Salò, Lolita, and the Aesthetics of Hegemony, Part 2: A White-Frame Horror
This is the second in a series of essays on the constructed conditions facilitating sexual abuse present in Pasolini’s Salò and Nabokov’s Lolita. In my last piece, I explored the relationship that sexual violence in each of the two texts holds to the conditions of hegemony, arguing that each work is demonstrative of how such violence is not only permissible within contemporary normative social relations but in fact endemic to them. I wrote about the metonymic function of the four libertines and their daughters in Salò, designed to signal a discursive compatibility between the kinship relations encoded in the bourgeois home and the relations of commodity exchange between hegemons that make up the fascist state; I then argued that the repeated appearance of marriage over the course of the film transforms this discourse into a mutable site wherein marriage can at once serve as a consolidation of power or its removal (as with the wedding between Sergio and Renata in the Circle of Manias). The final wedding sequence in the Circle of Blood, through its ironic re-performance of the very first series of marriages, establishes the studs (four young soldiers) as functionally equivalent to the ‘sons’ of the libertines, figuring their collaboration as part of a practice of expected inheritance. The violence of Salò, I argued, is not at all arbitrary; it is a precisely systemised process open to a reading which analogises it to the conditions of hegemony.
Concerning Lolita, I argued that Nabokov presents us with a psychiatrist who espouses the moral health of the text through its utility in evincing the internal flaws of the Haze family unit and demonstrating how those currently held socially responsible for the wellbeing of the child can from it learn how to establish a ‘safer world,’ only to all but eviscerate his psychiatrist’s positions with a straightforward depiction of the abuse of Dolores Haze as being made possible through that ‘safer world’ to which John Ray appeals. Through this, we understand that the social power afforded to the family unit under hegemony is a means by which the process of protracted abuse (given aesthetic expression, in turn, by the proclivities of the dominant culture) becomes possible.
The concern of this essay is one of demarcation and containment; how does each text circumscribe and isolate the subject of sexual abuse? The title draws from a line in Lolita, in which Humbert describes the Haze house in Ramsdale as ‘a white-frame horror […] looking dingy and old, more grey than white — the kind of place you know will have a rubber tub affixable to the tub faucet in lieu of a shower.’ In my last essay, I made use of scholarly touchstones of Gothic literature (specifically those concerning the metonymic function of patriarchal incest) as explanatory devices; I intend to continue this pattern here, and argue that thinking of the Haze house — our white-frame horror — within a particular critical framework concerning the use of space and demarcation in the Gothic brings some enlightening and valuable interpretive potential to the text. Lolita is not a wholly Gothic work, but it is certainly a horror novel — not only for the sheer fact of its subject matter but for the particular literary devices that Nabokov deploys in order to discursively arrange it — and I hope that paying more attention to it on the critical assumptions that such a genre can bring may elucidate its discourse in greater detail.
From this argument, I intend to develop towards reading the artificial limitations of the narrative created by its internal discourse of literary technique; the practices of enclosure that we can read into the Haze house are just one of the several points at which such a marking of the boundaries of discourse takes place. I intend to highlight how Lolita the novel encloses two sites of obviously limited perspective, each rendered with a verisimilitude which paradoxically exposes the artifice: Lolita the memoir and its peritext, John Ray’s introduction. Nabokov at once limits his story to that which Humbert is given discursive space to tell (and John Ray is able to expound on) and, in doing so, creates an obvious ironic gap by which the limitations of our narrator gain explanatory power.
I will then turn to Salò, which similarly relies on a process of enclosure; through visual emphasis on the isolation of the palace to the tightly ordered system that permits no external disruption, the narrative plays out with something of a hermetic seal placed over it, arguably to a far more significant extent than Nabokov’s work at least as far as the use of physical space is concerned. As with Lolita, Salò mirrors its process of entrapment in its discursive construction; the delineative framework provided by an ironic invocation of Dante orders, explains, empowers, and contains its respective violence.
I intend this essay not only to point out the obvious — that a prolonged process of sexual abuse tends to rely on the isolation and entrapment of the victim such that escape becomes incredibly difficult — but also to build from the conclusions I drew in the last piece in order to consider how we might map such an obvious point onto our reading of each text as unspooling its depiction of abuse from the essential conditions of hegemony. Our analysis of such a process of containment is, after all, a means of mapping that which can be enfolded by the internal conditions of the container and function such that those conditions can be sustained and that which must be discarded and expelled.
Though I intend to focalise the Haze house, it is necessary to pay some attention to Nabokov’s other uses of space and spatiality as mechanisms of entrapment in the novel. Perhaps the clearest example of this is Humbert’s desire to ‘substitute time terms for spatial ones’ when he speaks of the ages within which one might be thought of as a ‘nymphet.’ Of these spatial terms, he says:
In fact, I would have the reader see “nine” and “fourteen” as the boundaries — the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks — of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.
This removal of temporality of course removes the means by which a child might ‘escape’ the imposition of the ‘nymphet’ category on their being, ie. by ageing out of it. The ‘vast, misty sea’ forestalls an equivalent escape; unlike the eventuality of age, there is simply nowhere that they can escape to. Here, Nabokov draws a crucial connection between Humbert’s desire to crystallise and preserve Dolores Haze within a literary discourse that transforms her into an aesthetic object the likes of which are seen in such figures as Beatrice and Annabel Lee and the process of entrapment from which there can be no possible escape. The trappings of the Haze house to which I will shortly turn are situated within this context from which we can draw a broader understanding of entrapment and literary or aesthetic preservation as one and the same.
