Salò, Lolita, and the Aesthetics of Hegemony, Part 3: In a Kingdom by the Sea
MY last essay dealt in detail with the mechanisms of circumscription and entrapment taking place in Lolita and Salò, touching at once on relations internal to the story (the Haze house, and what a house can metonymically stand for in fiction, being a multifaceted representation of the social forces which trap Dolores and enable her rape; the palace of the libertines approached with a similar assumption of metonymy under which the conditions of the palace stand for the conditions of hegemony) and those taking place on the level of narrative discourse (the very conceit of Lolita being one that imposes significant limitations on the narrative; Pasolini’s use of Dante’s Commedia as a governing structure). I spent a little time with ideas around detemporalisation in the two texts, noting the substitution of temporal boundaries (the time between X and Y) for spatial ones as a means by which temporal entrapment could be achieved, noting Humbert’s ‘enchanted island’ of nymphethood as a key example of such a process; I also noted the tension between the very title of Salò (the full title being Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom) presupposing a particular length of time over which the course of the film takes place that exists congruent to the other mechanisms of numerical ordering in play in the discursive arrangement of the narrative and the ambience of the film being one in which time feels as though it does not pass at all, an ambience accomplished in large part due to the discursive suspension of the captives between life and death.
Here, I intend to begin consolidating some of the ideas that I have spent the last two essays sketching out, and tackle this question of detemporalisation in greater detail. For Salò, I mean to suggest that Pasolini calls attention to the narrative playing out in a state wherein death has simultaneously already taken place and is indefinitely prolonged, and to what end; for Lolita, I wish to dive in greater detail into the means by which a similar state is constituted and imposed on Dolores Haze and how this functions alongside Nabokov’s subtle use of the paranatural. Finally, I will attempt to suggest that about fifteen thousand words’ worth of groundwork has been laid to the purpose of constructing a particular argument: that these mechanisms, emerging from the conditions of hegemony, of entrapment, suspension, and detemporalisation, operate in tandem to create a subject positioned at a remove from the linear progression of ‘life’ and the end of that linearity which is marked by ‘death,’ thus existing in a neither alive nor dead state by which the creation of the aesthetic subject becomes possible. This is, if you will, a metric for the ‘success’ of the protracted process of abuse; when the subject is wholly malleable under the aesthetic terms of their captor the reconstitution of that individual as commodity is accomplished such that the logics of rape — a complex tangle of ownership and depersonalisation, often met with particular aesthetic terms — come to meet with little to no meaningful resistance.
This condition is limited — Dolores and the vast majority of the captives do of course die — but this does not diminish the importance of the events and the discourses preceding that fact. Lolita in particular is a text which takes great pains to establish that it does not operate in a unilateral fashion; Dolores’ death is in fact a catalyst by which the story restarts, creating a feedback loop of conditions under which she cannot be allowed even to die in peace.
In my last essay, I noted that both texts deal in significant part with Dante. On the surface, the respective usage of his work made by Nabokov and Pasolini feels too disparate to be worth spending much time with beyond halfheartedly noting the coincident convergence of subject matter; whilst Nabokov invokes Dante and Beatrice as one of several frameworks by which Humbert’s artistic and literary proclivities are bound up with his pedophilia, Pasolini’s film involves an ironic invocation of the Commedia that provides a governing structure as well as, in its irony, emphasising fascism as a site of violence indebted to Hell without the promise of redemption. However, in working through the commonalities between Dolores and the captives of the libertines, I can’t help but return to this question of Dante, and wonder if the framework given to us through Nabokov’s usage might gain some explanatory power when refracted onto Pasolini’s.
Nabokov invokes Dante and Beatrice as one of several touchstones against which the composite ‘Lolita’ can be aesthetically constituted as a site of discourse in the text. Nabokov’s Beatrice is like Nabokov’s Annabel Lee or Vee Clemm Poe, to a point such that the text draws explicit attention to the comparison (“Lolita, you are my girl, as Vee was Poe’s and Bea Dante’s”) — she is an aesthetic signifier, a cultural denotation made sense of through her presence in the literary canon and thus available to be clipped, dissected, referenced, ascribed metonymic and metaphorical qualities, and ultimately relegated back to the literary context in which she has been enshrined. There is no way to meaningfully speak of Beatrice without Dante; that we continue to speak of Beatrice at all is indicative of this condition of immortality to which she has been consigned. This is — as I will turn to later in this essay — the condition to which Humbert aspires, casting himself as the Dante or the Poe relative to Lolita’s Beatrice or Annabel Lee or Vee by way of protracted sexual abuse.
