The popular media has adopted the name Lolita to describe any sexually precocious young woman with a penchant for twisting older men around her finger. The original Lolita, however, was a more mythical creature, a "nymphet" (Nabokov coined the word especially...
[more]The popular media has adopted the name Lolita to describe any sexually precocious young woman with a penchant for twisting older men around her finger. The original Lolita, however, was a more mythical creature, a "nymphet" (Nabokov coined the word especially for her), who at a mere 12 years of age coyly and unconsciously becomes the object of obsession for her tortured stepfather. In exploring the magnetic field of attraction radiating around this rare, delicate, and devastatingly sexy child, Nabokov's novel achieved a succ's du scandale for the eccentric Russian 'migr' who worked as a professor of foreign literature and entomology at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell.
Published in 1955 by Olympia Press, the Parisian purveyor of porn and experimental literature, "Lolita" came as a wake-up call to repressed America and her rigid sexual mores. But Nabokov abhorred the idea that the themes of his work garnered more attention than the form. For him, the literary act was one "of language and not of ideas" -- an approach that aligned him with many of his Modernist contemporaries. Nabokov's linguistic tricks and commitment to sensory experience recall James Joyce, and have inspired the evolution of Postmodern fiction, including the work of Thomas Pynchon.
The product of a trilingual household, Nabokov displayed an arrant mastery of language. Playful, lyrical sentences seemed to flow from his fingers with utter ease. Combined with his sometimes shameless indulgence of formal devices, the result is a total linguistic experience: a fully self-referential, sensuous world of language. His second great novel, "Pale Fire" (1962), is a prototype of Postmodern intertextuality: a long poem is surrounded by layers of elaborate and (we come to learn) spurious critical commentary.
In "Ada, or Ardor" (1969), Nabokov returned to the theme of dubious erotic relationships: he tells the story of two cousins, who carry on a tempestuous love affair from early adolescence all the way to death. Every sentence of "Ada," whether explicitly sexual or not, is written with the energy of Nabokov's unrelenting eros; his language moves in undulant, prurient rhythms. But it is "Lolita" that has become a landmark in the American literary psyche, not only because of its shocking tale of pedophilia, but also because of its dazzling, linguistic acrobatics and its cunning, stylistic irony.
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