Lee Siegel is a professor of Indian religions at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of several serious academic works, a Sanskritist and an Indologist of repute. He should know better - and does! That is what makes Love in a Dead Language such a deliciously wicked performance. Love was first published in the US in 1999 to a chorus of critical acclaim. Siegel had the critics scrambling for superlatives, vying to describe the coruscating and multi-dimensional narrative wit that makes Love simultaneously a heart-stopping satire of academia, a farce about cultural cross-fertilisation and miscegenation, a tragic meditation on life and love and, reflexively, on the untrustworthy crutch that both rely on - language.
The facts, man, give us the facts! Professor Roth, then, is working on his "translation" at a US university. He is an Indologist who hasn't yet slept with an Indian woman. He decides to remedy this when the lovely Lalita Gupta, abcd daughter of ambitious nri parents, registers for his course. He organises a fictitious field trip on which Lalita, inveigled by the lustful, deceitful Roth, is the only student. The trap is perfectly set, and Professor Roth is able to correct that small lacuna in his Indological training, but as happens frequently, it is the trapper who gets caught.
The Professor's Gupta liaison cannot remain gupt, he returns to scandal and professional disgrace, his wife leaves him and the irate parents of Ms G are out for his blood. He spends his last months being suspended and enquired into, huddling in his office with the unwelcome cat his only companion, until he is discovered, dead, having been struck on the head by Monier-Williams's huge Sanskrit-English Dictionary. It falls to the hapless Saighal to prepare Roth's unfinished "work" for posthumous publication.
It is of the nature of literature, however, that it resists such summary. One might even propound the proposition - albeit in trepidation of Siegel's parodic propensities - that any work attains to the status of literature only to the extent that it resists such summary. Thus, Love in a Dead Language is not simply a tragic love story, reminiscent of Nabokov's Lolita. It resembles Lolita too in the alarming energy of its inventiveness. (Intelligence of this order must, surely, require a licence? Officer, please check Siegel's papers!)
The literary "problem" that Siegel earns the right to confront is, naturally, of the highest order. A linguistic gift such as his, or Nabokov's, for that matter, comes with one serious limitation. It is true that language creates the world, worlds even. But when the writer, on pain of terminal cleverness, wishes to be sincere, it is difficult to convince the reader that "sincerity" too isn't merely another rhetorical mask. This is Siegel-Roth apropos a lover who died young: "I should have stayed with her but I didn't. Does it matter? She's dead. The fallen leaves of autumn have scattered, are gone forever, and dry earth, threatening us again with barrenness, awaits no lover but the frost. The deathly beauty of turning leaves, the vividness of the reds and yellows, fades. No one cares to endure the pain of remembering. Nothing means anything except in books."
Nabokov pulls it off, just, makes us believe in Humbert's guilty, repentant, helpless pain right at the end of Lolita. I'd like to believe that Siegel does, too.
