfawn.blogspot.com

Everyone thinks Humbert is a middle-aged man because they're remembering James Mason, who was in his early 50's when he played the role in Stan "Fucking A" Kubrick's adaptation.

While I agree with posters that Kubrick's casting of Mason was a gross misjudgement, 30something or 50something with a 12 year old is really beside the point. I count this book as one of my favorites, and can compare it to the ponderous and oafish Atlas Shrugged that represented the anti-Lolita.

Rand's tomes (which I have also read) are nothing if not anti-art. The equivalent of passing off 60 story bank HQ as architecture or Tom Cruise as an actor.

To me, humble reader in the heartland, Nabakov represents the pinnacle of an author using language to seduce even the most unwilling to follow. Fiction is the making real the unreal, no one ever did it better than Nabakov.

I agree that great works of art, like Lolita, often take on a cultural significance far beyond what the creator envisioned. That is why, even though Nabakov may have disagreed with the Iranian writer's interpretation, her context for using it is no less legitmate.

In some ways, Nabakov's disclaimers about his own work are similar to Bob Dylan's pronouncements about his own seminal works. He has said, repeatedly, that they are "just songs" and he really just wrote them because he could, not because he was trying to lead a movement. Not being any kind of artist myself, I often wonder if this ability to immerse one self so completely in the creative process that the greater world drops out of sight is the first requirement for any great artist.