Virtual Eden: Lolita, Pornography, and the Perversions of American Studies

Abstract

Native of St. Petersburg, author of works in Russian and French as well as English, and sometime goalkeeper for Trinity College, Cambridge, soccer team, Vladimir Nabokov would not appear to be the most obvious avatar of American Studies in the subject's nationalist phase of the 1950s. My argument, however, is that Lolita, which first appeared in 1955, can be seen as symbiotically intertwined with various classic texts of American Studies that helped to invent and define the field during the Truman and Eisenhower years. At times, the dream of Eden that permeates Nabokov's narrative impels it towards becoming a parody of the early American Studies movement, which harboured within its collective consciousness similar vestiges of an imaginary paradise. More dexterously, though, Lolita makes the theoretical parameters of this movement visible, so that Nabokov's novel might more accurately be described as a metafiction of area studies: a text which holds up a mirror to the implicit assumptions of American Studies and renders them translucent. Just as the process of metafiction can reilluminate ways in which more traditional artefacts have been constructed, so Nabokov's virtualization of American Studies also reflects back upon the established boundaries of other national formations and nation-states, foregrounding the contingent status of their supposedly naturalized values and social markers. In particular, by focusing upon the cultural reception of Lolita in Britain, we will see how the book brings into play troublesome questions about the relationship between formal aesthetics, public morality, and social power. In this sense, Nabokov's perverse reinscription of American Studies might be seen ironically to highlight the multiple dilemmas involved in circumscribing specific national territories for academic study or political jurisdiction.