Thought you might find it helpful if you do ever end up teaching this text or if you need an argument for reticent administrators: Clearly someone in America thinks its worthy of canonizing…

All best,
C

I’ve read Oedipus in countless translations, written a 20-page analysis of it to “prove” my one-eyed professor read it squint-wise, and I’ve read the other Oedipus plays as well.

What I wonder, from your dismissal of Lolita as a “trash[y] dime-store sex thriller,” is if you’ve read that book. I can only assume you haven’t.

A couple of reviews to set the record straight on the lack of “prurience” and the abundance of artistry - and yes, food for moral thought of the most sublime, but decidedly modern and non-Victorian manner - in Nabokov’s acknowledged masterpiece:

What is one to make of Lolita? In a prickly postscript to the novel, Mr. Nabokov dismisses this question as a problem dreamed up by “Teachers of Literature”: he rejects the satiric interpretations which critics have put upon Lolita and asserts, in effect, that it is simply a story he had to get off his chest. That all of this is too ingenuous by half is evident from the parodic style in which Lolita is written: a combination of pastiches of well-known styles, spoofing pedantry, analysis of passion � la fran�ais, Joycean word games, puns, and all kinds of verbal play. Wild, fantastic, wonderfully imaginative, it is a style which parodies everything it touches. It surely justifies, at least in part, those critics who have seen in Lolita a satire of the romantic novel, of “Old Europe” in contact with “Young America,” or of “chronic American adolescence and shabby materialism.” But above all Lolita seems to me an assertion of the power of the comic spirit to wrest delight and truth from the most outlandish materials. It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy.
–Charles Rolo, The Atlantic Monthly, 1958

and for something a little more contemporary, this 2006 review by Bret Anthony Johnston, author and creative writing professor at Harvard, on NPR’s All Things Considered

Readers always read, I think, out of a tremendous curiosity about other human beings, we’re looking for another soul on the page, and that’s what Nabokov has so fearlessly, so complexly, so gorgeously given us. In a lesser writer’s hands, we could easily dismiss Mr. Humbert as a monster, but Nabokov denies us that all-too comfortable option. Even if we would never condone his vain and deadly infatuation, we understand it. We’re complicit in his sins, and our complicity is seductive and terrifying. “Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury… look at this tangle of thorns.”

To be sure, this novel isn’t for the faint of heart, but neither should prospective readers retreat to any kind of moral high ground. Nabokov, in fact, threads an unexpected and affirming emotional serenity through his portrait of obsession. His enigmatic narrator leaves us in spellbound rapture. Because for all of its linguistic pyrotechnics — as Humbert confesses, “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” — and for all its controversial subject matter, Lolita is one of the most beautiful love stories you’ll ever read. It may be one of the only love stories you’ll ever read. This is the most thrilling and beautiful and most deeply disturbing aspect of the novel — and it’s what most persuasively recommends the book — that in addition to finding Humbert’s soul on the page, we also find, like it or not, a little of our own.

Wilde’s Miss Prism would dismiss this novel based on its content (which again, deals with taboos like Sophocles and Shakespeare so often do, just uncomfortably close ones); but lovers of literature would not regret reading it.

Again, though, the thrust of my post is this: literary merit aside, in this age of vanishing privacy and uncheckable exposure to the world via the web, our young need to be taught not only what a Lolita is - that allusion has all-too-successfully become iconic in our culture in ways we grown-ups know all to well, if we lay the cant aside - but also two more things: how not to be one, first of all, and more importantly, what a “Humbert Humbert” is.

And how to recognize his trademarks if ever they crop up on a blog comment, a tweet, a Facebook, and the avalanche of future avenues being prepared for him by our wonderful web 2.0 developers.

When “Humbert Humbert” becomes as iconic as “Lolita,” I’d wager we’d see wiser online behavior by our young. Maybe I’m wrong. But if I am, reading Lolita still rewards. It’s a great novel. It’s enthralling. It’s not one our young adults in upper secondary will skirt with a copy of Cliff’s Notes; it might be one that sets them a little more firmly on the course of life-long reading of real, uncensored literature.