Beatrice is absent from Salò, but a preoccupation with beauty and the types of sexual violence that can emerge within it remains. Salò is a visually gorgeous film; its gorgeousness is baked into its horror, and critical writing on the piece which neglects or contradicts this fact can tend to feel insufficient. The palace is glimpsed in that same shot that I have used to open each essay in this piece; it is a shot of a beautiful red building across a body of beautiful blue water surrounded by beautiful mountains and trees of a deep, verdant green. The libertines and the storytellers wear beautiful, elegant outfits; the interiors are vast and splendid and the architecture equally so; the food is (literally) shit and the sex is devoid of eroticism in favour of blunt, brutal, ritualistic rape.
As I noted in this essay’s predecessor, the structure of the film and the diegetic structure of the palace each are precisely enumerated into multiples of four; the captives are subject to ‘rules’ and so are those who hold relative power (the storyteller in the Circle of Manias, for example, is chastised for not initially providing sufficient details in her story). Rules and structures and precision are constituted as part of the mechanism by which aesthetic beauty can be both recognised and sustained; the constructed notion of ‘degenerate’ art and the idea that worthwhile or successful artistic practice can be meaningfully quantified along a criteria fitting the aesthetic proclivities of hegemony is an infamous tactic of fascism. A mathematical calculation of sorts that can determine aesthetic success is a tool by which the fascist can harness control of the dominant culture and consign art which falls short of such a standard to a precarious and socially and economically denigrated periphery.
Thus, as Beatrice stands as an aesthetic signifier in Nabokov, so too is Dante brought into the fold of aesthetic signification in Salò when the governing structure necessarily becomes part of the process by which the aesthetic is produced. When Beatrice is part of the cloth from which Lolita is cut and Humbert’s protracted assault on Dolores can be made sense of under the aesthetic conditions that he sets for the narrative, Beatrice then becomes a necessary ingredient in the logics of that assault; we can consider this configuration in line with how this backdrop of hegemonic aesthetic appeals (and the optics of wealth and a particular degree of opulence) in Salò are similarly conditions both facilitating and being facilitated by the contiguous process of sexual violence in the film. Sexual violence in turn becomes a metonym for the violence of the fascist state at a far broader level (we might here think of the double meaning of ‘rape’ as both an act of sexual assault and one of pillage and plunder), drawing attention to not only the necessity of the aesthetic to fascist violence, but the necessity of a governing structure by which the aesthetic can be identified, quantified, and sustained.
There is a flicker of the Nabokovian Beatrice in Salò just as there is a flicker of Lolita as a whole; the captives are at once dead and kept from death, cast as grist into the mill of aesthetic sensibilities whose principle fodder is a site of sexual violence. Renata forced into the wedding dress for her mock marriage, or elsewhere begging to be allowed to die before she is forced to eat excrement off the ground for the sexual gratification of the Bishop, converges these constellate ideas around rape, death, and aesthetic figuration in a manner not dissimilar to those converged in the moment where the young Humbert’s lover named for Annabel Lee dies of typhus at the end of a sentence which began with their unsuccessful effort to consummate their relationship on a beach.
From here, I can turn to the presence of life, death, and neither life nor death in Pasolini’s film. The clearest signifier of this state is of course the very same as that to which I have been repeatedly referring already: Dante, and the idea of the palace as equivocal to Hell. At a glance, this would posit that the captives are in a state of post-death, Hell as it were being accessible only to those who have already died; this is a framing substantiated by, for example, the claim made towards the beginning of the film that ‘as far as anyone else is concerned, [the captives] are already dead.’
