10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 a lexaNder s cherr Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature The Proleptic Agency of Texts 1 The Value of Literature and the ‘Postcritical Turn’ Some of the key aspects concerning the value of literature have recently been addressed by literary scholars under the banner of a “postcritical turn ” 1 The idea of ‘postcritique,’ which is strongly associated with Rita Felski’s work, is not to be confused with an uncritical engagement with literary texts, nor does it suggest a return to a naïve belief in the universal value of literature However, attempting a rethinking of “literary value, of the critic’s interpretive labor, and of the public role of the humanities,” 2 postcritique represents a departure from traditions of scholarship that are linked to the established paradigm of critique By ‘critique,’ Felski means both a method of analysis and an institutionalised ethos that scholars of literature have been socialised to adopt, roughly in the past 40 to 50 years, as an interpretive stance on texts Appropriating a phrase by Paul Ricœur, Felski posits that critique is characterised by a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’: a critical reading of a literary work suspects that its ‘true’ meaning lies hidden or repressed under its textual surface, so the critic must read the text against the grain, demystifying the ideological work in which it unknowingly engages 3 Given that literature is suspect in Felski’s rendering of critique, literary value was, for a long time, a somewhat precarious concept within this tradition of scholarship, “spurned as antidemocratic, capricious, clubby, and in the thrall of a mystified notion of aesthetics.” (15) But aesthetics is enjoying a revival in 21st-century literary studies, no matter 1 Elizabeth S Anker/ Rita Felski, “Introduction,” Critique and Postcritique, eds eaed (Durham: Duke UP, 2017), 2 2 Ibid 3 The argument is most comprehensively developed in Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2015) Citations from the study will from here on be given in parentheses in the text 298 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 if this reorientation is labelled as ‘postcritical’ or differently As early as 2003, the renewed turn to aesthetics was welcomed as an “exile’s return” by the editors of a volume on Aesthetic Subjects 4 Like Felski, the contributors to the collection express the need for new concepts and vocabularies in our engagement with literary texts and the aesthetic experiences they afford What interests me about the problematic place of aesthetic value within the critique paradigm is that the ethos of critique rests on a particular kind of temporality While it is obvious that, chronologically, any act of academic criticism takes place after the publication of a given text, Felski’s argument implies that critique also trumps the literary text insofar as it claims the final verdict on its value In this sense, the text appears as a fairly passive and anterior object awaiting the very inscription of authoritative meaning that the critic will provide It is the critic who settles the question of a given text’s value (or harm), not the text itself This position is problematic, in particular, for literary texts that exercise what I call a ‘proleptic’ kind of agency Recasting the text-criticism-relationship, I draw attention to the fact that a literary text can steer, constrain, and even perplex criticism in its search for value, thus posing particular challenges for the institutional environments in which it will be received That criticism does not always trump literature was cogently demonstrated by Shoshana Felman - four decades before the debates over critique and postcritique - in an influential (meta-)reading of Henry James’ Gothic novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) and its scholarly reception Taking issue with psychoanalytical readings of James’ work that fell victim to its ambiguity (her example is a Freudian analysis by Edmund Wilson), Felman posits that a text like James’ “constitutes a trap for psychoanalytical interpretation ” 5 Her argument relies on the observation that The Turn of the Screw already negotiates the limitations of a suspicious reading before a Freudian critic like Wilson would seize this interpretive option As Felman shows, Wilson assumes a reader-position that is supposedly external to the text but has, in fact, a blind spot about it: It resembles in striking ways that of James’ text-internal protagonist - a governess “who is equally preoccupied by the desire, above all, not to be made a dupe, by the determination to avoid, detect, demystify, the cleverest of traps set for her credulity ” 6 The lesson to be learned from Felman’s insightful anaylsis of The Turn of the Screw is that the work constitutes 4 Pamela R Matthews/ David McWhirter, “Introduction: Exile’s Return? Aesthetics Now,” Aesthetic Subjects, eds eid (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2003), xiii-xxviii 5 Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” Yale French Studies 55/ 56 (1977), 186 6 Ibid , 188 Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 299 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 an interpretive agency of its own, constraining the critical discourses in which it will be received Instead of understanding its readerly reception only within a linear framework, Felman proposes a different set of questions for coming to terms with the kind of temporality engendered by a text like James’: “What does the text have to say about its own reading? […] In what way does literature authorize […] a discourse about literature, and in what way, having granted its authorization, does literature disqualify that discourse? ” 7 The idea that literature might fashion or ‘authorise’ a discourse about its own reception will continue to inform my discussion of the value of literature in the present contribution Extending the theoretical discussion in section 2, I will first demonstrate how the concept of proleptic agency can be aligned with recent approaches to canonisation - a scholarly field that is closely connected to social debates about the value of literature. By surveying this field, I aim to show that, while established theories of canonisation tie in closely with the paradigm of critique, more recent approaches have made a move towards postcritical thought Building on some of the concepts reviewed in this section, I will then present an analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita (section 3) The novel makes for interesting (re)reading in the context of my argument as it is famously linked up with “aesthetic bliss” - the notion Nabokov uses in his afterword to distinguish his own ideal of literature from what he calls “didactic fiction.” 