Salò, Lolita, and the Aesthetics of Hegemony, Part 1: Anteinferno
[This is the first in a series of essays; a brief introduction to this overarching project can be found on my page. Please be aware that this essay contains discussion of sexual abuse, including rape, incest, and pedophilia, as well as reference to torture.]
Patriarchal incest — that which takes place between the father and the daughter — is a common point of reference in scholarship of Gothic literature as a site where the relations of patriarchal ownership can be analogised and thus constituted as the locus of violence that they had in fact been all along.[1] The typical argument runs as follows: the father covets ‘ownership’ of the daughter under such terms that the daughter is transformed into a commodity traded to insulate and protect the holdings of the bourgeois family unit, and such a process is analogously unravelled through incestuous relations; an understanding of such a relation as abusive and perverse makes clear — at least in the less reactionary strains of Gothic literature — the currency of violence making up the the social paradigms of (bourgeois) father-daughter social coherence all along. Through the vector of incest, violence taking place within the stable configuration of hegemony can be illuminated. The metaphor of sex and its attendant associations can be made to do a lot of heavy lifting as far as dynamics of power and abuse is concerned. It is this tradition of patriarchal Gothic incest that I find myself most frequently falling back on when thinking about relations of fathers and daughters in Salò and Lolita.
Salò begins with a marriage agreement. Pasolini’s libertines — the ringleaders of the 120-day period of captivity — are named for state hegemons: the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate, and the President. The period of debauchery begins with their four daughters each marrying another man in the group; the daughters then go on to serve the captives and the libertines at the palace whilst being constantly naked. All four are killed at the end of the film after having been raped and tortured several times along the way.
In this manner, Pasolini begins his film with reference to the discursive baseline that I outlined above: the notion of patriarchal ownership which casts the daughter as currency in exchange relations as a facilitation of sexual violence made possible under the conditions of (capitalist, fascist) hegemony within the bourgeois household. Every subsequent event unspools from this same base point; everything that takes place across the course of the film can be traced back to the process of daughter-exchange, and can thus be presumed to hold a significant relationship to the discourse that such an exchange invokes. The naming of the four libertines only for hegemons of which they are representatives closes the already-porous gap between the bourgeois household and the fascist state; the economic exchanges taking place under such a configuration are rendered indistinguishable from the private exchange of women as commodities between men. The aristocracy, the Church, the state, and the legal system each participate in this method of exchange which will soon collapse into a ritual of debauchery facilitating the violence for which Pasolini’s film is infamous. It is here made clear that what we are about to witness is made possible through the relations of fascist hegemony. Though the marriage transactions are not incestuous in the most literal sense (and nor is the relationship between Humbert and Dolores, to which I will turn in a moment), the intimate containment and exchange of power between four people and their daughters invokes the very same configuration as that which the patriarchal incest reading achieves: the daughter-as-capital is preserved amongst the dwindling, overlapping circles of the ruling class.
Analogy is an unwieldy concept, particularly when deployed to make totalising claims about a text; as soon as a work is analogous, with all of the weight of unilateral objectivity that an ‘is’ can convey, it becomes an uneasy vehicle for ushering in overarching and heavyhanded claims about one singular ‘theme’ such that every nuance finds itself collapsed into grist for the single-interpretation mill. I prefer to think of texts as holding space for a multiplicity of interpretations and literary criticism as a process of teasing out those possible interpretive sites, rather than seeking for a singular correct metaphysical property or a neatly resolved ‘answer’ which can tend to transform a multifaceted and challenging text into a flat deliverance of a ‘meaning’ or ‘message.’ It is for this reason that I would shy away from a reading of Salò as unilaterally ‘analogous’ to the fascist Italian republic for which it is named.
All the same, the very fact of the four libertines named for (and thus implicitly standing as metonymic representations of) four sites of concentrated state power controlling a demarcated area within which they enact hegemonic authority through a system of rules and rituals easily lends itself to this reading even before one accounts for the function performed by the very title of the film. In naming the film Salò for the Republic of Salò, the Nazi puppet state of 1943–1945, the content of the narrative is subsumed under an umbrella which presumes it to relate back to the state in question: as the function of a title tends to be one of gesturing towards a nucleus of significance around which the key sites of momentum in the film can gather, we can reasonably extrapolate a reading which announces the palace and the libertines to be a mimetic rendition of the titular Salò itself. From here, we can read this early sequence as indicating that which I described above — the erosion of distinctions between the home and the state, the interchange of women on the marriage market made discursively identical to exchanges taking place between concentrated sites of hegemonic power — to be a condition of fascism, and thus understand fascism as a political territory by which sexual violence is not only made possible, but becomes the base condition.