Yet Dante’s descent into Hell does not begin with his death; though he is guided throughout the Commedia by the dead (Virgil followed by Beatrice, to say nothing of his meetings with classical giants and Christian theologians and, famously, Brunetto Latini in Hell), his journey begins at a crisis point identified as a decisive midway through his life and proceeds on the assumption that there is a life to which he shall return. The state to which he is consigned — between ‘life’ and ‘life again’ — such that the narrative momentum of the poem can play out is one which allows him to commune with the dead without joining them.
Pasolini’s narrative inverts this process — if we say that Dante journeys from life to life always with the promise of life again, the captives in Salò journey instead from death to death with death held over their heads as both a promise and a prolongation. I have already noted the line towards the beginning which clarifies the captives as ‘already dead’ — there exists from the start the inevitable knowledge that their deaths in the future are at once guaranteed (an inevitability promised even by the title of the film) and already both taking and having taken place. Renata begs to be allowed to die rather than endure further torment; the libertines enact a process of picking the captive with the nicest buttocks with intent to kill them, only to promise their winner (Franco) that he has instead been marked for a worse death in the future. Even the deaths towards the start of the film — that of the boy who tries to run away and the girl who has her throat cut — are somewhat instrumental; narratologically, they exist to trim down the numbers to a clean multiple of four, and diegetically, they reinforce the status quo by terrifying those left alive into submission to the between-state.
There are two points in Salò in which death represents a loss of control on the part of the libertines such that some measure of the hermetic enclosure of the narrative is able to crumble. I spoke in my last essay about the suicide of the Pianist, who as the tortures and murders begin comes to some kind of realisation around the acts of brutality on display and her own complicity thereof and throws herself out of the window, a death not sanctioned or facilitated by the libertines and one which represents the possibility of a flicker of conscience, however feeble compared to the titian power of the libertines themselves. Another, similar death is that of Ezio, preceding the Pianist, who is shot for his affair with the Black slave girl and dies holding his fist in a socialist salute. The significance of his death (and it is of immense significance!) will be unpicked in the final essay of this series; it bears immediate relevance to my argument because it forces a rupture in the enumerated structure and thus a rupture in state of between-death, bringing about the process of torture and murder which kills the captives for good this time and so ends the film.
It ought to be remembered that death is not a condition of finality within the political logics of communism; it is not without purpose that Marx and Engels posited their ideology to be a ‘spectre’ carrying out a haunting. Historical materialism (of the kind best elucidated by Benjamin in his infamous Theses) stands in opposition to the principles of idealist progressivism which presume time and progress alike to take place along a linear continuum advancing towards a Hegelian-type idealist condition such that any change in conditions must be understood either in terms of ‘progress’ or as a freak exception; the historical materialist understands themselves to be in dialectical conversation with the past and with the dead, and knows that death is not an immutable site beyond the bounds of transgression and revisionism and violation on the part of hegemony, but rather an active and ongoing site of struggle. In The Eighteenth Brumaire (in the very same section as where can be found that infamous passage in which Marx quips that ‘the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’), Marx argues for hegemony as a process of ‘conjuring’ and ‘awakening’ the dead, reappropriating history as best befits the rhetorical and discursive needs of the bourgeoisie:
But unheroic though bourgeois society is, it nevertheless needed heroism, sacrifice, terror, civil war, and national wars to bring it into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Roman Republic the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a century earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.
A Marxist view of history understands time as — to give a close approximation — a process by which everything can haunt everything else. Death is a site of struggle under the logics of communism, and so too does it become a site of struggle in Pasolini’s film — we cannot forget that Pasolini was a communist. For Pasolini, the ‘in-between,’ the inverted Dante, can well be taken as this site of struggle within death; the ability to render the captives ‘already dead’ and subject them to a discourse of brutal subjugation within that state reflects well the conditions to which Marx refers above. Though the ‘actual’ deaths at the end of the film might mark some measure of relief for the captives, they do not contravene the notion that they had been dead by the end of Anteinferno and all which came subsequent was a discursive refiguring thereof.
As always, however, death can be a site of resistance (as with Ezio and the Pianist) as much as it can be a site of exerted control. Pasolini may demonstrate how death can be wielded in the hands of the libertines, but he does not relinquish it in totality to reins of fascism.
