Words failed him

At Quillette, writer and book lover Lester Berg recounts his failed effort to persuade a Left academic with literary pretensions that art should be judged on its merits, not an author’s politics:

… Jamie said that Lolita bored him after the first few sentences, so he stopped reading: “Maybe it was a bad translation.”

It brought me no joy to have to tell him that while Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian émigré who wrote his first nine novels in his native tongue, the later Nabokov of Lolita fame was one of the great prose stylists of the English language. What followed was a contentious exchange in which it became clear that Jamie has never read or finished many of the great books that I held dear. When I asked, in all sincerity, how he could teach writing to college students, he shot back by rejecting my beloved texts as artifacts of white, male European hegemony.

It wasn’t long before tirades against the Western canon—against my use of terms such as “Shakespearean” or “Dickensian” in reference to Ralph Ellison and Zora Neale Hurston—spilled over onto Facebook pages, where they turned personal, especially after I critiqued Ta-Nehisi Coates’ politics of nihilism and doom.

“I take offence to that as a man of colour,” Jamie wrote in response.