This is not the only time that marriage is brought forth as a legible channel of sexual violence in Salò; each of the four parts of the film contain some reference to a wedding, with the exchange of daughters belonging to the Anteinferno. During the Circle of Manias, two of the captives — Sergio and Renata — are forced to get married, and kept from having sex with one another after having been ordered to do so (thus breaking the rule against penis-in-vagina sex) when the men in attendance choose to rape them instead. The Circle of Shit sees a mock wedding reception in which faeces are served to the guests. Finally, in the Circle of Blood, the studs (four young soldiers) and the libertines undergo a wedding ritual in which the latter are dressed in drag; they exchange rings before consummating the marriage with anal sex. This is what we might call the ‘beginning of the end’; immediately following the final wedding sequence is the series of betrayals on the part of the captives which mark the condition under which the final series of tortures and murders can begin.
In the Circle of Manias, we see a straightforward wielding of marriage by force as a display of power; what makes the scene compelling is that neither Sergio nor Renata are, of course, able to court any power within hegemony after the fact, such that both are made open to rape (and the specific expression of violence-through-power that rape denotes). If the exchange of daughters represents the process by which women are reduced to commodities, Sergio and Renata’s marriage indicates a shift in the concerns of the film from that of the prior hegemonic bolstering towards the sites where violence-through-power is most saliently expressed; the reduction of the captive to a totalised subject position means the loss of all currency of power that participation within hegemony might otherwise bring, and the vacuum left by the absence of such power means that the usage of such rituals on the part of the instigator (ie. the libertines) becomes a dual source of entertainment-as-violence, violence-as-entertainment. Rapeability, to use a slightly gauche term, is gauged at the site where the subject-creation process takes place, proportional to the subject inching towards or straying away from totalisation. Put simply, it’s funny because Sergio, Renata, and the daughters have no power.
The wedding ritual during the Circle of Blood represents another such shift in the concerns of the film; at the same time, it stands in dialectical tension with the instigating exchange of daughters. This time around, the libertines are figured not as the patriarchs of the marital arrangement, but as the brides; the ‘studs’ are cast as their masculine counterparts, a figuring that finds further expression in the expectation that they will perform anal sex on their partners. Here, the film seems to recall the aesthetics of gay fascism; the nexus of ideas around masculinity, virility, strength, and cleanliness all valorised by a Nazi ideology by which the gay subject legible within Nazism can be made sense of come to the fore with the studs, all of whom after all collaborate with the libertines to a significant degree.
Crucially, this scene does not signal any shift in concentrated sites of power and subjectivity. If anything, the supposedly mutable nature of the libertines as far as marriage arrangements go only serves to further highlight the extent and totality of their control, and the ways in which their own deliberate shifts in subjectivity can allow for the reconstitution of the subject at whichever site they please. In the highly ritualised and precisely enumerated space of the palace, the four daughters and the four studs can be taken as one another’s approximate counterparts, and thus become two equal yet divergent channels by which the libertines can exert their power.[2] This equivocation can even open the doors to a yet more interesting reading: that of the studs taking on the functional position of the ‘son,’ paradoxically through marriage. In taking up such a position, they are figured as the patriarchal heirs to the libertines; their collaboration can be considered as a practice of potential inheritance, once again calling to mind the relationship between the economic bolstering of the bourgeois family and the practical ideological articulation of that bolstering.
A final note on Salò before I turn to Lolita — it and Lolita each possess an understanding that the ability to rupture the family unit is just as much an effective means of subjugation as the ability to reify it. The complex interchange of daughters as commodities is the same currency of power as the one which sees Renata forced to eat the Duke’s faeces for the crime of mourning her mother; Humbert’s extensive abuse of Dolores becomes possible only after he murders Charlotte.
