That's Not What Lolita Is About

Why would a distinguished professor of literature get this so wrong?

The recently released Jeffrey Epstein documents are a trove of…something.

We see that the wealthy and connected have a sub-childlike ability to communicate via email.

We see that Larry Summers is the POS we thought he was.

We see that people who are supposed to be among the leaders of society are more than willing to flatter a wealthy sex trafficker provided they can get their hands on some of that money.

(Side note: I hope I never need money so badly that I find myself having to flatter the sensibilities of a sex trafficker.)

Speaking of flattering the sensibilities of a pedophile sex trafficker, I was umm…concerned by this message to Epstein from Elisa New, wife of Larry Summers, and professor of English at Harvard, in which she recommends Willa Cather’s My Antonia by comparing it to Lolita.

“…it’s about a man whose life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl” is perhaps a reasonable (though reductive) description of My Antonia, and the life of the narrator Jim Burden, though in that novel Burden is 10-years-old boy when he meets Antonia, who becomes his lifelong friend, even as their fates diverge. In My Antonia Burden admires his friend’s spirit, even in the face of great hardship as her immigrant family attempts to settle in the American plains.

Applying this description to Lolita’s Humbert Humbert is to drain the novel of the entirety of its meaning and significance, bleeding out the irony that makes Lolita one of the great literary achievements of our time.

Elisa New, Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University surely understands this, but in order to curry favor with Epstein she says, essentially, “Here’s a book about an elegant-seeming guy who lusts after children, just like you.”

New is being chummy with and flattering Epstein because she is using his money and connections to help with her poetry podcast. The “WA” who is referred to in the email is Woody Allen, who had apparently recorded an episode, but apparently was in a phase where people didn’t want to hear from him. This email is dated seven months prior to Epstein’s arrest on federal charges of sex trafficking and many years after the truth of his predation on girls and young women were well known.

While my head contains more than its share of petty thoughts, I try not to be a publicly spiteful person, but I sincerely hope there are consequences for this sort of thing, both for the sin of bad literary interpretation, and for cozying up to a sexual predator.

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Elisa New is well down the list of bad actors being exposed in this scenario, ranking below her husband who appeared to have a bantering relationship with Epstein, including soliciting dating advice:

I don’t know who Summers is referring to here, but I don’t think it’s his wife (New).

In my role as a fellow for the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom I have spent a fair part of the last year defending Harvard from the assaults coming out of the Trump administration, even going so far as to declare, “we are all Harvard now.”

We Are All Harvard Now

But I am here to say that once this existential threat to our democracy has passed, we’ve got to do the work of ending the influence of these elite institutions which obviously have plenty of good people, but which also spawn some of the worst of the worst.

I don’t know what to say beyond it’s all just sad and gross and I would like it to end.

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When I was teaching the general education literature course at Clemson University one of the first orders of business was to disabuse my students of the notion that there were specific, correct interpretations of literature. We had not yet descended all the way into the pit of curriculum dominated by decontextualized excerpts from which small bits of information were to be extracted for the purposes of passing standardized assessments, but the students were primed to believe that English class was about sussing out the teacher-approved “answers” about a text.

I, on the other hand, was interested in helping students develop their observational and interpretive skills, their abilities to find meaning that connected their unique intelligences to the text itself.

One particular response to this framing from students was so common I ended up dealing with it in my course policies document, which took the form of an FAQ about the course. After decrying the notion that literature is to be “figured out,” the pretend dialogue moved to these exchanges. (This is from a Spring 2011 course.)

I suppose what I desired was to convince students that this work was worthwhile, that to read and think would be rewarded with knowledge, knowledge which became theirs to use as they saw fit.

Maybe what offends me about Elisa New’s choice to bend literary interpretation to flatter a criminal sex trafficker is how casually she chooses to abandon the grounding of truth tied to the text.

I realize, given the scope of lying and depravity involved, that focusing on this particular lying and depravity seems bizarre, but I refuse to give ground on this shit. It matters. One of the additional reasons Elisa New was kissing up to Epstein was to try to secure funding for her program which was going to port Elisa New’s online classes to “underserved” students.

New flattered Epstein’s ego so she could impose her own ego on the world through her classes as though the experience of literature for the masses is best experienced through the sensibility of Harvard professor Elisa New.

But why are we outsourcing poor kids’ experience of literature to an online experience guided by an elite professor who apparently doesn’t understand Lolita?

It is not expensive to give underserved students books. It should not be impossible to provide them teachers who are qualified to discuss literature with them. I do not have the credentials of Elisa New, but I think I was able to a credible job with the students of Clemson University. I can tell you on good authority that there are thousands and thousands like me who stand ready to do the job if you could muster a living wage for the effort.

We don’t need to hear from these people like Larry Summers and Elisa New anymore. Let them stay confined to their elite institutions where they can do less damage than when loosed on the world at large.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I reviewed Ann Packer’s Some Bright Nowhere, the last book by a Harper Collins I will cover for the foreseeable future for reasons I covered last week.

At Inside Higher Ed I shared my appreciation for the life and work of Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do.

David Szalay won this year’s Booker Prize for his novel, Flesh. I reviewed Flesh back in April.

Great stuff here in this conversation between Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor, authors of two of my most potent reading experiences of the last 12 months, Small Rain and Minor Black Figures.

For those concerned about the reading practices and habits of young people, I highly recommend this report from friend of the newsletter, Maryanne Wolf, “Elbow Room: How the Reading Brain Informs the Teaching of Reading.”

Adam Sewer explains “Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to be Racist” which goes deep into The Lord of the Rings along the way.

Via my friends McSweeney's, something for those of us who might have found ourselves frustrated by air travel over the last week, “Carmen Sandiego’s Flight to (Redacted) Gets Grounded Due to Air Traffic Reductions” by Alicia Oltuski.

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Recommendations

1. The Bomber Mafia by Malcom Gladwell
2. The Zorg by Siddharth Kara
3. Dracula by Bram Stoker
4. Splendid Liberators by Joe Jackson
5. Perseverance by Stephan Kesting

Woodie M. - Honolulu, HI

This is actually a request from Woodie’s wife Traci who wants a suggestion for a gift, which is a fantastic use of The Biblioracle. A friend of mine recently reminded me about this book which I think is a great fit, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my theme/focus for my luncheon keynote at this year’s NCTE convention and have settled on this core message: Writers should teach writing to writers.

Hopefully that’ll sound less silly when I flesh it out. I want to do a bit better than preach to the choir and give the choir something they can truly use when they head back to their home congregations.

Next week’s newsletter will come after the experience of delivering my talk and almost certainly be written on the flight home, so who knows what that shall bring?

See you next time,

JW
The Biblioracle