8 The analysis put forward in the present article does not so much aim to dismantle the notion of aesthetics than to show that it needs to be supplemented by a focus on the discursive, historicised, and institutionalised frameworks of aesthetics of which Nabokov’s novel takes advantage While it would be incorrect to claim that the novel participates in only one discourse of modern art, my reading emphasises that its relationship to specific value systems shaped in the legacy of Romanticism are particularly rewarding to consider I will return to the renewed attention to aesthetics in 21st-century criticism in section 4, outlining a number of perspectives and challenges for a postcritical turn in literary studies 2 The Agency of Literature in Canonisation Processes - Contingency Reconsidered In order to better understand how exactly critique has informed the ways in which scholars think about the value of literature, let us turn to a more 7 Ibid , 102 8 Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” Lolita (1956; London: Penguin, 2011), 358 300 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 specific institution of literary criticism that is directly linked to the making of values and norms: the canon Even though research on canonisation is a highly diverse field, it seems fair to say that certain of its traditions align firmly with the paradigm of critique. A particularly influential position, in this context, is that of Barbara Herrnstein Smith In a much-cited passage from her monograph Contingencies of Value, the making of literary value is rendered as follows: All value is radically contingent, being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, or an objective property of things but, rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables or, to put this another way, the product of the dynamics of a system, specifically an economic system 9 We may first wish to acknowledge the merits of this position. By declaring all value as a socially and historically contingent construct, Herrnstein Smith has done much to legitimise the critical revisions of the Western canon as they have been undertaken, for instance, by feminist and postcolonialist scholars Indeed, there are good reasons for literary scholars to be suspicious about pronouncements of the “transcendent universal value” of literary works, 10 especially since such declarations can operate as disguised exercises of power on the part of a hegemonic social class 11 Critics have learned, therefore, to mistrust the spatial metaphor that literary value is ‘in’ the text In keeping with the poststructuralist legacy of our discipline, the contingency-of-value thesis testifies to the anti-essentialist faith that characterises most work in the study of literature today Nevertheless, Herrnstein Smith’s constructivist hypothesis is also problematic, or rather does not go far enough In its questioning of aesthetic value, it excludes literature from the social communicative processes in which values are shaped and thus runs the risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater As Frank Kelleter has explained, positions like Smith’s imply an understanding of literature as a fairly passive object to which values are ‘ascribed’ in the ensuing process of its canonisation 12 In this model, processes of social 9 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Critical Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988), 30 10 Ibid , 53 11 Matthews and McWhirter give voice to this position when arguing that “taste - recognized as a carrier of prestige or cultural capital - cannot be evaluated properly in isolation from its entanglements with power ” (“Introduction,” xv) The authors’ emphasis on power hints at the legacy of Michel Foucault’s thinking 12 Cf Frank Kelleter, “Populärkultur und Kanonisierung: Wie(so) erinnern wir uns an Tony Soprano? ,” Wertung und Kanon, eds Matthias Freise/ Claudia Stockinger (Heidelberg: Winter, 2010), 57 The full passage in which Kelleter sketches how the logic Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 301 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 evaluation are considered external to literature - a matter of ‘social context’ - as if literary texts themselves were non-social objects to begin with Moreover, in a temporal sense (though not in a normative one), critical evaluation is secondary to literature This is exactly the point made by Felski, who frames the chronology of the evaluation process within the critique paradigm in a way similar to Kelleter: “Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing: a time lag that can span decades, centuries, even millennia Critique, then, looks backward, and in doing so it often presumes to understand the past better than it understood itself ” (123) In section 3, we will see that the logic of looking backward is challenged by a work like Lolita, which, in many ways, ‘looks forward’ to the process of its canonisation and thereby comments on the values that underlie any such process in a given system of literature An alternative to the backwards orientation of critique can be found in recent sociologically informed approaches that insist on the active, worldmaking potential of literary texts in the making of values Kelleter sketches this position in the following way: “If we genuinely ask ourselves what a text does instead of asking what it is or what is going to happen to it, then we are asking about the aesthetic as an activity which does not simply precede social ascriptions in terms of supplied material, but which enables them and is thus actively involved in the making of cultural values ” 13 Building on Kelleter’s ideas, Alexander Starre has submitted a text-context model that recasts the temporal logic underlying canonisation processes According to this model, some literary texts are heavily invested in their own canonisation - a phenomenon for which Starre proposes the felicitous notion of ‘self-canonisation ’ One crucial point made by him is that literary texts do not simply reflect the norms and values of their social context; in many cases, they also reshape the standards of ‘good’ literature, recommending themselves as candidates for subsequent evaluations