As Salò makes use of marriage as a means of threading together such ideas around ritual, hegemony, violence, and commodification as those I laid out above, so too does Lolita rely on a scaffold of particular hegemonic bolstering from which its depiction of sexual violence develops, and returns to the language of marriage and the family in order to make such a scaffold apparent. I find the argument that I outlined at the beginning of this section — that of incest between a father and a daughter in Gothic literature as an effective shorthand for exposing and exploring such familial relations of a sort more socially sanctioned yet no less accountable to sites of violence and social control — just as salient when considering the process by which Nabokov’s pedophilic rapist gains and maintains access to his prey.
Humbert is able to interpolate himself into the Haze family home by marrying and murdering Charlotte Haze, thus granting him direct access to Dolores as her legal stepfather. Already, we see the preliminary machinations by which extant social norms receiving legislative backing facilitate the intrusion of the predator into the family home; Humbert at one point compares himself to a spider at the centre of the web that is the Haze house, able to track Dolores’ every move just by pulling on a string of silk in an image which figures him quite plainly as the underhand, sinister intruder. Having gotten Charlotte out of the way, he is able to bring Dolores under his control; he then transports her across the continent before depositing her at a private school in New England, repeatedly raping and abusing her until she successfully runs away, only to be forced to reach out to him for money when pregnant at seventeen. She then goes on to die in childbirth.
Nabokov introduces his novel with a fictitious paratext — an introduction to Humbert’s memoir (which is what the main body of Lolita’s text is represented to be) written by one John Ray, a fictional psychiatrist who professes that the novel
will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac — these […] warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita” should make all of us — parents, social workers, educators — apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.
I will return in a later essay to the blunders made by John Ray and the obvious ironic gap placed between himself and Nabokov (a fact that a startling number of critics seem to have missed!); for now, I hope it is sufficient to state that Nabokov disdained the psychiatric circles to which Ray and his colleagues are assigned, and wrote the foreword not to placate the moral concerns of his readership by suggesting that his work could be read with an impetus towards instruction, but to poke fun at the psychiatric establishment and the certainty with which they approach a text that fulfils none of the functions given by Ray with such perspicacious certainty. At one point, Humbert describes how he ‘discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists’ such that he ‘stayed on a whole month after [he] was quite well […] and added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a powerful newcomer […] known for his knack of making patients believe they had witnessed their own conception.’ Institutional psychiatry encounters a near enough unilateral disdain on the part of our narrator, and moreso on the part of Nabokov.
John Ray claims that Lolita is a text which ought to be used to the purpose of ‘bringing up a better generation in a safer world,’ and points to such sources of contamination as the ‘wayward child’ and ‘egotistic mother’ as the sites by which Humbert’s abuse was able to take place. Humbert himself is merely a ‘maniac.’ Yet this is not at all the discourse that Lolita itself presents; far from arguing for the correction of these internal maladies (Charlotte’s neglect of Dolores helpfully collapsed into a clinical ‘egotism,’ an ill-defined term with little to no explanatory power as far as the relationship on the page is concerned), Nabokov recognises how the social order of the family unit provides what is effectively a blueprint by which the ability on the part of the abuser to gain proximity to the soon-to-be abused is augmented. As Humbert is able to form a coherent articulation of himself and Dolores through the literary touchstones of the dominant culture, so too is this articulation able to be put into practice through the social world that it inhabits.
I am taking certain liberties with the text; unlike Pasolini, Nabokov was not a communist, maintaining the reactionary positions of the Russian bourgeoisie to which he and his family belonged for his whole life. Much of the political vibrancy of Lolita comes, I am sure, from my own approach to it as a communist myself, reading for possible interpretation where I am confident no real intention on the part of the author can be found. As much as I want to push back against the impulse to collapse Nabokov into a ‘left-wing’ reading and thus discard his reactionary tendencies in my own discourse, I also take an approach to critical practice which resists deference to the intentions and the imaginaries of the author as the sole ‘right’ answer that we are seeking; such properties are, after all, impossible to be certain about, and part of the fun of exegesis comes from asking contingent, conditional questions (Could we read it like this? Should we?) that illuminate the text from fresh angles and lend credence to the reader as an active participant in the process of meaning-making.