You realize that with a few selected edits just about everything you say about Oedipus can be equally true about Lolita —

It’s also difficult to reconcile twin statements like this:

“That Oedipus and Jocasta suffer horribly as a result of their actions is a fact of the story.”

alongside

“The point of the story is not the incest or the murder that Oedipus committed. Did he really commit either, being ignorant of his crimes and of his past?” —

Even Oedipus would agree that he killed his father and slept with his mother — and he’ll share his eyeballs to back it up!

Of course, it took a blind man to get him there — unless, of course, we want to take Eliot’s more gender neutral version of the blind man with withered dugs.

And this is (for me, anyways) one of the values of this thread: the effort to pigeonhole certain works as acceptable while rejecting others as classics is fraught with imprecision. 60 years ago, students would have read Lochinvar, and would have been tasked with writing essays extolling its virtues. Give me three steps down the palate over Lochinvar’s hackneyed gallop any day of the week.

Cheers,

Bill

On hearing from an oracle the same prediction that he would one day murder his father and marry his mother, Oedipus runs away from those he assumes are his loving parents for fear of doing them harm. On his travels, he encounters his real father who he slays in a duel. Arriving at Thebes, he vanquishes the Sphinx (remember the riddle of the Sphinx?), and is elected King, finally marrying Queen Jocasta his mother, thus fulfilling the prophecies of the oracle.

This is the starting point of the play, and it begins with the wrath of the gods being visited on Thebes because the death of King Laius needed to be avenged.

Scholars over the centuries have pondered the true meaning of Oedipus the King. The point of the story is not the incest or the murder that Oedipus committed. Did he really commit either, being ignorant of his crimes and of his past? The question behind this story is rather of pre-destiny and free will.

I’m not sure if you have actually read this play, or ever seen it performed. But I would suggest that this story, as all enduring literature, provokes thought and asks questions in an unassuming manner. That Oedipus and Jocasta suffer horribly as a result of their actions is a fact of the story. Our reaction to it is neither indictment of their action nor condonement of their innocence. It should, on the other hand, represent a vehicle whereby we can sense within our selves our own evils and come to terms with them. As well, we can recognize the perennial struggle in all humanity between good and evil, free will and destiny, crime and punishment. To relegate such a timeless classic to the trashiness of contemporary dime store sex thrillers unjustly condemns this great work.

Please read the play! Then, try and understand the gist of it.

Paul C’s last blog post..Meme: High School Daze to Praise (3)

Who else for your Banned Books list? How about Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, & Harry Potter? Authors Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, Judy Bloom, Robert Cormier, Philip Pullman, Mark Twain? Books have been challenged, sometimes banned, for containing witchcraft, magic, sexual content, even inappropriate attitude towards adults/parents. There is always someone, somewhere, ready to be offended. People whose beliefs can be so easily shaken must build high walls indeed to protect themselves and their children from “unwholesome” influences.

diane

diane’s last blog post..Saint Expeditus: He’s fo’ close scrapes

The irony you note is one I’ve noted many times. One of my hopes with Students 2.0 was that it would serve as evidence that American students can blog publicly (and beneficially for both learning and college admissions bullets *sigh*) without, as I put it somewhere in these pages, “being torn apart by wolves.” I wonder if any US evangelists are using it as such evidence as they argue for blogging in US schools.

For the record, I have never taught in the USA. I left to explore the wide world, and the US Army was this working-class Humanities graduate’s ticket out (I was stationed in Germany, an Arabic Linguist for Military Intelligence). And I only started teaching in China as a plot complication in a (cue dramatic music) doomed love affair.

Somehow your post has inspired a little fantasy in return: wouldn’t it be grand to teach a “Banned Books” elective class? D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Nabokov, Ginsberg . . . . who else?

Thanks again, Miguel.

Clay