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Reading Estrada’s book ...
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Complete article at the following URL:
http://www.inquirer.net/specialfeatures/theestradawatch/view.php?db=1&article=20080108-110965
Reading Estrada’s book
January 08, 2008 00:29:00
Rina Jimenez-David
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Reading a book is not just about the author’s words or worldview. It is as much about the reader’s own world -- his or her (and it does matter if the reader is a he or a she) experience, appreciation and taste, the circumstances in which the reading is taking place, the reader’s mood, the reader’s sympathies with the writer or the characters.
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But it also possible for different readers to read the same book, savor the same words, and yet emerge with varying interpretations and ways of appreciating the work. For instance, since its release in the 1950s, especially after a movie was made of it, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” has generally been interpreted as a narration of a hapless man’s sexual enslavement by a “nymphet,” a word that was first used in the novel and gained public acceptance since.
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Nabokov himself called Lolita “a vain and cruel wretch,” and since the novel is written purportedly by Humbert Humbert, Lolita’s lover, the story that’s told is of a man sexually obsessed with the 12-year-old girl, who exploits this obsession to pursue her own selfish ends. The popular interpretation hewed to this point of view, and indeed, “Lolita” became code for a sexually promiscuous and manipulative girl.
But in the book “Reading Lolita in Teheran,” written in 2003, Azar Nafiri, writing about her experience leading a readers’ club composed of female students shortly after the takeover of fundamentalist Islamic clerics in Iran, firmly takes Lolita’s side of the story. Perhaps it is her and her students’ experience of lives curtailed by social and religious restrictions that enables Nafiri to see through Humbert’s self-justifying depictions and read the novel through Lolita’s eyes, to appreciate her sense of isolation and violation.
I had read “Lolita” as a teenager, attracted mainly by its “racy” reputation, and had accepted wholeheartedly the dominant interpretation of the work. Only many years later, reading Nafiri, did I realize that indeed it is Lolita, and not Humbert, who is the victim, who watches the world through the metaphorical bars of a cage.
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Which brings me, and I do concede it is quite a conceptual feat, from Nabokov to Joseph Estrada.
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Looking back, we can say the contradictory assessments were only reflective of the confusion of the times, and the competing agendas that the People Power phenomenon had unleashed. Twenty-two years later, those same agendas are still at loggerheads, and the situation is not helped any by the fact that there was an EDSA People Power II and III -- and that we have yet to choose which among the many books offering mixed reviews of our immediate past we will favor, or believe.
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