Aestheticism, Nabokov and Lolita (review)

228 Nabokov Studies This makes things complicated but involves no contradiction. The reason Clio laughs, in Nabokov's image, is not because we fail to escape history but because we try to classify it. The history of mankind is only chance. One may connect these chances and tie them up into tidy bouquets of periods and ideas, losing in the process the aroma of the past, and we see things not as they were but as we want them to have been.... (209) But what if the bouquets were not too tidy, what if they tied up not periods and ideas but sensations and memories, what if the writer did not lose the aroma of the past in the process? We could be reading Speak, Memory, another form of history; more historical, in Dolinin's terms, because less historicist. Diment thinks Nabokov is a "great theoretician" of autobiography because he understands, as he told Alfred Appel, that "imagination is a form of memory ," and that "both memory and imagination are a negation of time." A negation of time as unrecoverable, always lapsing, but a recovery of time in the form of the unlost past. Diment, at the end of a very subtle discussion, offers a rewording of Nabokov's phrase from Bend Sinister: "Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past." "Anyone can invent the future," Diment suggests, "but only a wise man can imagine the past." We need to give "imagine" its strongest, most difficult sense here. Just making up the past as we fancy it would be the same as tying it up in tidy bouquets, and would have the same result, the disappearance of "things ... as they were." The essential paradox is that of imagining what once was real, what still is real, because it is only in such a paradox that imagination is a form of memory. Perhaps Clio will laugh whatever we do, but the attempt to recreate chance is not the same as the attempt to deny it. David Andrews. Aestheticism, Nabokov and Lolita. Studies in American Literature, Vol. 31. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1999. 161 pp. ISBN 0773479600. Review by Christian Hunt, Oxford. David Andrews' recent book on Nabokov and aestheticism is largely a moral indictment of aesthetic solipsism in general and of the "aesthetic hedonism" oÃ- Lolita in particular. Andrews' moral critique leads him to establish a fine distinction between '90s aestheticism and "Art for Art's sake." Through this distinction, crafted almost to a fault, he undertakes to re-evaluate the Aesthetic movement by arguing that pure art for art's sake, as an aesthetic isolationism, promotes moral forgetfulness and perversion. Andrews cites several works of Poe and Wilde as examples of art primarily concerned with aesthetics but not Reviews 229 disengaged from morality; that is, as works in and of an "Art for Art's sake" discourse that do not advocate the moral non-position of art for art's sake. The importance of aesthetic perception in art for art's sake works is also taken up as a critique of the solipsistic extension of Walter Pater's subjective aesthetics. Andrews suggests that Poe and Wilde ironically depict solipsist characters and thereby provide a critical social commentary against immoral and hedonistic aestheticism. In the section on Lolita, Andrews aligns Nabokov 's works with the critical aesthetic approaches of Poe and Wilde. Andrews cites the 1930s films of Leni Riefenstahl as examples of the dangerous extremes of a non-utilitarian, uncritical aesthetic. Riefenstahl's claim that she was ignorant of the ideology her films disseminated is the basis for Andrews' critique of aesthetic solipsism, which is presented as a self-indulgent crime of omission and as a lack of moral conviction brought about by a form-privileging separation of form and content. Curiously enough, in a book which places such importance on authorial intent and in which the main critical revision is the debunking of the sincerity of Humbert's "moral apotheosis" (as a means of covering up his pitiless reaction to Quilty's murder), Andrews has chosen to present himself on the white-cloth, back-cover in a large, Riefenstahl-esque photo. I...