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.

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.

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.

Nabokov was a wily one. His only real allegiance was to art, and yet his works are threaded with such a consummate disgust with propaganda, vulgarity, credulousness, violence, and the abuses of power that it's hard not to find his protestations a bit disingenuous. Nabokov seemed to find complete individual freedom only in art. It was an inviolable realm. And that, in its own way, was a deeply political act that never relied on the propaganda of "ideas."

"Strong Opinions," a complication of interviews, letters, and other bits and pieces, is a good example of how he tried to be unassailable. Though the interviews are mostly formatted as conversational Q&As, in reality they were questions submitted to him in writing. After he wrote his responses, he retained the right to edit or rewrite as he saw fit--sometimes, even the interviewer's content--right up to point of publication. He protected his individual sovereignty more than crowing about the importance of "freedom" ever could. Yet we shouldn't necessarily take his statements at face value. He might sneer at all of us for being so easily duped by his clever constructions. Hell, half of them are probably meaningless anagrams.

I don't think Nafisi is far off. The relationship between Humbert and Lolita doesn't represent the "confiscation of one individual's life by another," but literally is that confiscation--no symbolism necessary. Is there any doubt that Humbert wields complete, unjust, corrupt power over Lolita? Is there any doubt Nabokov found such behavior brutal? Certainly, he wasn't making crass comparisons to creaky democracies or outright police states--yet he was still speaking truth to power, albeit on an intimate, individual scale. It's the scale that each of us operates on. And that's why Lolita is still so devastating.

The book may be all its defenders say it is, but every time there's a revival or new movie we have a flood of images of little girls as sex objects. the book cover is a case in point.