Subject
Nabokoviana: Lee Siegel's _Love in a Dead Language_ (L-A-LITATA)
Date
Body
September 8, 1999
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
'Love in a Dead Language': Lalita, Post-Modern Object
of Desire
Related Link
Tom LeClair Reviews 'Love in a Dead Language' (May 23)
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
Erudite murder mysteries used to be the
province of Jorge Luis Borges, who would
invent some scholarly master of arcane lore
and entangle his fate with the study of obscure
manuscripts, palimpsests, secret codices, Cabalist
mysteries, Sufi labyrinths and other hidden
meanings. Now along comes Lee Siegel, who mixes
a bit of Borges with some Nabokov and then adds
an erotic gloss from the Kama Sutra to write "Love
in a Dead Language," a witty, bawdy, language-rich
farce of academic life.
Siegel, who is a professor of Indian religions at the
University of Hawaii, is especially and purposefully
Nabokovian in his choice of a main
theme. His story centers on an adulterous affair between a
professor of Indian studies named
Leopold Roth and an initially reluctant student of his, a
beautiful American-born Indian woman named, not Lolita but Lalita, Lalita
Gupta.
But from that beginning Siegel flies off on his inventive
own. His Prof. Roth, a married man
haunted by the death of his only daughter, is doing a new
translation of the Kama Sutra, the
famous Indian manual of sexual knowledge, and his pursuit of
Lalita is a kind of realization
in practice of Kama Sutrian erotic wisdom. But we also know
from the beginning of Siegel's
book that shortly after the affair, Roth is found dead in
his office, having been struck in the
face, either accidentally or not, by his copy of the massive
Monier Monier-Williams
Sanskrit-English Dictionary.
After Roth's death, an Indian-Jewish graduate student of his
named Anang Saighal is
assigned the task of editing the professor's unfinished
annotated translation of the Kama
Sutra. The first thing he discovers is that most of Roth's
annotation consists of the story of
his sexual obsession with Lalita.
Saighal himself is the narrator of Siegel's novel, and he
turns out to be a sardonic and
scholarly figure, a man who is faithful to his deceased
mentor but has a mind of his own. So,
speaking of palimpsests, "Love in a Dead Language" is
Saighal's story about Roth's work and
murder, which is written over Roth's illicit love affair,
which is itself inextricably blended with
his erotic attraction to India and the notion that all
knowledge is a kind of seduction, an erotic
attraction.
Some might call this post-modern, this hall of fractured
mirrors that reflect Siegel's themes
back on one another. Whether it is post-modern or not, "Love
in a Dead Language" is pulled
off with such unhinged elan by Siegel that it is also plain
good fun, a clever, literate satire in
which almost everything is both travestied and, strangely,
loved by its author.
There are farcical riffs on the mating habits of snails,
extracts from the brilliantly scurrilous
confessions of a 19th-century member of the Bengal Lancers
and portions of the
correspondence of Richard Burton, the storied English
explorer who first translated the Kama
Sutra into English.
Siegel concocts comedic articles on sexual harassment from
the student newspaper. He
invents marvelously learned and poetic disquisitions on
Indian sexual lore. He even fabricates
an index and a six-page multilingual "bibliography" -- a
list of books supposedly used by
Saighal in his work on Roth -- that so cunningly apes a real
academic bibliography that you
have to study it for a while to be sure it is a parody.
Siegel brings along for the trip a bright collection of
cleverly
wrought caricatures. These include a professor of Indian
religions
at the University of Hawaii named Lee Siegel, an academic
rival
heartily disliked by Roth. Siegel -- the author, not the
character --
floats the whole contraption on a literary raft loaded with
wordplay
and verbal pyrotechnics that often stay just on the
civilized side of
excess.
Here is an extract from what Roth (in his Kama Sutra
commentary) calls "the raucous roar and grumbling anthem of
Delhi": "Pandemonial moans and hapless laughter, scolding
and
beseeching, hawking and hounding, and the hectic honking of
horns, discordant metallic clitter-clatter and terrible
tintinnabulation
The infernal blast agitated the perfumes of the road (spice
and
sandal, gasoline and feces, ganja and dust, garlands and
tropical
sickness)."
Or here is a wry little commentary on Siegel's main theme:
"We
cannot comprehend the meaning (either the intent or
significance)
of our word for love, that morphemic wafer on a quivering
tongue,
that small, dark, vermicular, spermatic squiggle from the
tip of a pen."
Siegel's penchant for the ludicrous is so strong that the
underlying and actually more serious
themes of "Love in a Dead Language" are almost hidden by his
scholarly games and verbal
tumescence. But within this ludic tale there lurks a tragedy
of love and loss that does not lose
its tenderness even when embedded in Siegel's perpetually
farcical frame of mind.
Roth, the aging scholar, is a man whose thirsts simply
cannot be quenched. "Sometimes I
worry about you," his wife Sophia tells him. "You just seem
to need so much."
His needs are embodied in his fascination with India, a
fascination that he admits "has
allowed me some success at socially legitimating my
essential deviance." His fascination with
India is in turn embodied in his infatuation with Lalita,
even though anybody except Roth can
see that Lalita is just an ordinary teen-age girl, bright,
rebellious, mercurial and
impressionable.
Like another famous literary visitor to India, Mrs. Moore in
"A Passage to India," Roth sees
the smallness and the horror of it all, including his own
smallness and horror, but he also sees
the poetry of his obsession and of India: "I want the
silence within the mausoleum to be
perfect, a melodious silence that enchants the heart, a
celestial silence that drowns out all
earthly rumblings, a peaceful silence that is different than
any other silence anywhere in this
world."
Siegel's narrator Saighal attributes those words to Shah
Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal.
That Siegel is able to bring them to bear in "Love in a Dead
Language" is a strong indication
that there is more to this raucous love story than mere
satire.