The structured procrastination, she continues. In the midst of writing seminar papers and preparing to fly to Visby, I cobbled together an abstract for another grad student conference from an essay I wrote last year on Lolita and fan fiction. The conference, “Agency and Its Limits,” is happening at Stanford in April; from the call for papers it sounds like they’re interested in the reader as responding subject, and such. Ah, but are they interested in X-Men/Nabokov slash?
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“Re-Writing Lolita: Nabokov Fan Fiction and the Reader as Literary Rebel”
First and foremost, Lolita is a book about recreating the world through writing. Humbert Humbert’s posthumously discovered manuscript, his obsession with literary references, even Lolita–who proves less a flesh-and-blood girl than a text–allow our most unreliable of narrators to rewrite his life through literature. This has, in turn, inspired countless readers to respond to the novel with their own writing and revisions. Prodigious work by academic scholars joins book-length fiction (e.g. Lo’s Diary, a rewriting of Humbert’s narrative through the eyes of Lolita) along with filmic and dramatic reinterpretations in the long list of material produced by readers who take a cue from Humbert and use their writing to recreate his world. In fact, the readers who have claimed the most agency over the original are also those with the least writerly “authority”: amateur “fan fiction” enthusiasts publishing their own short stories about Humbert and Lo online.
This paper will engage in a close reading of a piece of Lolita fan fiction, “A Veritable Lolita.” Written by one of the literally hundreds of thousands of anonymous authors on FanFiction.net, “A Veritable Lolita”–which re-envisions the young Dolores as a fresh-faced X-Man–raises questions of lowbrow vs. highbrow writing, creativity and authorship, and going beyond “the canon.” As social commentators like MIT’s Henry Jenkins have noted, internet communities like FanFiction.net, which have flourished over the last two decades, “constitute a scandalous category in contemporary American culture, one that… provokes an excessive response from those committed to the interests of textual producers.” It is response that the rebellious reader harnesses in rewriting Lolita, the legacy of which is always being rewritten.
