Loved this essay, so brilliantly written and argued. I agree that the question “how could Nabokov write such a monster if he was not himself a monster” is absolutely baffling and out of place with all those other ACTUAL monsters the book mentions. To ask this question is to not know Nabokov’s style - his books are seeped in irony, forcing the reader question the functional reality and the trustworthiness of the narrator. To take it literally is, well, missing the point.
As I kept reading, American Psycho came to mind and how no one thinks Bret Easton Ellis is capable of doing any such things. I’ve seen the book you refer to around and read some bits here and there as I was interested in the question of good art by bad people, or more precisely whether we can separate the art from the artist. But the example here of Lolita is of course a different one and I have enjoyed reading your thoughts on how fiction should be taken as such without assuming is necessarily a reflection of the writer’s lived experience or true nature.
Absolutely brilliant essay as always Heather, I think this has been my favourite so far! And I think you would have done a far better job at writing the non fiction book you speak about it at the start!
Honestly there are some great insights in the early chapters, but I believe it started life as a viral essay and I think it maybe should have stayed as that; there wasn't enough to fill a book and it showed by about half way through.
Absolutely brilliant, Heather. And so right. The demonisation of Nabokov can only be based on a misreading, (or not reading) of the novel. It is deeply disturbing, but that is its purpose. I loved 'The People in the Trees,' too (and your Orpheus!). Did anyone accuse Graham Greene of being a sociopath because he created 'Pinkie' in Brighton Rock so perfectly? I don't think so.
Amazing essay wow! I think the need to place abusers into a subhuman category so that we don’t have to recognize them as everyday people has aloud abusers to get away with it for a long time.
Thank you, for this. One might say that you are overly generous in devoting so many words to your refutation of the thesis of the book about monsters. Clearly that author does not have a clue about what art and literature are. Would she say Conrad was Mr. Kurtz? Melville, Ahab? Faulkner, Benjy? Come on! Nabokov was the great love of my literary life when I was an undergraduate writing my thesis on “Ada”. So I am delighted to come across another reader who understands.
Thanks for this Heather. I found that whole book irritating in its style and premise, though I wasn’t sure why. And yes, that she misses that Nabokov was probably a victim of SA himself is telling.
This is a little outside of the topic of this brilliant piece, but this way of thinking about monstrosity shows so well in the way we think about Nazis, how in works of fiction they’re portrayed as inhuman creatures
Loved reading this! I think it brings up some really important points when we are currently living in a society where everything online is curated for us, for our demographic and beliefs. It's easy to stay in your comfort zone and looking at the context of a piece, especially one so disturbing as Lolita and having to examine the way those themes exist in the world around you or even how you may have contributed to them when we are so rarely provoked like that now (at least when we are not looking for it) is something that id imagine many find challenging. I also may have gone and bought a copy of your book as it's exactly the sort of thing you have inspired me to read more of after finishing this essay 😳
I think there's definitely something to that - that the spaces we create are more comforting than when we didn't have the curatorial power, and that this might contribute to a lack of willingness to engage with difficult literature. (And I hope you enjoy the book!)
This was a really great essay, and a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot since I heard of the Gisele Pelicot case in France. Fiction unlike a news article does give more space to really think about an issue like that, privately / without it passing through conversations so quickly, like so many other horrible news stories. To process it and glean insight into why it keeps happening. And to reduce it to “is the writer familiar with this topic, is that why they were able to write about it” just makes the topic so shallow and, in my opinion, disempowers it.
I agree that the idea of monstrousness is unhelpful - it is humans like you and me, like all of us, who commit atrocious acts of violence, abuse and genocide x
I thought this was great, but I do think you should link the book you're criticizing both out of fairness and to allow what might be an interesting rebuttal. I'm sure your decision not to do so was deliberate; I'm curious as to your thinking on that. Whatever your response to that may be, I very much appreciated the thoughtful analysis and reasoning you applied to *Lolita* which is currently getting a lot of bad press and to the writing process more generally, which is also under fire.
It's not difficult to find the book if you want to; the reason I haven't mentioned the book or the author by name is that a) I'm not trying to create beef and b) I don't want to cause any sort of attack on the author. There's no need to do so to have this conversation. As a woman on the internet I know how grim that can be.
