Death of The Author Analysis; The Death of Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita is a literary classic, published in 1955, and since then it has gone through many covers throughout the years, yet a common theme with a lot of these covers is that they on a whole defy Vladimir Nabokov's original intentions for the book cover, having said “I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain,” he wrote. “And no girls.”

With this it's easy to see how this relates to the Death of the Author theory. Vladimir Nabokov' specifically did not want girls on the cover of his book, yet it is the reader interpreting his work which created the number one image associated with the book. These covers have also shaped the way the book is perceived, most thinking it to be an erotic novel, when it's actually more a study into the mind of a male character whose dark and disturbing thoughts project onto a child. Instead we think of images of a teenage seductress. This can mostly be attributed to 1997 movie, where the main character age was changed from 12, to 16, a massive leap, which renders the original narrative of a sexually abused child to that of a rebellious young teenager, soon to be women. After that Lolita photographs of half naked or fully naked women seductively posing for the viewer, plagued covers.

Nabokov was outraged at: “Humbert was fond of ‘little girls’ — not simply ‘young girls.’ Nymphets are girl-children, not starlets and ‘sex kittens.’” and yet we still take the cover artists interpretations. Here the intent of the author is explicitly ignored.

The cover above is by Per Ahlin above is a one of numerous Loita covers, which shows how artists dismiss Nabokov's original intentions. The character on the cover looks to be a young woman, not the 12-year-old girl within the book. She had big model like hair and is wearing lingerie, which is highlighted by the orange spot colour chosen by the artist, her eyes seductively half lidded. This is exactly the type of cover Vladimir Nabokov did not want and thus the interpretation of his text Nabokov did not want.

However, in Roland Barthes "Death of the Author" text, he speaks of how in the modern era the origin of a work may lie with the author, but its destination is with the reader, everything comes down to the readers perception in the end. Here we have two readers, the cover book artists and the viewer who read the book with the artwork on the front, and see them as irrevocably linked. Barthes wrote "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing." Via Death of the Author, what is to say these erotic interpretations of Lolita are not valid? However, it becomes interesting because these erotic interpretations undeniably show the gaping flaws within our society around the sexualisation of young girls, and the abuse of young girls, and the way men feel they have ownership over them, the themes Vladimir Nabokov was originally trying to write about. Having Lolita's meanings and interpretations decided by the readers and artists via death of the author undeniable hold a mirror up to our society and it's problems. Has Vladimir Nabokov's original intentions been realised, even though they are not the way he intended.

Ellen Lupton Cover; a non sexualised cover