"How should we read Lolita? The beginning of an answer is that we
should read it the way all great works deserve to be read: with
attention and intelligence. But what sort of attention should we pay and
what sort of intelligence should we apply to a work of art that recounts
so much love, so much loss, so much thoughtlessness--and across which
flashes something we might be tempted to call evil? To begin with, we
should read with the attention and intelligence we call empathy. A point
on which all readers can agree is that great literature offers us a
lesson in empathy: it encourages us to feel with the strange and the
familiar, the strong and the weak, the vulgar and the cultivated, the
young and the old, the lover and the beloved. It urges us to see our own
fates as connected to those of others, to link the starry sky we see
above us with whatever moral laws we might sense within."--from Style
is Matter"Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I
really don't care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful
monsters of a cathedral facade--demons placed there merely to show that
they have been booted out."--Vladimir Nabokov, Strong OpinionsWith
this quote Leland de la Durantaye launches his elegant and incisive
exploration of the ethics of art in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov.
Focusing on Lolita but also addressing other major works (especially
Speak, Memory and Pale Fire), the author asks whether the work of
this writer whom many find cruel contains a moral message and, if so,
why that message is so artfully concealed. Style is Matter places
Nabokov's work once and for all into dialogue with some of the most
basic issues concerning the ethics of writing and of reading itself.De
la Durantaye argues that Humbert's narrative confession artfully seduces
the reader into complicity with his dark fantasies and even darker acts
until the very end, where he expresses his bitter regret for what he has
done. In this sense, Lolita becomes a study in the danger of art, the
artist's responsibility to the real world, and the perils and pitfalls
of reading itself. In addition to Nabokov's fictions, de la Durantaye
also draws on his nonfiction writings to explore Nabokov's belief that
all genuine art is deceptive--as is nature itself. Through de la
Durantaye's deft and compelling writing, we see that Nabokov learned
valuable lessons in mimicry and camouflage from the intricate patterns
of the butterflies he adored.