In this way, they conduct a particular kind of cultural of critique informs certain theories of canonisation reads: “Die Annahme ist: Ein Text liegt vor - und erst hiernach setzt der komplexe Kreislauf sozialer, institutioneller oder alltagspraktischer Zurichtungen und Nutzungen ein Die Vokabel ‘Zuschreibung’ suggeriert dank solcher Chronologisierung, daß der Text selbst relativ wenig zu seiner Bewertung beiträgt, und somit auch dazu, wie man sich an ihn erinnert Zugespitzt gesagt, kommuniziert das kanonisierte Kunstwerk nicht, sondern es existiert als Objekt kommunikativer Praktiken ” 13 Cf ibid , 58, my translation The original passage reads: “Wenn wir uns mit aller Konsequenz fragen, was ein Text tut, anstatt zu fragen, was er ist, oder was mit ihm getan wird, dann fragen wir nach Ästhetik als Aktivität, die sozialen Zuschreibungen nicht einfach als Materiallieferant vorangeht, sondern diese freisetzt und damit selbst kulturelle Werte schafft und aktiviert ” 302 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 work of their own 14 In Kelleter’s and Starre’s models of canonisation practices, we encounter a version of Felman’s thesis that literature can authorise a discourse about itself Their conceptualisation of the aesthetic as activity attests to a postcritical rethinking of the value of literature Felski’s, Kelleter’s and Starre’s proposals tie in closely with other recent turns in the study of literature First and foremost, they align with Mark McGurl’s call for a more focused consideration of literature’s ‘reflexive institutionality’ - a concept by which McGurl means the multiple feedback loops that are at work between texts and the institutions that impact their production, dissemination, and reception 15 A crucial idea, in this context, is that the form of a given literary text may bear the traces of its institutional environment, which it not only reflects but actively reshapes. This idea is also put forward in Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s analysis of so-called “novels of commission” - a genre in contemporary literature that is finely attuned to the role of institutional bonds during the production process of a literary text 16 Building partly on McGurl, Buurma and Heffernan show how fictional texts by writers such as Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner actively “reconfigure their imagined relations to literature’s commissioning and canonizing institutions” to problematise their self-understanding as literature and the attendant question of their value 17 What is striking, again, is that the scholars emphasise the cultural work accomplished by literature vis-à-vis institutions while refusing to reduce literary texts to passive objects awaiting their evaluation by external social actors In more general terms, what all of the theoretical approaches reviewed in this section have in common is that they foreground the self-referential or autopoietic role of literature in the generation of cultural values, including its own evaluation Borrowing from systems theory (a framework already evoked by the notion of ‘autopoiesis’), we may think of the ways in which literary texts refigure their place in a broader system of institutions as an example of the ‘re-entry of form.’ Defined as “the self-referential embedding 14 Cf Alexander Starre, “Kontextbezogene Modelle: Bildung, Ökonomie, Nation und Identität als Kanonisierungsfaktoren,” Handbuch Kanon und Wertung: Theorien, Instanzen, Geschichte, eds Gabriele Rippl/ Simone Winko (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013), 64 15 Cf Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2009); id , “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present,” New Literary History 41 2 (2010), 329-349 16 Cf Rachel Sagner Buurma/ Laura Heffernan, “Notation After ‘The Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti,” Representations 125 1 (2014), 88 See also Elizabeth Kovach’s contribution to this volume 17 Ibid Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 303 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 of a form of distinction back into its own indicational space,” 18 re-entry can help us understand that a distinction like the one between ‘literature’ and ‘criticism’ is not simply external to literary texts It can be indicated within the literary work itself, and this textual embedding of the distinction is a crucial way for literature to complicate its relationship to evaluation processes With due reference to concepts such as ‘reflexive institutionality’ and ‘self-canonisation,’ I therefore suggest that literary critics have something to gain from examining the formal strategies employed by literature to premediate its own subjection to the very institutions that have a stake in its evaluation (reviewers, publishing houses, commercial traders, scholars, etc ) By reconstructing the relationship between a literary text and the discourse of criticism in which it actively participates, the next section aims to outline how such an analysis could be conducted 3 Playing the Game of Canonisation: The Value System of Romanticism in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) In order to examine the ways in which literary texts can fashion a discourse for their own future reception, I turn to Vladimir Nabokov’s best-known novel Lolita - a work that, for different reasons, can constitute a challenging presence in institutions where its value is at stake In Living to Tell About It, James Phelan specifies one of these reasons when relating his experiences in teaching the text in higher-education contexts, and the diametrically opposed reactions among his students that it provoked 19 Falling into two camps, Phelan’s students were either delighted or irritated by Nabokov’s work, depending on whether they would speak in favour of its aesthetic charm or denounce its ethical misgivings The denial of ethical value by some of his students that Phelan reports must be taken seriously, especially since the fact that Lolita is a novel about the abuse of a teenage girl rings an all the more uncomfortable bell in the context of the manifold cases of abuse that have, in recent years, been reported online under the hashtag #MeToo While his teaching experiences predate the #MeToo movement, Phelan nevertheless mentions strong reactions to the text by some members of his class, with a few of them pointing out that “what we know about the incidence of sexual abuse makes it likely that one or more 18 Bruce Clarke, Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2014), 90 19 Cf James Phelan, Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005), 98-131 304 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 members of any class would have experienced such abuse ” 20 Personally, I think that such allegations cannot easily be brushed aside, and that scholars who choose to teach Lolita must be wary of reinstating forms of power that dismiss charges of its lack of moral sensitivity by playing them off against an unspecified notion of ‘aesthetic value.’ What strikes me as noteworthy, however, is that one particular accusation levelled by some of Phelan’s women students - “although you [men] talk in class about [the text’s] aesthetic qualities, what you really like is the way Humbert [= the novel’s protagonist] acts out male fantasies” - is an argumentative move of critique. It demystifies aesthetic quality by exposing the sexist reactions that the novel “really” incites in some of its readers 21 In light of the unbroken controversy sparked by the novel, I propose that one of the ways out of the dilemma outlined by Phelan is to explore how Lolita premediates the conflict within the institutions of criticism in which it will be received Analysing the text from the vantage point of postcritique therefore requires us to come to terms with approaches to the aesthetic as an ‘activity’ (see section 2) Using Starre’s term, we gain much by examining the strategies of self-canonisation in Nabokov’s novel, i e the self-referential elements through which the text invites and complicates its own evaluation with reference to specific value systems. Although the significance of self-referentiality and metafictionality have been foregrounded in many readings of Nabokov’s work, less attention has thus far been paid to the question of how the novel’s self-referential form gives way to a play with institutions far beyond the covers of the book In order to show how Lolita participates in its own canonisation, it bears pointing out that the text is, in many regards, a novel about evaluation On the one hand, this concerns the level of ethics, in that the question of the fictional narrator’s guilt is at stake and must be evaluated by the jury that he, writing his memoir in a prison cell, repeatedly addresses But Lolita is also a novel about matters of aesthetic taste such that many evaluative statements articulated in the text are endowed with a double coding Nabokov’s novel constantly foregrounds evaluative practices, and this cultural work begins as early as the “Foreword,” in which the fictitious editor John Ray, Jr. shares his thoughts on the manuscript he has received While the Foreword dates from 5th August 1955, we learn that the manuscript’s author - a man called Humbert Humbert - died in legal captivity on 16th November 1952 As is well known, his narrative is going to detail various episodes from his life in 20 Ibid , 101 21 Ibid Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 305 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 America, including his sexual encounters with Dolores Haze, a girl who is only twelve years old at the beginning of the novel’s central events and whom Humbert will turn into his “Lolita ” Given its delicate content, the question whether the manuscript ought to be published and thus made accessible to readers is negotiated from the beginning. John Ray, Jr.’s novel-internal evaluation reveals that the fictitious editor is torn between conflicting impulses: “had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist,” he writes, “there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book ” 22 A similar conundrum is invoked only a few lines later: “He [= Humbert] is abnormal He is not a gentleman But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! ” (3) These early statements introduce a logic which the novel is going to explore again and again: Ethics and aesthetics tend to preclude one another The grim possibility imagined in several of Nabokov’s works is that characters can only ever attain one when sacrificing the other. Proponents of aesthetic taste are therefore often morally deficient in his fictional texts; they are “genius-monster[s],” as Richard Rorty has called them 23 Humbert is no stranger to this worldview At one point in his narrative, he describes himself as a “sensualist” but hastens to specify that this side of him is “a great and insane monster ” (140) Crucially, the tension between aesthetics and ethics is exploited rhetorically by the narrator in various biting comments on the value systems underlying Western canonisation processes Humbert does not miss any opportunity to point out that “Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine,” or that, “when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve ” (19) The implicit message of these statements is clear enough: Questionable moral behaviour and great art have sometimes gone hand in hand in the history of great literature, and the same standards of evaluation that have turned Dante and Petrarch into canonical authors should not be held against the present piece of writing 24 In light of such consistent metafictional framing, 22 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955; London: Penguin, 2011 1955), 3 Subsequent citations from the novel will be given in parentheses in the text 23 Richard Rorty, “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty,” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: CUP, 1989), 161 Another prominent of Nabokov’s literary creations which Rorty discusses in the same context is the character of Charles Kinbote from Pale Fire (1962) 24 It should be pointed out that Humbert’s problematic statements about, as well as his ahistorical comparisons to, writers like Dante and Petrarch are his own, not Nabokov’s 306 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 many statements in the novel seem to send out a double message and can be read on two different levels When Humbert appeals to the “[l]adies and gentlemen of the jury” time and again (7 et passim), readers have a feeling that not only the jury of his trial on the level of fiction is addressed but also the jury of the novel’s future readership When he trashes the quality of the fast food he consumes - “they call those fries ‘French,’ grand dieu! ” (146) - it appears that the ‘tastelessness’ he attributes to US-American culture might also include its literary products 25 Nabokov’s protagonist employs many references to the history of art, but his self-image as a