Salò, Lolita, and the Aesthetics of Hegemony: Introduction
What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita — perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness — indeed, no life of her own.
Lolita, pt. 1, ch. 14.
Key to any politic of anti-fascism and anti-capitalism is an understanding of how hegemony asserts itself through conditions of sexual violence. It is not enough to state that these conditions are ones which give rise to sexual violence; sexual violence is the currency in which these relations deal, such that its existence is axiomatic to the ability of hegemony to sustain itself. Rape is the enactment of power and the imposition of subjectivity; rape is how the subject is kept in their place, and socially sanctioned rape can be a force of pacification, disempowerment, and the redrawing of hegemonic lines to great effect.
We see this condition in the dominant culture and its ability to act as a discursive stage within which sexual violence can be made possible. Cultural narratives, constituted at a multiplicity of sites including those of mythology, literature, religion, criticism, and film, help to establish the parameters under which certain expressions of violence become palatable, as well as reflecting back the proclivities of their creators — those who are granted access to sites of mainstream cultural production under a social order wherein such access is heavily stratified along the lines of one’s proximity to, and ability to court, hegemony. Such a cultural landscape provides ample fodder for the momentum of the two texts which I intend to talk about: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, both of which deal heavily and unflinchingly in sexual violence of the sort with the bolstering of hegemony to back it up. This violence is articulated within a framework which comprises in part referential literatures gesturing to the relationship between the state body of hegemony and its expression in the dominant culture.
Far from a principled antifascist or decrier of hegemonic activity, the anticommunist convictions which flourished in the wake of the October Revolution from which his bourgeois family were forced to flee would permeate Nabokov’s body of work and last him his entire life. All the same, a significant amount of insight into the relationship between sexual abuse, the state, and the literary giants scaffolding the dominant culture can be gleaned from Lolita, which glosses its depiction of the rape of a child with the language and artistic insight of such figures as Dante, Petrarch, Joyce, and most prominently, Edgar Allan Poe. Pasolini, meanwhile, structures his film around an inverted, parodic invocation of Dante’s Commedia; rather than journeying from Hell to Paradise, the subjects descend through the Circle of Manias, the Circle of Shit, and the Circle of Blood, undergoing tortures that roughly correspond to each. The libertines quote such writers as Pound, Proust, and Nietzsche with little regard for the substance or precision of the intellectual currency in which they deal as they rape, torture, and murder their captives. In both, the language of literature exists not only as a backdrop against which violence can be carried out, but as a means of encirclement and entrapment; these writers provide the parameters and boundaries from which that which is trapped and subjectivised — Dolores Haze and the captives of the libertines — can be reinscribed at the site determined by the will of their captors.
This series will consist of four essays, each taking up a portion of my overarching argument as it exists in both texts. In ‘Anteinferno,’ I intend to consider the rituals and conditions of hegemony present in Lolita and Salò as necessary predicates upon which the violence of each respective text rests. ‘A White-Frame Horror’ will then examine the process of demarcation and containment which takes place in both; diegetic entrapment in its most literal sense finds itself mirrored in the enclosure and isolation of narrative, which provides a hermetic container for the process of creating the subject in order for sexual abuse to take place. In ‘In a Kingdom by the Sea,’ I will then take up the question of how this contained space becomes a detemporalised, purgatorial state in which the victims are at once already dead and refused the finality that death would provide, and how these are the conditions under which the aesthetic subject can at last be produced. Finally, ‘Ezio’s Salute’ will consider the points at which this subjectivity is challenged; when the totalising force of aesthetic meets with resistance, and why this is meaningful.
Yet I do not intend merely to outline the ways in which Nabokov and Pasolini create and entrap their subjects through the language of the dominant culture; though doing so might provide a certain measure of analytical insight into the two texts, an overfocus on Nabokov’s use of Annabel Lee or Pasolini’s of Dante risks lending credence to the reading of both as works with a unilateral focus on the misery of their victims. Rather, I intend to identify the sites at which Dolores Haze and the captives of Salò’s libertines act against the imposition of a subject position which seeks to render them as wholly passive objects, expressing an agency which contravenes the totality of their abusers’ control over our reception of their character. I want to ask: in stories where the victim is definitively marked for death, what does it mean for the subject to assert themselves as individuated anyway?
The relevant essays will appear below as I publish them:
Anteinferno
A White-Frame Horror
In a Kingdom by the Sea
Ezio’s Salute
