Affect and fascism in Lolita
pp. 753-780
in: Thomas Blake (ed), The Palgrave handbook of affect studies and textual criticism, Berlin, Springer, 2017Abstract
Building on Susan Mizruchi's article, "Lolita in History," Wood uses Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the affective dimensions of fascism to show how the characters in Lolita are driven by fascistic desires. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari, Nabokov portrays liberating desire as a delusory trap. Instead, toward the end of Lolita Dolores Haze and Humbert Humbert exhibit signs of altruism born of suffering (ABS), a psychological phenomenon supported by some recent cognitive studies. Though this change is ambiguous and incomplete, Nabokov uses religious allusions to suggest its transcendent power. Mentalizing with the characters' responses to suffering, Wood argues, pushes readers toward what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls "reparative reading" and what Nabokov terms the "kindness' and "tenderness' inseparable from "aesthetic bliss."
