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Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. V (2011)
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PIA PERA’S LO AND FOUL PLAY
In a statement issued through her publisher, Pia Pera suggests that her literary
experiment in Lo’s Diary has been legitimized by Nabokov’s text itself, by its
intertextuality, its parodic playfulness and encouragement to join its literary games: “All I
did was to accept Nabokov’s challenge, his implied invitation to a literary tennis match
that, it seems to me, has a long and well established tradition behind it.” Pera reads
Humbert’s tongue-in-cheek bemoaning of his own maleness – “Oh, that I were a lady
writer who could have [Lolita] pose naked in a naked light” – as just such an invitation
(quoted in Blumenthal). Pera’s response to this provocation, then, is to follow with
meticulous precision every detail of the original text, attempting to reconstruct it through
the vision of the teen-age girl.
In creating a parody of Nabokov’s Lolita, Pera attacks precisely the book’s belief
in the ethical value of aesthetics. In its anti-aesthetic stance, Pera’s text is rabidly
postmodern; her parody attempts to undermine what might be called the modernist cliché
of elitist aestheticism. The fact that Pera’s novel is formally unassuming (it was critically
panned for its lackluster writing) merely underscores the distrust in aesthetics that
informs its content.
According to Morson, parody woos an audience to its side in its battle with its
target by recontextualizing the original: “Parody aims to discredit an act of speech by
redirecting attention from its text to a compromising context” (113). The attention
redirected in this case being that of the reader, Morson’s theory of parody radically
diverges from that of the Russian Formalists, who argue that, in contrast to satire, which
attacks extraliterary vices, parody assaults textual matters, specifically style or artistic
method. For Tynyanov, parody’s strictly literary aim is the rejuvenation of outdated
forms, and it, rather than political or social change, drives the process of literary
evolution.
that “satire is a lesson, parody is a game” (Strong Opinions 75), there is a lesson in Nabokov’s ludic web –
namely, how to be a less complacent, more attentive reader.
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