Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Reading Lolita in the US

In an unusually long and thought-provoking post at The Valve, Joseph Kugelmass, a U. Cal grad student and a prolific blogger of cultural criticism, delivers a critique of the ways in which Nabokov's "Lolita" is read, both in Tehran and everywhere else.

Kugelmass believes we've been led astray by Nabokov's statement, perhaps intentionally misleading, he feels, that "Lolita" is "the record of my love affair with the English language." (We're even more misled by that ubiquitous John Updike quote about Nabokov writing "ecstatically.") "Lolita" isn't really about language, Kugelmass protests. It's about the enormous and enormously complex consuming power of love, however forbidden. In the works of "Lolita" critisicm, he says, "one finds, instead of these elements, a series of moralizing accounts of the novel, most of which are both convincing and anaesthetizing."

He moves from there into a discussion of what it means to disagree about works of art, as he disagrees with many about "Lolita" and others (like the Web site Pitchfork) about music. He wants to conserve disagreement as a fruitful and compelling habit, not to let conflict devolve into agreeing to disagree, as the saying goes: "It is good to be provoked." A wandering essay, but in the end strangely persuasive.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:49 PM

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