I guess I have to respect the choice even as I think what a loss it is that some people (e.g., you : ) ) think that critiquing a work will subject either you or her (I’m inferring) to abuse, or that the ensuing discussion would be a “beef” rather than an interplay of ideas. shrugs The world we live in, I guess. Thanks for your response.
Some authors almost welcome criticism as a challenging “interplay of ideas” while others find it an attack on their whole existence and are deeply affected by it. Criticism is fair, but I think it’s totally understandable to shield the author as you don’t really know how they’d take it. Criticism isn’t for the author anyway. It’s for readers.
Do you extend that delicacy of feeling to commenters who, like authors, publish their ideas? In that case I must object to the cruelty implied by your implied criticism of my suggestion. And I will note that the article to which I am responding IS, in fact, a criticism which may very well come to the attention of the original author anyway, so it would have been more straightforward to do it in the first place and would have allowed a more immediate defense or reaction. I don’t think that, upon reflection, you’d defend your last two sentences, so I leave them unchallenged.
And, commenting is engaging in a conversation. Books take months or years to write. It’s just not the same. Authors have wildly varying attitudes to their work and as a reviews editor in the past I’ve had to manage people’s hurt feelings about bad reviews. I ended up feeling that while they’re a necessary part of cultural life, the author and their work may just be harmed by reading them.
You really are going to go there. Yes, a comment does invite reply, and your position is, bizarrely, that publishing a book is not part of the cultural conversation? That writers want to publish but not be read, thought about, or responded to? I won’t disagree that some comments are harmful and are better being unseen, but the critique of this article was not of that sort, and a writer who can’t deal with it has no business publishing. And you are ignoring the fact that the author might have something to say in support of the position she took.
I’m just not sure why you’re so annoyed about it, but you’re welcome to your opinion. Of course an author can find reviews if they go looking for them, and presumably, if they do that they’re feeling robust, or want to know. But it’s possible to engage in meaningful critique without shouting it directly at them, and it doesn’t affect the substance of the argument. Like, what do you actually gain by tagging them in a bad review? I don’t get the motivation.
I don't think anyone is attacking anyone in these comments; it is of course difficult to ascertain tone in writing but I don't think anyone is seeking to escalate, only discussing. But I will also say that my post is not a review of a book; the chapter mentioned was a prompt for it, but the issue under discussion is wider and more enduring, hence my desire to speak about it.
I’m not “so annoyed.” I made a comment, got a response and replied to that response and left it at that. The article here was not a “review,” though. It discussed and critiqued someone else’s work, yes, but it was much more than that. A review would certainly have named the book and the author. What this was was criticism without allowing response. As I pointed out, the article was excellent, but I think the failure to name the work criticized wasn’t fair play.
I must confess to feeling uneasy when teaching ‘100 Years Of Solitude’ as there is paedophilic fantasy in it which I didn’t feel the narrative did very much to challenge - I felt like Marquez wrote the paedophilic gaze as if it was just another part of the novel’s magical realism. I wondered what purpose it served. Lolita handled the subject in a more realistic way but that question of how to write about abuse without simply reinforcing it is tricky
It’s a small part of the overall story, I wasn’t sure what to make of it though. I suppose similar to critiquing the ‘male gaze’ you need some hint of the victim’s perspective, otherwise it can just feel like an abuse fantasy
I find it mystifying that aesthetic enjoyment can be affected by the facts about the artist's life. Lolita is superb on every level. Nevertheless, there is a good essay by Martin Amis on what Nabokov's artistic obsession with pedophilia does to his oeuvre:
"Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. [...[ Nabokov's mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus."
I think this is a fair opinion (tho perhaps uncharitably put by Amis), although the phrase "insufficiently honours the innocence" I find really grim. These are novels about men, not girls. (Though I must confess to having some negative bias against Martin Amis as he was head of English at my university and was widely considered to be a ****.)
It is a weird way of phrasing it, but the power of Lolita is when you see glimpses of her suffering in between the lines of HH’s narcissism.
I want to hear more Amis anecdotes now! Very odd that he went into academia at all. I assumed he rocked up for one class a week and then got the plane home.
I studiously avoided any Creative Writing classes in my degree (because I was terrified of actually trying to write; a topic for therapy I'm sure) so didn't come into direct contact but he was very much not liked (at least amongst everyone I knew).
