Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita Pekka Tammi Zoran Kuzmanovich and Galya Diment, eds. Approaches to Teaching Nabokov’s Lolita. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2008. 190 pp. Five decades after its publication in the United States, say the editors of this new guide to Nabokov’s Lolita, the book “continues to produce outcries” (Preface). This is generally a healthy sign, securing the novel a foothold in the contested curricula of today’s literature and language departments. There remains a ready market for pedagogical aids like the one at hand. With its twenty-two original essays displaying variable — variably useful — critical approaches, plus an assortment of background materials and ample suggestions for further reading, the collection is well suited to assist the teaching of Nabokov’s novel in a thousand and one classrooms around the globe.1 From the pedagogical angle, one feels that students should first of all be steered away from the more outlandish topics debated by Nabokov specialists: [End Page 221] the date conundrum (inconsequential to my mind, see 16–17); ghosts and “spirits,” which are mercifully all but neglected in the present volume (only once are we led to ask whether “Charlotte’s spirit appears to abet” Humbert’s pursuits, 91: one wonders what students will make out of that!); butterflies (see 49–54); even Eugene Onegin. That “Lolita is a parody of a free translation of Onegin” (94) — as proposed by Priscilla Meyer in her essay — may be a hypothesis well worth pondering among experts on Nabokov, especially in view of the author’s parodic manoeuvres in Pale Fire (on which Meyer herself has published much valuable research). But students wishing to make sense of Lolita should be spared, I think, at least if we wish to keep them coming to our classes. More promisingly, many of these essays set out to situate Nabokov’s novel in broader cultural contexts familiar (or sometimes less so) to students of literature today. The relevance of contemporary “consuming” culture as a backdrop in Lolita, manifested through the succession of references to shopping, advertising, imaginary brand names (“Dromes,” consumed by Quilty), is demonstrated in an essay by Tania Roy and John Whalen-Bridge (62–70). One need not wax overly ideological about such matters, however. The cultural-studies approach proves fruitful precisely because Lolita supplies its own sharp-eyed commentary on the commercialization of our lives, alarming to fastidious Humbert (but not to Dolly Haze who, one may remember, was “as glad as an ad”). Similarly, Lolita contains an inbuilt dialogue with visual media culture and cinema, as several critics have shown. The cinema angle, bound to strike a chord with students, is employed by Brian Boyd (108–114) in discussing the novel vis-à-vis its filmed (Adrian Lyne) version. Possible parallels between Lolita and pre-Soviet silent movies are taken up by Galya Diment. This is a fascinating topic in its own right, gaining relevance from Nabokov’s recourse to silent film references elsewhere in his work, as in Speak, Memory, quite expertly scrutinized by Diment in her contribution (101–107).2 Another kind of backdrop, impossible to avoid in discussing Nabokov, derives from the network of allusions to Russian literary topics. These are charted with regard to Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground and A Gentle Creature) — very usefully — by Dale E. Peterson (71–76) and by Julian W. Connolly (89–93), who also appends observations on Russian folklore motifs (i.e. rusalki, appearing throughout Nabokov’s fiction). At the same time, as pointed out by Michael Wood, Lolita should be at home in a course that studies the morbid American worlds of Poe (and Hawthorne) and the grander pathologies of Melville, but . . . Lolita is also relevant to any course in which varieties of American loneliness are explored, particularly in relation to those leaps of hope and desire that Europeans are supposedly (and sometimes actually) too tired to manage. (117) [End Page 222] As an inspirational guide to reading Lolita in the context of American literary landscapes Wood’s elegantly phrased piece strikes me as a model of its kind. Wood is also very good in tracing the recurrent “locomotive motif” (115–16...