I clarify this position in order to justify the claim I am about to make: that Nabokov, far from believing the words he put into John Ray’s mouth, intended (or can be read to have intended) Humbert’s abuse of Dolores Haze to be understood as a consequence of the social bolstering of that very same ‘safer world’ to which his psychiatrist appeals.
‘Safety’ is a politically loaded concept. More often than not, we see it deployed to justify state violence: policing, and the social necessity of policing, can be rhetorically fortified through appeals to the ‘safety’ of the family, the neighbourhood, the community — which is always to say the white and the middle class, the heterosexual and the normatively gendered. To speak of ‘safety’ means to discursively establish the threat and the threatened; in the rhetorical manoeuvres of hegemony, anything that threatens the current social ordering can have such a threat extrapolated onto beings who come to metonymically stand for a correct and morally upright social order under siege.
The social imperative to protect the child is a key example. The autonomy of the child is set aside in favour of this ill-defined, rhetorically multitudinous artifice of protection; from predators (those who can be painted as predators), from strangers (those whose strangeness can be discursively constructed), from anything taken as an ideological threat, from even the faintest possibility of sexual knowledge. The sites of safety for the child become the family unit; failing the family unit, the state. Much like in Salò, the family and the state operate in a kind of symbiosis of metaphor.
It is not to the ‘egotism’ of Charlotte Haze nor the ‘mania’ of Humbert Humbert, and certainly not the ‘waywardness’ of Dolores, that we should turn when asking why the protracted abuse was possible, but to the very fact that Dolores Haze had nowhere to turn besides that which is enfolded, rhetorically and literally, into the social constructions of hegemony within which she had been situated as the very subject of a necessary ‘safety’ to which our psychiatrist appeals. The social currency attached to fatherhood and the hermetically circumscribed state of the family unit is a totalising force in Lolita. Even prior to Humbert’s arrival, Charlotte’s grief for her dead son and dislike for her daughter, and whatever relationship may have existed between those two facts, finds no outlet or mediator; Dolores exists wholly at her mother’s behest. Friends of the Haze family accept without question that Humbert and his new stepdaughter would disappear together and make no effort to investigate or intervene, going so far as to conclude that Humbert must have been Dolores’ biological father all along. Humbert leverages the threat of a reformatory or else police intervention against Dolores, and appeals to allegedly normative strains of relations between fathers and daughters in order to ‘terrorise’ her into acquiescence and submission if not consent (“The normal girl — normal, mark you — the normal girl is usually extremely anxious to please her father.”). (Crucially, the specific appeal to which I here refer is made in the language of Freudian psychiatry; once again, Ray and his colleagues make possible that which they are so anxious to prevent.)
It is exactly as Humbert puts it to us in the infamous closing lines of Part 1: she had absolutely nowhere else to go. In spite of this, John Ray imagines that the corrective will come from the internal reform of the ‘parents, social workers, educators’ susceptible to the malaise he ascribes to the Haze family unit — those very same people making up the corpus of social touchstones by which Dolores Haze was failed time and time again until she died.
At one point, Humbert considers the possibility of impregnating Dolores and grooming their child (dubbed ‘Lolita the Second’) to be similarly sexually available to him once she reached the appropriate age; he even imagines practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.’ Here, the connection between hegemony and practices of sexual abuse becomes startlingly clear as reproduction (or on a broader scale, the process of producing a population) is figured through the practice of incestuous rape. (I note, again, the understanding of patriarchal incest relations typically ascribed to the Gothic form that I outlined at the beginning; such practices of sexual abuse can carry heavy metonymic codes.)
I will not dwell for too long on the use that Humbert makes of the dominant culture in justifying and enacting his abuse; the looming presence of literary giants over the grim reality of Lolita will be taken up in far greater detail in the third of this series of essays. Yet it is necessary to note that Humbert does appeal to a cultural language which has by and large been rendered sacrosanct, and that Nabokov intertwines these appeals with reference to the flimsiness and relativity of the attendant legal system:
Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term “girl-child” is defined as “a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years” (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is “young person.”) In Massachusetts, U.S., on the other hand, a “wayward child” is, technically, one “between seven and seventeen years of age” (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). […] Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in single tone, but probably preferred a lad’s perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten’s and Queen Nefertiti’s pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. […] After all, Dante fell madly in love with his Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.