writer is based on a Romantic framework, or rather a specific tradition of Romanticism. In proposing Romanticism as an important context for understanding how the novel communicates, I ally myself with critics who argue that a “romantic code” is at work in the novel 26 This does not mean that Lolita should be viewed as a period text of the Romantic era but that Humbert’s rhetoric for evaluating (great) art is indebted to key Romantic ideas In Lipovetsky’s words, “the romantic tradition gives Humbert […] a well-developed arsenal of means and ends of transcendence ” 27 Such is the case, for example, when the narrator claims that only an extremely gifted artist (like himself) is capable of espying “nymphets” (15) - the term Humbert uses to describe the teenage girls who allegedly bewitch him and whom he, in fact, abuses Humbert insists that not everyone is able to identify such “demoniac” maidens (15) - on the contrary: “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy” (16), which evokes the image of the ‘sensitive genius’ in the tradition of John Keats and other Romantic artists Using Christoph Reinfandt’s term, one can therefore see Humbert’s narrative as a form of “Romantic communication,” which is based on tacit assumptions about what constitutes great art and artists 28 What the rhetoric I will return to the significance of distinguishing between the fictional narrator and real author of the novel 25 Cf Ellen Pifer, “Lolita,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed Vladimir E Alexandrov (New York: Routledge, 1995), 308 26 Mark Lipovetsky, “A War of Discourses: Lolita and the Failure of a Transcendental Project,” Nabokov: Un’eredità letteraria, eds Alide Cagidemetrio/ Daniela Rizzi (Venice: Cafoscarina, 2006), 53 See also Susanne Rohr, “Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955),” Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed Timo Müller (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 318-319 27 Lipovetsky, “War of Discourses,” 50 28 Christoph Reinfandt, Romantische Kommunikation: Zur Kontinuität der Romantik in der Kultur der Moderne (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003) Reinfandt’s study reconceptualises Romanticism as a ‘discursive formation’ (cf 11-12) and an ‘epistemological paradigm’ (cf 37) that is characteristic of modernity at large and has had a shaping impact on our modern understanding of art Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 307 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 of Romanticism offers Humbert is that he can distinguish people like himself, who are allegedly “in the know” about art (16), from common people who are unable to appreciate aesthetic value This argument is circular: It posits that great art is what can be appreciated by artists, and Humbert’s virtuoso performance as a writer evidences that he is up there with canonised masters such as Edgar Allan Poe, Prosper Mérimée, Shakespeare, Petrarch, Rimbaud, or Baudelaire All of the latter, who “are in some way linked to romanticism - whether as its forebears, its classics, or its modernist progeny,” are referenced in his narrative 29 Lolita’s self-canonisation into the Romantic tradition goes further As has already been indicated, Romanticism is associated with the idea that works of art transcend their concrete historical situation and, due to the spiritual insights they can manage to convey, participate in the eternal Employing this idea as part of its Romantic coding, the novel initiates its own afterlife This self-serving cultural work is completed at the end of the text, when Humbert decrees that his manuscript should not be published before Lolita’s death In the novel’s final sentence, the narrator addresses the now teenage girl one last time, philosophising that “the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita,” is “the refuge of art ” (352) Ironically enough, Lolita’s death is reported in the novel, but the information is provided in the most inconspicuous of places, namely in John Ray, Jr ’s Foreword, in which the reader learns about the death of a “Mrs. ‘Richard F. Schiller’” (2), which, as we later find out, is Lolita’s marital name The closure that Nabokov’s novel accomplishes in this way is vital to its self-canonisation: Lolita, the character, has effectively been turned into a work of art, and now keeps company with Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee” and Georges Bizet’s “Carmen” - two dead literary muses from the Romantic tradition with whom Humbert repeatedly compares Lolita in the course of the novel There are many female ghosts in Lolita, then, which live on as what Elisabeth Bronfen calls “pure immortal textuality ” 30 Nabokov knows how to play the game of canonisation: He knows that women’s death has often been a precondition for beauty and posthumous admiration in the context of Romantic theories of art It is therefore not surprising that John Keats, the great Romantic populariser of the connection between death and beauty, is alluded to in the novel when Humbert states that “my schoolgirl nymphet had me in thrall” (207), thus evoking the canonical example of Keats’ “La Belle Dame 29 Lipovetsky, “War of Discourses,” 50 30 Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992), 375 308 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 sans Merci” (1819) One might go so far as to argue that the communicative shift in the novel’s final sentence, in which Humbert directly addresses his muse (“my Lolita”) rather than the jury to which he had previously appealed, is in keeping with the communicative structure of a Keatsian ode It completes the work of self-canonisation insofar as the dead muse (Lolita, the character) is now transformed into a beautiful piece of art (Lolita, the novel) and will, as such, forever be immortal 31 By reminding readers of how Romantic theories of beauty operate, the narrative makes itself complicit with a pre-existent value system and bluntly lays claim on its mechanisms of judgment 32 What is the value of Lolita, then, from the vantage point of a reading that emphasises the text’s investment in its canonisation? The analysis that has been presented so far underlines that Nabokov is not the kind of writer who would readily cater to “readers who expect novelists to critique the social order, negotiate its change, or teach the audience how to live ” 33 Nevertheless, it is possible to read Lolita as a novel that conducts ethical work in a more indirect way Understanding how this work is accomplished