This detemporal state of suspension wherein anything short of that which could bring about immediate, literal death could plausibly be enacted on the captives makes for the constitution of aesthetic harmony (death outside of the control of the fascists, after all, can disturb this harmonic arrangement) and thus illuminates this idea of the aesthetic norms of the dominant culture as both sustained by rape (and what rape metonymically encodes) and as a sustaining force in cementing and sustaining the promise that rape will (must) continue; it draws a relationship between rape and death (as mutable states — one can be raped and be dead, and still be malleable under the discourse of fascism) reminiscent of Nabokov. It is the creation of such a state that I explained in the introduction to this piece, and it is this state that I mean to suggest as comparable to Nabokov’s enchanted islands and kingdoms by the sea and fluency in the language of the literati as a topography for Humbert’s pedophilia.
The title of this essay is taken from neither Lolita nor Salò (though Nabokov had originally intended for his novel to be titled The Kingdom by the Sea); it is taken from Annabel Lee, to which Nabokov owes a significant chunk of his narrative discourse. Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 poem is arguably the most significant of all the intertexts to which Nabokov refers, being the model from which Humbert recalls a childhood romance with ‘Annabel Leigh’ that goes on to shape his taste for ‘nymphets’ and structure his relationship with Dolores. The opening lines of the book run as follows:
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
[…]
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
He then goes on to describe his childhood relationship with Annabel. Already, these opening sentences contain multiple references to the poem; the ‘princedom by the sea’ in which he claims to have first loved Annabel echoes Poe’s own ‘kingdom by the sea’ where the story takes place, with an ironised gesture towards a somewhat diminished state in the substitution of ‘king’ for ‘prince.’ The ‘misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs’ who are said to have ‘envied’ the narrative about to unfold are the ‘winged seraphs of Heaven [coveting] her and me’ in Poe, here positioning the narrative he is about to unspool (to an imagined ‘jury’ made up of his readership) as an explanatory elaboration on that of Annabel Lee and the speaker of the poem. Already, Nabokov makes clear the lines along which Humbert’s relationship to young girls is to be articulated, ie. those of the world made possible through the literary fabric of Poe — already, we as a readership are primed to begin asking the questions threaded throughout the text, concerning what can be covertly made possible through elevated aesthetic appeals and the propagation of high culture and on what bedrock the literary imaginary tends to rest.
Beyond the most immediate references at the beginning of the novel, the world invoked by Poe in Annabel Lee shines through in the imaginary within which Humbert operates. I have spoken already of his ‘enchanted island’ on which his nymphets reside, reminiscent of Poe’s settlement by the ‘sounding sea’ and the somewhat anachronistic fairytale setting that the lilting lyricism of the poem manages to convey. Humbert repeatedly figures himself as the ‘enchanted’ to Lolita’s ‘enchanter’; that he gives the name of the first hotel they stay at after leaving the Haze home in Ramsdale as the ‘Enchanted Hunters,’ and later names a play written by Quilty as the same, paradoxically positions his (and Quilty’s) state of ‘hunting’ the ‘nymphet’ as one of enchantment in which the ‘hunted’ is agentive and the ‘hunter’ cannot help himself. Here, the standard line of apologism — that the victim had in fact been willing, and had given some signal by which the rapist felt that she ‘wanted’ it, making his pursuit and violation a process of natural response to behaviour perceived as enticing or sexually available — is transposed onto this language of magic and fairytales, this dense, thick prose and poetic imaginary that, wielded by Humbert, becomes evasive in its string of aesthetic appeals.
The act of being physically beside the sea, as is Poe’s kingdom, becomes a signifier both for sexuality and death in the novel; it is where the young Humbert and Annabel almost have a sexual encounter, passing their time in a ‘petrified paroxysm of desire’ amidst the ‘cool blue water’ and the ‘soft sand.’ Like Annabel Lee, Humbert’s own Annabel dies; as the ‘kingdom by the sea’ is by the end of the poem transformed into a ‘tomb by the sounding sea,’ so too does the Annabel of Humbert’s memory die of typhus, an event delivered to us as a matter-of-fact close to a sentence which began with Humbert in the middle of describing their attempt to have sex.
Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
Sex, death, and beaches here are intertwined and remain as such throughout, such that the presence of one is able to act as a signification of the others; far later in the novel, Humbert takes Dolores to a beach (named once again as a ‘princedom by the sea’) with intent to reenact his childhood memory by raping her. The echo of this early account and the association of Annabel’s death that it carries preempts Dolores’ own fate — not only in gesturing towards her death at the end of the novel, but in opening up a discourse to which Nabokov repeatedly refers, ie. the idea that Humbert raping Dolores can be figured as equivalent to killing her.
It should of course be remembered that it is Humbert deploying the language and rhetoric of Annabel Lee as much as it is Nabokov; Annabel Leigh is not named as such due to Nabokov slotting a heavyhanded reference to the poem into his text of which his speaker is ignorant, but as Humbert’s own pseudonym transposed onto his account of the girl in order to make clear his imagining of her as the subject of Poe’s aesthetic construction. Here, too, we see Annabel Leigh take on the subjectivity that would later be extended to Dolores; in renaming her as such, he extends a particular ownership over her memory, and succeeds in wholly subsuming her to the aesthetic terms upon which she is formed. As the world of Annabel Lee is a blueprint for Humbert’s imagined world to which he wishes to transport Dolores Haze, ‘Annabel Leigh’ is an early prototype of ‘Lolita’: an already-dead girl recalled under a new name as aesthetic fodder in the literary imaginary of her recaller.
As Annabel Leigh is already folded into the imaginary imposed upon her, so too is this process about to happen to Dolores; we see such a process already in that very first paragraph, when the invocation of ‘Lolita,’ the name that the narrative gives to Humbert’s constructed version of her, is broken down into its three distinct syllables — Lo-Lee-Ta — in which the middle syllable is the surname of the aesthetic subject to whom she owes her existence. For as long as Lolita herself is present on the page, Annabel Lee exists at her centre; Humbert will later cause them to overlap even further (‘Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Lo-lee-ta’) and even later insist that ‘Lolita’ is a being separate to and beyond Annabel (Leigh), yet the connective tissue holding Humbert’s discourse together is embedded in the very process of naming (and thus asserting ownership over) her, and such an embedding takes place as soon as we first hear of her.
This early narrative structure — the doubling of Annabel Leigh and Dolores Haze, governed by the overarching aesthetic presence of Poe’s Annabel Lee (who in turn is yoked to Vee Clemm Poe at least in the popular discourse), such that it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins and impossible to clearly make out either of them beyond the limitations set by the poem — maps a clear trajectory for the rest of the novel. ‘Lolita’ — she who is named at the very start of the book — is a composite figure best understood when thought of as separate from Dolores, existing strictly within the terms that Humbert imposes on her. She is made up in good part of Annabel Lee; she also at times takes on the form of Beatrice, Botticelli’s Venus, Petrarch’s Laura, and any number of literary girls and women easily figured as immortal aesthetic subjects and muses, for all intents and purposes trapped on the enchanted island of the dominant culture. Such a state is accomplished through the sidelining of Dolores and privileging of Humbert’s articulated ‘Lolita’ in the narrative; if we are to take the approach I alluded to in my introduction, in which we hone in on the paranatural elements of the text and consider what reading it as a horror novel of sorts might achieve, we can build a reading of this process as one of killing and resurrecting Dolores Haze — the kind of narrative fondly communicated in the popular aphorism that a character ‘came back wrong.’
I spoke already of the connection between sex and death drawn in the very first chapter of Lolita. It is not difficult to read this connection as present throughout the book. Amidst the accounts of child rape, Lolita is studded with child death — Dolores’ unnamed brother; Annabel Leigh; the son of a barber that Humbert offhandedly dismisses but who comes to us in an anecdote that Nabokov claims ‘cost [him] a month of work’ and exists as one of ‘the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates by means of which the book is plotted […] the nerves of the novel’; Dolores and her stillborn daughter together; the lingering literary presences of Beatrice and Vee Clemm Poe, both of whom died young.[1] The stillness given to Humbert’s slew of literary touchstones is a sort of death; a transposition into an immortality into which they have no agentive input at the expense of a single, linear lived existence with a definitive ending. At one point, before Humbert has made any overt assault on her, he imagines himself to have touched Dolores and upon realising with relief that he has not done so, describes her as ‘alive, unraped’; and of course, there is what on a reread of the novel quickly becomes the looming, ever-present knowledge that everything we read comes to us on the diegetic pretext that Dolores already be dead.