We can note, of course, the redeployment of John Ray’s ‘wayward child,’ here further reified as a purportedly coherent and meaningful category. That this category can comfortably exist within Humbert’s rhetorical justification for his own pedophilia ought to tell us something about its usefulness in expunging the predator from the family home in such a manner as that which Ray seeks to achieve. We ought also to note the function of orientalism in this passage; the discursively constructed periphery at once becomes a site of sexual debauchery free from the impositions of Western sexual ethics and one of incivility such that the reach of the law of a kind that prohibits child marriage has yet to reach it. The language used to describe the ‘Nile daughters’ recalls ‘bright beads’ and cushions, the aesthetics of orientalist opulent imaginings; Humbert here appeals not only to a notion of cultural relativity that renders the social taboo of pedophilia allegedly spurious (at least by his own perception), but also to a pre-existing assumption of sexual debauchery attached to the racialised constructions of the placed and people to whom he refers. Able to play with the currency of racially charged sexuality yet ultimately unable to relegate his ‘Lolita’ (whose whiteness he refers to frequently and reverently) to a discursive site carved out with reference to the lesser Orient, he must immediately return to the discourse of the literary West.
Most of all, we should note the primacy given to cultural giants (Virgil, Dante, Petrarch) over the apparent provincialism and relativity of the legal code; how much does the legal prohibition of sexual relations between adults and minors or the contingent legal definition of a ‘child’ matter if we live and immerse ourselves in a culture which valorises the artistic accomplishments of those who themselves participated in such a practice?[3] The social facilitation of sexual abuse extends far beyond the legal boundaries of correct behaviour (the site to which appeals to ‘safety’ such as those made by John Ray will typically fall, being most often a product of carceralism if not a direct propaganda effort towards it), and it is this terrifying absolutism that makes for much of the steam under the engine of Lolita. Humbert is illusory, evasive; he is able to exist only within the logics of the literary, and Lolita as a text pushes at the boundaries of what those logics can make possible.
In this first essay, I hope at least to have laid some groundwork from which my future writing on these two texts can develop. I hope to have shown that Salò and Lolita each scaffold their brutal depictions of sexual abuse with an understanding of how that abuse under the conditions of hegemony becomes possible; how, in fact, that abuse is an essential part of the current of power by which hegemony sustains itself. For Salò, this is made clear through the exegetical power that understanding the libertines and their palace as metonymic stand-ins for the state and its subjects brings to the text; for Lolita, it is through an understanding that the social fabric of the nuclear family and its attendant ideologies and state functions is the very means by which Humbert’s abuse became possible.
In my next essay, I will develop the ideas laid out in this piece as I turn to practices of demarcation and containment carried out in the two texts, arguing that each text carries out a process of circumscribing the subject in order to create an enclosed ‘stage’ of sorts, on which its discourse can play out; this is a process taking place at the diegetic level, but also echoed and reinforced at the site of narrative structure.
[1] See, for example, Ruth Perry’s Incest as the Meaning of the Gothic Novel, though I would note Jenny DiPlacidi’s critique that Perry overassumes father-daughter incest as the sole or at least hugely predominant incestuous configuration in the Gothic form and thus elides the other relations available for interpretation along similar lines.
[2] Our third unit of four is the storytellers; three sex workers and a pianist are hired to tell stories of the sort that stimulate the libertines such that their assault on their victims finds itself in some way shaped by what these sex workers disclose — cf. Renata being made to eat the Duke’s faeces after Signora Maggi recounts her coprophilia. The fourth group of four is, naturally, the libertines. The victims originally come in two groups of nine, but one boy and one girl are each killed relatively early in the film, making for two groups of eight. The recurrent use of the number four in Salò further contributes to this reading of this film as understanding fascism to be a precisely ordered and organised process.
[3] It should be noted that Dante and Beatrice were the same age; Humbert prioritises ‘attraction’ to the child over the age of the attracted. In my third essay (on temporalisation and the aesthetic), I will spend more time with this concept and how it is specifically articulated in Annabel Lee.