requires us to come to terms with the idea of the literary text as an “event” in Derek Attridge’s sense, i e an intervention within an institutional environment that the text not only reflects but within which it brings about certain ruptures and disturbances 34 In line with Phelan’s analysis of the complex coding of unreliable narration in the novel, I consider it vital to emphasise that Nabokov’s rhetorical project is ultimately different from Humbert’s, and this also entails differences in their respective relationship to canonising institutions 31 Cf. Philipp Schweighauser, “Metaficition, Transcendence, and Death in Nabokov’s Lolita,” Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/ 1999), 104, who captures this logic in a similar way: “Lolita must die so that Lolita may conform to the rules of the genre ” His focus, however, is on the genre of the confessional narrative, not on the context of Romanticism 32 My present interest is in the connection between women’s death and literary immortality in the Romantic context, but it bears pointing out that similar practices of self-canonisation also take place outside of Romantic frameworks One might think of Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus (1979), which examines the comparatively minor place in cultural memory allotted to Antonio Salieri (in comparison to that of his rival, Mozart) In a highly ironic gesture, Salieri’s mediocrity is commented on at the end of the play when, in addition to his limitations as an artist, the protagonist is not even able to commit suicide - the last action that could have instigated a posthumous recognition of his art as ‘great ’ 33 Leona Toker, “Nabokov’s Worldview,” The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov, ed Julian W Connolly (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 232 34 Cf Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004) He understands the event of literature, in a performative sense, as “the singular putting into play of - while also testing and transforming - the set of codes and conventions that make up the institution of literature and the wider cultural formation of which it is part” (105- 106) Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 309 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 As we saw above, the fictional protagonist is an unreliable narrator who unashamedly exploits certain institutionalised value systems in order to verify the high aesthetic standards of his own writing Yet, Nabokov’s novel, insofar as it exposes Humbert’s rhetoric and ironises his strategies of justification, constitutes an altogether different kind of event and rather provides a meta-comment on the operational logic underlying these value systems By embedding and historicising Humbert’s writing skills within received frameworks of evaluation, the novel represents a departure from the Romantic notion of aesthetic value as ‘transcendent’ and instead acknowledges “the aesthetic’s entanglement in systems of power, repression, and exclusion ” 35 As a thought experiment, the text shows what happens when a Romantic aesthetic is radically embraced Through his great artistic capabilities, Humbert creates Lolita/ Lolita as a Romantic piece of art, but this aestheticisation turns him blind towards Dolores Haze and the cruelty he inflicts upon her: “it is the romantic Humbert, who repeatedly rapes Lolita,” as Lipovetsky remarks 36 For all of Nabokov’s declarations that his interest is in nothing else than the experience of “aesthetic bliss” (see above), his novel makes clear that aesthetics is not only a bodily phenomenon but has a history Romanticism, with its emphasis on the autonomy of art, constitutes a key stage in this history. According to critics like Jerome McGann, it is so influential that it has even informed scholarly traditions of evaluating literary texts 37 Viewed in this broader context, Lolita’s ethical force does not only consist in exposing Humbert as a morally dubious individual but as a representative of a modern framework for evaluating art Readers (including critics) of the novel must therefore be wary of reiterating the logic of his Romantic code, namely that aesthetics can neatly be separated from ethics, and that the former takes place in an altogether different sphere that can only be entered by some. This interpretation can finally also be aligned with Rorty’s thesis that radical autonomy (as is claimed by Romanticism for art) comes with a price: “the pursuit of autonomy is at odds with feelings of solidarity ” 38 From a postcritical vantage point, it is productive to analyse Lolita as a novel that is highly outspoken on the frameworks of evaluation that render 35 Matthews/ McWhirter, “Introduction,” xxvi 36 Lipovetsky, “War of Discourses,” 60-61 37 This is the thesis argued in Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1983), 1: “the scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations.” As McGann’s study is firmly rooted in the paradigm of critique, I will come back in section 4 to its implications for the postcritical framework outlined in this article 38 Rorty, “Barber,” 159 310 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 it as a great work of art These frameworks, including the Romantic context on which the present analysis has focused, are referenced again and again in the text - the damage to Dolores Haze and other Romantic heroines is done At the same time, by canonising itself, the text ‘looks forward’ to the institutions that have a stake in judging it and - provocatively - presents them with a ready-made evaluation of its aesthetic discourse Within the Romantic framework of evaluation in which it wants to be read, Lolita demands that its aesthetic quality be acknowledged This proleptic agency complicates the task of any critic who is used to retranslating aesthetics into ethics, or who assumes that ethical value must be looked for below the aesthetic ‘surface’ of a text - as if aesthetics was a different kind of problem It requires readers to face up to the institutionalised traditions of literary evaluation that inform literary criticism as much as they are at work in the novel This also goes for the specific tradition of Romanticism which is enacted in Nabokov’s text as both an aesthetic and an ethos, if a morally questionable one In light of the re-examination of reading methods that is presently being conducted across literature departments and the renewed engagement with questions of literary value that is closely connected to this