ЛОЛИТA ВЛАДИМИРА НАБОКОВА У ОКВИРУ ЏОН ФИСКОВОГ КОНЦЕПТА ОДБРАНЕ ПОПУЛАРНЕ КУЛТУРЕ
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov within John Fiske’s Concept of Popular Culture Defense

Summary/Abstract: John Fiske claims, in his book Understanding Popular Culture (1989), that popular culture is the culture of people in opposition to the high or elite culture of the ‘superior’ class. People use the products supplied by dominant forces, but in the active process of opposition they alternate the original meanings by using them in a different context. He also makes a distinction between popular and mass culture which involves passive consumption of products offered by the dominant forces in society, without any resistance or personal interpretation of their meanings. Fiske thus contrasts such defined popular culture with both high and mass culture, and appreciates popular culture to the extent that he disapproves of all the culture that is not popular. Nabokov’s Lolita contains strong oppositions between elements of elite and mass culture which contrast in a variety of ways throughout the novel. The opposed family and educational backgrounds, as well as their tastes in literature, films, music and other cultural products, put the two characters into two contrasted roles in terms of their reception of cultural values: Humbert’s world is shaped by the values of high, elite culture, while Lolita represents, in Fiske’s categorization of cultural values, a typical consumer of mass culture who mindlessly and automatically consumes every product that is offered. None of them, therefore, is subject to Fiske’s categorization of popular culture as a culture that changes the original meanings of the existing products in a process of active resistance to the dominant culture. The novel also contains explicit criticism of contemporary American culturе and its values. The criticism is provided, on the one hand, through Humbert’s humorous and ironic references to mass culture (and American culture in general), and on the other hand, through the author’s selection of the theme, since the plot is reminiscent of numerous actual cases of young girls being kidnapped and raped by adult molesters, which may be associated with the ideas and values promoted by cultural products. It might seem paradoxical, then, that, despite the protagonists whose cultural values are largely the values of elite or mass culture, and the contained criticism of contemporary culture, the character of Lolita has continued to live in the realm of popular culture for more than five decades as its omnipresent icon and inspiration. This is, in fact, where Fiske locates popular culture: people take the goods offered by mainstream society and turn them into their creative, even subversive, uses, thus showing their creative nature and illustrating the manner in which people create their own culture. The fact that, in this way, people create their own meanings of cultural products, revealing a more active, more creative, more productive audience, is what Fiske uses as the main argument for his final defense of popular culture. Moreover, thanks so such perceived role of popular culture, John Fiske evaluates it as superior not only to mass culture which involves only passive reception of cultural products, but also to high culture which does not allow for any possibilities of criticism or change.

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