Loved this essay, so brilliantly written and argued. I agree that the question “how could Nabokov write such a monster if he was not himself a monster” is absolutely baffling and out of place with all those other ACTUAL monsters the book mentions. To ask this question is to not know Nabokov’s style - his books are seeped in irony, forcing the reader question the functional reality and the trustworthiness of the narrator. To take it literally is, well, missing the point.
As I kept reading, American Psycho came to mind and how no one thinks Bret Easton Ellis is capable of doing any such things. I’ve seen the book you refer to around and read some bits here and there as I was interested in the question of good art by bad people, or more precisely whether we can separate the art from the artist. But the example here of Lolita is of course a different one and I have enjoyed reading your thoughts on how fiction should be taken as such without assuming is necessarily a reflection of the writer’s lived experience or true nature.
Absolutely brilliant essay as always Heather, I think this has been my favourite so far! And I think you would have done a far better job at writing the non fiction book you speak about it at the start!
Honestly there are some great insights in the early chapters, but I believe it started life as a viral essay and I think it maybe should have stayed as that; there wasn't enough to fill a book and it showed by about half way through.
Absolutely brilliant, Heather. And so right. The demonisation of Nabokov can only be based on a misreading, (or not reading) of the novel. It is deeply disturbing, but that is its purpose. I loved 'The People in the Trees,' too (and your Orpheus!). Did anyone accuse Graham Greene of being a sociopath because he created 'Pinkie' in Brighton Rock so perfectly? I don't think so.
Amazing essay wow! I think the need to place abusers into a subhuman category so that we don’t have to recognize them as everyday people has aloud abusers to get away with it for a long time.
Thank you, for this. One might say that you are overly generous in devoting so many words to your refutation of the thesis of the book about monsters. Clearly that author does not have a clue about what art and literature are. Would she say Conrad was Mr. Kurtz? Melville, Ahab? Faulkner, Benjy? Come on! Nabokov was the great love of my literary life when I was an undergraduate writing my thesis on “Ada”. So I am delighted to come across another reader who understands.
Thanks for this Heather. I found that whole book irritating in its style and premise, though I wasn’t sure why. And yes, that she misses that Nabokov was probably a victim of SA himself is telling.
This is a little outside of the topic of this brilliant piece, but this way of thinking about monstrosity shows so well in the way we think about Nazis, how in works of fiction they’re portrayed as inhuman creatures
this was phenomenal!! really thought provoking as well. kudos!
Loved reading this! I think it brings up some really important points when we are currently living in a society where everything online is curated for us, for our demographic and beliefs. It's easy to stay in your comfort zone and looking at the context of a piece, especially one so disturbing as Lolita and having to examine the way those themes exist in the world around you or even how you may have contributed to them when we are so rarely provoked like that now (at least when we are not looking for it) is something that id imagine many find challenging. I also may have gone and bought a copy of your book as it's exactly the sort of thing you have inspired me to read more of after finishing this essay 😳
I think there's definitely something to that - that the spaces we create are more comforting than when we didn't have the curatorial power, and that this might contribute to a lack of willingness to engage with difficult literature. (And I hope you enjoy the book!)
This was a really great essay, and a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot since I heard of the Gisele Pelicot case in France. Fiction unlike a news article does give more space to really think about an issue like that, privately / without it passing through conversations so quickly, like so many other horrible news stories. To process it and glean insight into why it keeps happening. And to reduce it to “is the writer familiar with this topic, is that why they were able to write about it” just makes the topic so shallow and, in my opinion, disempowers it.
I couldn't agree more!
I agree that the idea of monstrousness is unhelpful - it is humans like you and me, like all of us, who commit atrocious acts of violence, abuse and genocide x
I thought this was great, but I do think you should link the book you're criticizing both out of fairness and to allow what might be an interesting rebuttal. I'm sure your decision not to do so was deliberate; I'm curious as to your thinking on that. Whatever your response to that may be, I very much appreciated the thoughtful analysis and reasoning you applied to *Lolita* which is currently getting a lot of bad press and to the writing process more generally, which is also under fire.
It's not difficult to find the book if you want to; the reason I haven't mentioned the book or the author by name is that a) I'm not trying to create beef and b) I don't want to cause any sort of attack on the author. There's no need to do so to have this conversation. As a woman on the internet I know how grim that can be.
I guess I have to respect the choice even as I think what a loss it is that some people (e.g., you : ) ) think that critiquing a work will subject either you or her (I’m inferring) to abuse, or that the ensuing discussion would be a “beef” rather than an interplay of ideas. shrugs The world we live in, I guess. Thanks for your response.