development, reading Nabokov’s 1955 novel alongside Felski’s 2015 study is an insightful endeavour. Whereas Felski looks back on the influential role of critique in academic literary criticism, Lolita is a text that premediates critique at a time when this method - especially in its Marxist and feminist variants - was yet to be fully institutionalised By historically framing critique, both texts testify to a (renewed) attention to aesthetics It is therefore tempting to establish a connection between the famous “tip of the tongue” (“Lo Lee Ta ”) at the beginning of Nabokov’s novel (Lolita 7) and the way in which Felski faults critique for its hostility towards aesthetic sensitivity At any rate, the altogether unaesthetic movement of the tongue during the pronunciation of ‘critique,’ to which Felski alludes in a striking passage, resonates with Nabokov’s take on the tongue in an interesting way: “Crrritique! The word flies off the tongue like a weapon, emitting a rapid guttural burst of machine-gun-fire. There is the ominous cawing staccato of the first and final consonants, the terse thud of the short repeated vowel, the throaty underground rumble of the accompanying r ” (Limits 120) Such phonological wordplay notwithstanding, it is important to see that both Nabokov and Felski render questions of aesthetics as more than just a matter of bodily pleasure. In the final section of this article, I will assess some of the implications one can derive from a joint reading of the two texts for the project of a postcritical turn in the study of literature 311 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 4 Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the (Aesthetic) Value of Literature: Perspectives and Challenges The present contribution has understood the topicality of questions concerning the value of literature in light of recent scholarly debates over ‘critique’ and ‘postcritique,’ and the concomitant attention that scholars have begun to pay again to aspects of aesthetics. The final word on these debates has certainly not yet been spoken, especially since Felski’s rendering of critique is as deliberately provocative as her ideas about postcritique are programmatic Nevertheless, with respect to the criteria that need to be met if the postcritical project is to be successful (regardless of the question of its label), it makes sense to hint at a few perspectives and challenges First, a re-integration of aesthetics into the study of literary value can only be accomplished if critics “resist the temptation to ‘recuperate,’ ‘reclaim,’ or ‘resurrect’ aesthetic discourse as a discourse of purity ” 39 It is one of the merits of critique to have alerted literary scholars to the fact that the discourse of aesthetics is itself a historical phenomenon With regard to the period of Romanticism, for example, which I presented as a significant context for analysing the rhetoric of beauty in Lolita, McGann’s work (already cited above) has shown that the idea that art ‘transcends’ its immediate historical circumstances is, in many regards, an invention of the Romantic age itself Romanticism is, in this sense, as much an institutionalised ethos for evaluating literature as is critique, and its principles of judgment have a considerable legacy of their own in literary criticism One must therefore be careful not to think of aesthetic value as an irreducible ‘fact’ of individual works that only the most gifted critics are capable of seeing, for such a rhetoric would reiterate the kind of self-delusion that is at work when Humbert claims that only a highly sensitive artist like himself can espy “nymphets ” In this sense, Lolita sets up a similar kind of trap for Romantic critics that James’ The Turn of the Screw has in store for psychoanalytical readings If McGurl is right in stating that “literary critics tend to see their existence in institutions as an embarrassment,” 40 a postcritical turn in literary studies would require scholars to develop greater awareness of the frameworks they apply when examining the aesthetic features of a given work Second, instead of viewing aesthetic value as a static feature that literary texts either have or do not have, it is promising to think of the aesthetic as an ‘activity’ in Kelleter’s sense (see section 2) Rather than asking what we can 39 Matthews/ McWhirter, “Introduction,” xv 40 McGurl, “Ordinary Doom,” 337 312 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 do with a novel like Lolita, we may wish to refocus our engagement with texts by asking what literary works do with us, especially when we read them in contexts that have a clear self-reflexive dimension. Many literary texts have something to tell us about our scholarly frameworks of evaluation, of which a novel like Nabokov’s takes advantage but which, in so doing, it also shakes up Recognising this potential of literature would make it possible to understand how a given work connects with practices of scholarship and intervenes within academic institutions In Felski’s words, which point at the impact of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory in her thinking, we are invited to move away from an understanding of literary texts as “objects to be investigated” and come to view them as “coactors that make things happen ” (180) In this framework, aesthetics appears as indissolubly connected to ethics I have attempted to foreground this connection in my reading of Lolita as a novel about evaluation which inevitably constitutes an ‘event’ (in Attridge’s sense) for literary criticism Third, a direct implication of the shift towards greater recognition of the agency of literary texts is a development of alternative temporalities to the linear framework of traditional models of evaluation, especially the assumption that critique ‘trumps’ literature In addition to Felski’s work, such an alternative is also envisioned by Wai Chee Dimock in her “theory of resonance”: [W]hy should a text not be interpreted in relation to events outside its temporal vicinity? Does simultaneity necessarily confer analytic pertinence? Is it not possible to think of historicity as a relation less discretely periodized, one that emerges over time between any text and subsequent generations of readers? The preposition in, capturing a literary text only in its pastness, cannot say why this text might still matter in the present, why, distanced from its original period, it nonetheless continues to signify, continues to invite other readings 41 In line with Dimock’s key concept, the