On elitism

Back in my student days, I once loaned a dog-eared copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada to a flatmate. There are plenty of criticisms one could throw at this book — it’s overwritten, self-indulgent, whimsical in places and also goes on about itself too much, although this was probably precisely why I loved it so much in adolescence. My flatmate, though, came back with a criticism I hadn’t anticipated. ‘It’s too elitist’ she complained.

I would never have thought about it in those terms. Ada was, is, a book about aristocrats, but then it was self-evidently building on a literary tradition that was almost exclusively preoccupied with aristocrats. But perhaps that was not all that my flatmate meant? Ada is also full of long words, a few of them marginally obscure. It is laced with in-jokes that require a passing grasp not only of European history and literature, but probably also Nabokov’s own Speak, Memory.

But even this wasn’t the problem. Read the rest of this entry »