Larmour, David H. J., ed. Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose. 2002

Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose, edited by David Larmour, is a collection of nine critical essays dealing with the interplay of "ideological structures" and "discursive ... practices" (3) in Nabokov's prose. As Larmour explains in the introduction to the volume, the essays share an attempt to shift the critical focus in Nabokov studies towards the Foucauldean "author function." The book is divided into four thematically arranged parts: ideology, sexuality, Lolita, and Nabokov's place in American pop culture.

In her "The Nabokov-Wilson Debate: Art versus Social and Moral Responsibility," Galya Diment offers an overview and an ideological analysis of the writers' celebrated polemic and falling out. Diment attributes the disagreement to Wilson's "ultimate Americanness" and Nabokov's "ultimate Russianness," terms that leave room for further definition and clarification. Her analysis suggests that their "Americanness" and "Russianness" are linked to Wilson's and Nabokov's conflicting views regarding literature as a social and moral phenomenon. Brian Walter also examines Nabokov's derision of the "Literature of Ideas" (25) in "Two Organ-Grinders: Duality and Discontent in Bend Sinister." He explores what he labels as the "odd" (25) position of Bend Sinister in Nabokov's literary oeuvre and attributes it largely to the author's discomfort with writing political novels. Walter makes a compelling argument that Nabokov officiously shapes the reader's reception of the characters by abandoning his usual authorial indifference towards them. Walter's discussion of "Nabokov's difficulty" (38) in writing a novel that displays "the author's own distaste for his rather simple political story" (39) might have been augmented by a comparative analysis of Invitation to a Beheading, a novel congruent to Bend Sinister in its political agenda.

In "Okrylennyi Soglyadatay--The Winged Eavesdropper: Nabokov and Kuzmin," Galina Rylkova convincingly argues that Nabokov's "The Eye" is an appropriation of Mikhail Kuzmin's Wings [Kryl'ia] transferred to the cultural context of the Emigre Berlin of 1920s. Rylkova also suggests that Nabokov's adaptation of Kuzmin's novel is responsible for the succession of alienated "emigrant-outsider" (55) and sexually perverse characters in Nabokov's later works. David Larmour speaks about Martin's sexuality and masculinity and their manifestation through sports in "Getting One Past the Goalkeeper: Sports and Games in Glory." Larmour allows Martin no heroic qualities when he concludes that as his identity, masculinity, and sexuality become increasingly confused and intertwined, the novel simply removes Martin "from the reader's gaze" (72), leaving the three main characters undefined and tenuous. In "The Crewcut as Homoerotic Discourse in Nabokov's Pale Fire," Paul Allen Miller examines the breakdown of the five central binary opposites of the novel. Although he relies on some cultural assumptions about sexuality, he convinces the reader that in Kinbot's world, like elsewhere in Nabokov's prose, stable identity does not exist.

Engaged in a dialogue with each other, Tony Moore, in "Seeing through Humbert: Focussing on the Feminist Sympathy in Lolita," and Elizabeth Patnoe, in "Discourse, Ideology, and Hegemony: the Double Dramas in and around Lolita," offer innovative, albeit irreconcilable, readings of Lolita. In Moore's reading, Lolita is sexually assertive and outwits Humbert who is trapped in "his own masculine rhetoric" (94). Moore argues that through rereading his own story, Humbert recognizes "his theft of the girl's childhood" (105). Hurnbert's reevaluation of the story is marked by a return to "tasteful and reticent" prose. Moore invites the reader to treat Lolita as "paper and ink, not flesh and blood" (108) and to avoid moral and political judgement. Conversely, Partnoe speaks of Lolita instead as a molested and tortured child. She asserts that despite Humbert's attempts to manipulate the reader by his elegant and witty prose, what happens to Lolita qualifies as nothing but rape. She maintains that the novel silences women by robbing Lolita of her own voice in the narrative; she goes on to claim based on personal teaching experiences that the novel intimidates female readers into silence. Neither essay properly addresses the reliability of Humbert's narrative, but both make persuasive arguments about the connection between discursive strategies and ideology in Lolita.

The concluding section of the book contains two articles that examine Nabokov's position as an American cultural icon. D. Barton Johnson, in "Nabokov and the Sixties," discusses the social and literary circumstances in American culture that established Nabokov's "reign in absentia" (142) over the American literary scene, making him the best-read American writer of the 1960s. The concluding article, Suellen Stringer-Hye's "Vladimir Nabokov and Popular Culture," surveys the iconization of Nabokov and Lolita in spheres ranging from postmodern literature to Internet pornography.

From a review by Margarit Tadevosyan, Boston College