present article has made Nabokov’s Lolita ‘resonate’ with some of the recent debates in academic literary criticism and Felski’s work, in particular, in order to cause “unexpected vibrations in unexpected places ” 42 The future-oriented attachments that Dimock sees literary works as capable of forming align with other forms of proleptic agency that have been surveyed in this contribution - from Felman’s idea that literature might ‘authorise’ a discourse about its own reception to Starre’s concept of ‘self-canonisation ’ 41 Wai Chee Dimock, “A Theory of Resonance,” PMLA 112 5 (1997), 1061 42 Ibid 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 With regard to the key objective of a postcritical turn to rethink the relationship between literature and academic literary criticism, I therefore suggest that this endeavour would profit from a study of the proleptic agency of texts Such an activity could focus on a great variety of literary works - from a text like Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” (1711), which is both a poetics of the new kind of writing envisioned by its author and an execution of this poetics, to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) For all the differences that surely exist between a work like Morrison’s and Lolita, what both texts have in common is the intervention within the institutions of academic literary criticism they undertake 43 The forms of self-canonisation we find in Beloved, especially the narrator’s repeated emphasis that “[t]his is not a story to pass on,” 44 impact literary criticism in their own way and point at the novel’s fraught relationship to educational and canonising institutions It might be a promising starting point for a postcritical study of literature, then, to analyse how literary works constrain, unsettle, and challenge scholarly systems of value While previous studies of literary value have productively focused on the cultural work of literature “vis-à-vis the norms and values generally accepted by the majority of society,” 45 a postcritical version of this study would attempt to enrich this objective by more systematically considering within its concept of society the eager evaluators of literature who are known as ‘critics ’ Works Cited Anker, Elizabeth S / Rita Felski “Introduction ” Critique and Postcritique Eds eaed Durham: Duke UP, 2017, 1-28 Attridge, Derek The Singularity of Literature London: Routledge, 2004 Baumbach, Sibylle/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning “Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values ” Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating and Constructing Norms and Values Eds eid Trier: WVT, 2009, 1-15 Bronfen, Elisabeth Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992 43 For Morrison’s novel, this is convincingly shown by Mark McGurl, whose analysis of the text departs from the observation that the white villain is an educator named “Schoolteacher ” See the respective chapter in his The Program Era, 346-360 44 Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987; London: Vintage, 2010), 324 45 Sibylle Baumbach/ Herbert Grabes/ Ansgar Nünning, “Values in Literature and the Value of Literature: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating, and Constructing Norms and Values,” Literature and Values: Literature as a Medium for Representing, Disseminating, and Constructing Norms and Values, eds eid (Trier: WVT, 2009), 8 313 Towards a Postcritical Understanding of the Value of Literature 314 a lexaNder s cherr 10.2357/ REAL-2021-0015 Buurma, Rachel Sagner/ Laura Heffernan “Notation After ‘The Reality Effect’: Remaking Reference with Roland Barthes and Sheila Heti ” Representations 125 1 (2014), 80-102 Clarke, Bruce Neocybernetics and Narrative Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2014 Dimock, Wai Chee “A Theory of Resonance ” PMLA 112 5 (1997), 1060-1071 Felman, Shoshana “Turning the Screw of Interpretation ” Yale French Studies 55/ 56 (1977), 94-207 Felski, Rita The Limits of Critique Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2015 Herrnstein Smith, Barbara Contingencies of Value: Critical Perspectives for Critical Theory Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988 Kelleter, Frank “Populärkultur und Kanonisierung: Wie(so) erinnern wir uns an Tony Soprano? ” Wertung und Kanon Eds Matthias Freise/ Claudia Stockinger Heidelberg: Winter, 2010, 55-76 Lipovetsky, Mark “A War of Discourses: Lolita and the Failure of a Transcendental Project ” Nabokov: Un’eredità letteraria Eds Alide Cagidemetrio/ Daniela Rizzi Venice: Cafoscarina, 2006, 49-65 Matthews, Pamela R / David McWhirter “Introduction: Exile’s Return? Aesthetics Now ” Aesthetic Subjects Eds eid Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2003, xiii-xxviii McGann, Jerome J The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1983 McGurl, Mark The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2009 --- “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present ” New Literary History 41 2 (2010), 329-349 Morrison, Toni Beloved (1987) London: Vintage, 2010 Nabokov, Vladimir Lolita (1955) London: Penguin, 2011 --- “On a Book Entitled Lolita” (1956) Lolita London: Penguin, 2011, 353-361 Phelan, James Living to Tell About It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005 Pifer, Ellen “Lolita ” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov Ed Vladimir E Alexandrov New York: Routledge, 1995, 305-321 Reinfandt, Christoph Romantische Kommunikation: Zur Kontinuität der Romantik in der Kultur der Moderne Heidelberg: Winter, 2003 Rohr, Susanne “Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) ” Handbook of the American Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Ed Timo Müller Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017, 308-321 Rorty, Richard “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty ” Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Cambridge: CUP, 1989, 141-168 Schweighauser, Philipp. “Metafiction, Transcendence, and Death in Nabokov’s Lolita ” Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/ 1999), 99-116 Starre, Alexander “Kontextbezogene Modelle: Bildung, Ökonomie, Nation und Identität als Kanonisierungsfaktoren ” Handbuch Kanon und Wertung: Theorien, Instanzen, Geschichte Eds Gabriele Rippl/ Simone Winko Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013, 58-66 Toker, Leona “Nabokov’s Worldview ” The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov Ed Julian W Connolly Cambridge: CUP, 2005, 232-247