Lolita is a cyclic text, in that its ending preempts its beginning and its beginning makes immediate reference to its ending. It even opens and closes on the same word (if you are to disregard the preface): that being, predictably, ‘Lolita.’ Humbert spends the last few pages of the novel detailing his intention to have it be published only after himself and Dolores are both dead, and imagines that such a process will facilitate their joint penetration of the literary imaginary; the novel then closes on the following paragraph:
Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.
(There is a slight, albeit pathetic, spasm of narrative defiance in the fact that Dolores’ baby was a girl.) Under such terms, the diegetic existence of the memoir (an existence confirmed by the very fact that we are reading it) makes inevitable Dolores’ being dead, a fact which is confirmed at the very beginning when John Ray informs us that ‘Mrs. Richard F. Schiller died in childbirth.’ The person we meet as ‘Lolita’ is less a ghost as much as she is a resurrection on the part of Humbert Humbert constituted entirely in the discourse that he wishes to construct and doomed to go to her death only to be brought ‘back’ again in the state of literary immortality that our very reading of the memoir facilitates. In a sense, the reader (and moreso the re-reader, who restarts the whole grisly process) becomes complicit in Dolores’ death — which is also to say her rape.
John Ray’s foreword lists the fate of the various actors following the close of the events of the memoir. We learn a little of what Dolores’ friends at Beardsley went on to do in a gesture towards an adolescence that she herself is denied; the woman Humbert briefly marries for a stint of a few chapters towards the end goes on to marry the proprietor of a hotel in Florida; Dolores dies giving birth to a stillborn daughter on Christmas Day. Vivian Darkbloom, whose name is an anagram of ‘Vladimir Nabokov,’ goes on to write a biography of Quilty, cementing yet further the reading of Humbert and Quilty as one another’s doubles (the very name of ‘Quilty’ easily becoming ‘qu’il t’y,’ ‘that there you are’) each with a text concerning their doings having been penned by one or the other.[2] Upon giving this account, Ray remarks rather glibly that ‘[t]he caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.’
In a sense, John Ray is the voice of pragmatic and didactic literary realism. Everything that he reads is a direct reflection of the real world, and thus everything he reads is instructive, Lolita included; we might think back to the literary debates of the late eighteenth century, wherein writers such as Walpole revived the romance genre in the form of the Gothic in large part due to the dominance of literary realism and literary moralism that stymied the imaginative potential of the novel form.[3] (Every day I get closer to outright insisting that Lolita ought to be read as a Gothic text.) No ghosts walk for John Ray because he reads Lolita as a realist text (it is, for him, literally ‘real’; it is an account of events that ‘really’ happened, as he himself exists in the world of the memoir, but we as readers are equipped to approach it as Humbert intended, ie. as a work of literature); herein lies the fundamental gap between himself and Humbert Humbert, who, whilst recalling diegetically ‘real’ events in his signature unreliable fashion, occupies the discursive register of the literary.
Yet we know — as I outlined in the very first essay — that what John Ray makes of Lolita is certainly not what Nabokov imagines ought to be made of it. Disdaining didacticism, Nabokov wrote of his novel as an accomplishment of ‘aesthetic bliss’ not to suggest that he saw nothing essentially ‘wrong’ in Humbert’s actions, but to guide his readership towards a framework which deploys a more literary discourse in making sense of the work. John Ray cannot imagine that ‘ghosts’ might ‘walk’ because the point at which Lolita’s ghosts are made narratologically possible is not in their literal ‘appearance’ as literal ‘spectres’ in the text, but in Humbert’s discursive constitution; in Dolores as the already-dead, already-resurrected ‘small ghost of somebody [he] had just killed.’