Some authors almost welcome criticism as a challenging “interplay of ideas” while others find it an attack on their whole existence and are deeply affected by it. Criticism is fair, but I think it’s totally understandable to shield the author as you don’t really know how they’d take it. Criticism isn’t for the author anyway. It’s for readers.
Do you extend that delicacy of feeling to commenters who, like authors, publish their ideas? In that case I must object to the cruelty implied by your implied criticism of my suggestion. And I will note that the article to which I am responding IS, in fact, a criticism which may very well come to the attention of the original author anyway, so it would have been more straightforward to do it in the first place and would have allowed a more immediate defense or reaction. I don’t think that, upon reflection, you’d defend your last two sentences, so I leave them unchallenged.
And, commenting is engaging in a conversation. Books take months or years to write. It’s just not the same. Authors have wildly varying attitudes to their work and as a reviews editor in the past I’ve had to manage people’s hurt feelings about bad reviews. I ended up feeling that while they’re a necessary part of cultural life, the author and their work may just be harmed by reading them.
You really are going to go there. Yes, a comment does invite reply, and your position is, bizarrely, that publishing a book is not part of the cultural conversation? That writers want to publish but not be read, thought about, or responded to? I won’t disagree that some comments are harmful and are better being unseen, but the critique of this article was not of that sort, and a writer who can’t deal with it has no business publishing. And you are ignoring the fact that the author might have something to say in support of the position she took.
I’m just not sure why you’re so annoyed about it, but you’re welcome to your opinion. Of course an author can find reviews if they go looking for them, and presumably, if they do that they’re feeling robust, or want to know. But it’s possible to engage in meaningful critique without shouting it directly at them, and it doesn’t affect the substance of the argument. Like, what do you actually gain by tagging them in a bad review? I don’t get the motivation.
I don't think anyone is attacking anyone in these comments; it is of course difficult to ascertain tone in writing but I don't think anyone is seeking to escalate, only discussing. But I will also say that my post is not a review of a book; the chapter mentioned was a prompt for it, but the issue under discussion is wider and more enduring, hence my desire to speak about it.
I’m not “so annoyed.” I made a comment, got a response and replied to that response and left it at that. The article here was not a “review,” though. It discussed and critiqued someone else’s work, yes, but it was much more than that. A review would certainly have named the book and the author. What this was was criticism without allowing response. As I pointed out, the article was excellent, but I think the failure to name the work criticized wasn’t fair play.
I must confess to feeling uneasy when teaching ‘100 Years Of Solitude’ as there is paedophilic fantasy in it which I didn’t feel the narrative did very much to challenge - I felt like Marquez wrote the paedophilic gaze as if it was just another part of the novel’s magical realism. I wondered what purpose it served. Lolita handled the subject in a more realistic way but that question of how to write about abuse without simply reinforcing it is tricky
You know I don't remember this at all from 100 Years of Solitude? But then it has been probably a decade since I read it; will have to revisit!
It’s a small part of the overall story, I wasn’t sure what to make of it though. I suppose similar to critiquing the ‘male gaze’ you need some hint of the victim’s perspective, otherwise it can just feel like an abuse fantasy
I find it mystifying that aesthetic enjoyment can be affected by the facts about the artist's life. Lolita is superb on every level. Nevertheless, there is a good essay by Martin Amis on what Nabokov's artistic obsession with pedophilia does to his oeuvre:
"Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. [...[ Nabokov's mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus."
https://web.archive.org/web/20091117205854/http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/14/vladimir-nabokov-books-martin-amis
I think this is a fair opinion (tho perhaps uncharitably put by Amis), although the phrase "insufficiently honours the innocence" I find really grim. These are novels about men, not girls. (Though I must confess to having some negative bias against Martin Amis as he was head of English at my university and was widely considered to be a ****.)
It is a weird way of phrasing it, but the power of Lolita is when you see glimpses of her suffering in between the lines of HH’s narcissism.
I want to hear more Amis anecdotes now! Very odd that he went into academia at all. I assumed he rocked up for one class a week and then got the plane home.
I studiously avoided any Creative Writing classes in my degree (because I was terrified of actually trying to write; a topic for therapy I'm sure) so didn't come into direct contact but he was very much not liked (at least amongst everyone I knew).