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Nabokov's most famous work ...
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http://www.dailycal.org/article/102259/things_of_import
Things of Import
Light of My Life
By Melissa FallContributing WriterWednesday, August 13, 2008 | 9:47 pm
Remarkably enough, this final column coincides with the first week of the Olympics in Beijing. And so it happens that a summer which started off being very much about America ends, ostensibly, being very much about the world coming together for a hugely unifiying athletic event (but still very much about America). The teams, the medal counts, the competition-this is how these things tend to go. We measure everything in relation to ourselves.
I might think, for example, that I've been telling you about other people and places for the past few months. In reality, I've only told you about an abstract version of myself. This is why my farewell column has been especially hard for me to write: Without 600 weekly words, foreign films and Chopin's heart, who am I? As usual, there are no answers. There are only films to watch, records to enjoy and books to read in some ridiculous, futile grab for a resolution. For some strange and wholly haphazard reason (the distance from my hand to the book on the nightstand), I ended up picking "Lolita" in response to this particular question.
A likeable English "novelist, critic and reviewer" named Martin Amis wrote the introduction to my edition of Vladimir Nabokov's most famous work. Of that titular character, Amis says, "It may be that Lolita, so identified with 'the geography of the United States' ... is to some degree an exile's delirious invention." Thus a girl, a "nymphet," becomes the literary proxy for an entire country. According to Amis, Paris-born Humbert Humbert paints Lolita into a corner sketched out by Norman Rockwell and the Hudson River School. Though he acknowledges that Nabokov disagreed with this interpretation, Amis still contends that "the descent of Humbert Humbert � on the fruit vert of America is in some sense a pedophilic visitation. Like Lolita, America is above all young."
I understand what Amis is saying, to some extent (for who among us has not equated the barefaced sensual excesses of a European exchange student with Old World Decadence?), but at the same time I wonder if any of this is actually the case. Amis eyes us from his side of the Atlantic and sees the cultural equivalent of buxom, throbbing teenage sex objects. I glance his direction and am overcome by the weight of the ages, by a love for stuffy, drawing room humor and a simultaneous abhorrence of Jane Austen. I see in England what I think is already there-just as Humbert Humbert may or may not have created Lolita in the image of America-but Amis creates America in the image of Lolita.
Some of us who live here (and, remember, the author himself) disagree with this analysis of "Lolita," and, consequently, of the United States. Like Humbert and Amis, I have spent a few thousand words as an "exile." I have tried to convey the value of appreciating art products from around the world while I sat at a desk in Northern California. I have attempted to show how American culture appropriates and borrows from other cultures, how ridiculous big-screen comedies participate in a global dialogue. I may have succeeded. I may have failed. But regardless, I'm glad I tried.
So I end the column as I opened it, with a few words on the games going on some continents away: If you end up watching the Olympics, try not to focus wholly on Michael Phelps' medal count. Try to see the other athletes, too. Try to remember that we've all got our own lanes, but we're pushing through the same pool, treading water as fast as we can.