In explaining his decision to publish the text only after her death, Humbert tells us that he could not conscionably ‘parade living Lolita.’ This notion of ‘parading’ an individual whom, by your own terms, is already dead, cements to some good measure my reading of the novel as a reanimation of sorts; Nabokov bestows upon Humbert the language and discursive configurations of necromancy, the modes of storytelling far better suited to the story of the zombie or the reanimated corpse or the Gothic narrative of Frankenstein than to a realist account of pedophilia. Constellate ideas of reanimation, puppethood, and the state of being (un)dead collide when Humbert also repeatedly figures Dolores as a doll, at once a metonym for the childhood to which she is eternally consigned and an inanimate simulacrum of a human wholly malleable to the whims of its owner; whims which can consist of anything from pontifical narratological construction to rape. At least in the second half of the novel, she is called ‘Dolly’ with a frequency greater even than that with which she is called ‘Lolita’; a friend of hers uneasily remarks to Humbert that she is ‘a doll’; Humbert terms a room in her home with Dick Schiller a ‘dollhouse parlour’ and castigates Quilty for ‘[taking] a dull doll to pieces and [throwing] its head away.’
The horror affect of Lolita extends to its language, which at times appeals to visceral, violent imagery concerning the penetration of one’s insides as an effective means of explaining rape. Humbert laments that his ‘only grudge against nature was that [he] could not turn [his] Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.’ At one point, he recounts a dream in which Lolita appears to him as a ‘complex ghost’ shapeshifting between herself and Valeria and Charlotte, dully offering herself up before collapsing into a ‘dream disorder’:
Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamt of Lolita as I remembered her — as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my conscious mind and during my daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.
There is a process of mutual constitution taking place here: Dolores’ rape is made sense of not only in the language of death, but in the language of horror by which death becomes — as in Salò — a site of perpetual discursive potential. For Nabokov, the language of horror can be melded with the language of elevated literature to which he has Humbert refer such that Annabel Lee, already on its own a sinister text by a prolific writer in the canon of horror, can be reimagined through Lolita as an act of violence comparable to both rape and murder made sense of through a transposition of its subject into an aesthetic stasis.
In Lolita, rape is death and death is an aesthetic state established separate to the privileged position of temporal progression, and an aesthetic state is a state of horror that the inattentive, unimaginative, moralist reader such as John Ray will fail to identify. The suspension, entrapment, and aesthetic transposition of the subject are key mechanisms by which rape becomes rhetorically legible within hegemony and can thus become a social currency thereof; sexual violence is key to the aesthetic harmony of Salò and the inevitable canonicity of Lolita.
Though I have here attempted to demonstrate that Dolores Haze and the captives of the libertines each undergo a process by which they are reproduced as aesthetic subjects and thus made wholly legible to the perpetrators of their rape, I intend the final of this series of essays to contravene the suggestion that this process is entirely successful within the parameters of each narrative. Almost every story of resurrection and reanimation hinges on the hubris of the resurrector in question; the reanimated being spins out of control and acts outside of the boundaries set for them by their creator. Dolores Haze is no different even when carefully governed by Humbert’s narrative voice, and nor are the captives. In the final piece, I will focus on ‘cracks’ in the narrative of Lolita and what we might extrapolate from them, and spend significantly more time with the death of Ezio to which I alluded here, in an argument that I hope will contravene the popular notion of Salò as a unilaterally and grotesquely pessimistic work. If both time and death, as I hope to have demonstrated here, can be made into cudgels with which the fascist can bludgeon their victim, then we ought to be able to probe the sites at which such cudgels might be prised out of their hands and refigured as tools for resistance.
[1] The Nabokov quote given here is taken from ‘On A Book Entitled Lolita,’ frequently appearing as an afterword to the book itself.
[2] I don’t have time to break this reading down properly in this piece, but for posterity: another great contributor to the reading of Lolita as a text far more steeped in conventions of horror than those of straightforward literary realism is the recurrent presence of doppelgängers in the text. Humbert’s alliterative name calls to mind Poe’s ‘William Wilson,’ a doppelgänger story which Humbert echoes in his figuring of Quilty as his own doppelgänger. Dolores and Lolita, too, are doppelgängers of one another; Nabokov plants his own authorial doppelgänger in Vivian Darkbloom. Even Humbert’s first wife, Valencia, comes to be split into two — Valencia and Valenchka.
[3] Cf. E. J. Clary, ‘The genesis of “Gothic” fiction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge University Press, 2002).