Similarly, it is crucial to note that the application of a Gothic explanatory framework to the use of space in Lolita is consistent with the novel’s ambience; that is to say, one concerned with ghostly happenings and paranatural activity at least in its scaffolding and discourse if not in its direct content. Dolores is a ‘little ghost’ and a ‘dead bride,’ a character in a text whose diegetic existence is predicated on her own death; Lolita the memoir is a haunting of sorts. Humbert’s rhapsodising about his desire for Dolores, always macabre, can at times take on a visceral, vampiric voice; he at one point speaks of her ‘lovely prismatic entrails.’ I intend to spend a lot more time with the question of death and reanimation and the touchstones of horror present in Lolita in the essay that will immediately follow this one; for now, what’s important is that the text deals heavily in hauntings in a manner that makes a ‘Gothic reading’ of sorts seem far less out of left field than it might sound on the surface.
I’ve written in the past about my own somewhat grandiose theory of houses in literature; the house stands for a social unit and becomes a physical marker of social boundaries. An old essay of mine on du Maurier’s Rebecca asserts that
The literary house — the house in a work of fiction that merits the use of the definite article by virtue of its being not only a house, but a stage for a set of discourses, a compact social configuration and a tight, contained arena in which these discourses play out — haunts the literary imaginary for the precision with which it can both reinscribe and disrupt, refortify and distort. The house is a house and a house is a harbour of the domestic social fold; the domestic social fold is a reification of bourgeois relations and bourgeois relations are designed to secure the interests of capitalist imperialism. The house is a set of walls and doors and windows that together make for a demarcation of that which is inside of its border and that which is not — by extension, it is an assertion of that which can be absorbed into the fold and that which cannot. The house of the literary imagination is at once a social organ and the site at which the assertion and reassertion of the domestic relations needed to keep that social organ moving will take place; this is the fulcrum from which we must come to think about the architecture, the inhabitants, the aesthetic sensibilities and the fictionalised histories that together make up the body of the house itself.
[…] [T]he house is a site of conflict and control oriented around capital and its discursive offshoots — a narrative form emerges from a wrestling of sorts between the house’s desire to retain its shape and the pressure applied by any number of intrusive forces, from the hauntological past to the inevitability of modernity to the destabilisation of the very bedrock upon which the house was built, which is, inevitably, a site of particular capitalist relations. Any discourse of literary houses must begin with the same fundamental premise — that the house is a border drawn around a social unit, and any pressure exerted both on that which lies within and that which elides the border will operate in relation to this unit and its limitations.
Though the question of the literary house and its attendant social organs is a discourse not at all limited to the literary Gothic, I find that the Gothic form takes on a particular exegetical power when considered in line with the reading outlined above. The Gothic house — which is to say, the house of the bourgeois or the aristocratic family, often anachronistic, almost always haunted in one way or another — is a horror setting. Its internal conditions are unstable and such an instability will often come to us not only in the form of supernatural happenings and malevolent shades, but also through some deviance against the norms of sexual hegemony: incest, rape, homosexuality, transgression or rejection of conventional gendered behaviour. Rebecca de Winter acts like a boy, commits incest with her cousin, enters into a homoerotic (if not explicitly lesbian) relationship with Mrs. Danvers, and has cancer in her womb where a baby ought to be; she threatens the bourgeois stability of the de Winter family line and its accumulation of capital on particular terms which make clear the purpose of hegemonic sexual ordering. The Gothic house is an enclosed unit; it is the stage, with a limited number of actors, wherein these discourses can play out.
In this sense, the Haze house is a Gothic house. We begin with a family unit: Charlotte and Dolores, hardly the extravagant bourgeois figureheads typical to the Gothic canon yet nonetheless comfortably middle-class, white, and Christian. There is a haunting of sorts — Charlotte grieves the death of her young son at the age of two, and though it is not made explicitly clear whether or not her grief can be considered the root cause of her dislike for her daughter (certainly Humbert is not interested in answering this question), we can at the very least read such an implication into the novel’s subtext. A certain anachronism hangs over the house; Charlotte, lamentably American in Humbert’s eyes, yearns for a European sophistication for which she is mocked relentlessly, and I do not believe it is a stretch to extrapolate from this a tension between European antiquity (to which the Gothic form belongs) and American modernity, the settler-colonial imaginaries of the ‘Old’ world and the ‘New.’
Charlotte is widowed, leaving open a convenient spot by which someone outside of the ‘white-frame horror’ might find their way in; and this is, of course, exactly what Humbert Humbert did. Rather than taking on the role of naïve and benevolent interloper into the enclosed Gothic space for whom the horrors of the past are called upon in an effort to expel all forces of intervention, Humbert provides the missing element by which the Gothic transformation can be made complete: a legitimate and essential Europeanness and its attendant literary imaginary, saturated in the language of the canonised American Edgar Allan Poe as much as Dante, Shakespeare, Virgil, at once setting up the internal conditions of the Gothic and preempting the (sexual) horror made legible within its genre discourse. As I explained in my previous essay, in successfully usurping the position of the ‘father,’ Humbert can be understood within the framework given to us by the metonymic use of patriarchal incest as standing in for normative social relations of power and sexuality between fathers and daughters within hegemony; to make sexuality the language by which a discourse of power can emerge, and to make use of sexual deviance as equipped to interrogate and undermine the presuppositions of sexual hegemony, is a tactic perhaps not limited to the Gothic form but certainly one that those familiar with it tend to have learnt by rote.
I honed in on ‘white-frame horror’ as a turn of phrase because I think that each word manages to communicate something significant about the Haze family home, opening it up to multiple sites of possible interpretation beyond the obvious diegetic cadence which figures it as another of Humbert’s dismissive remarks. ‘Frame,’ of course, calls to mind this process of enclosure that I am describing; as the house encloses the subjects, so too does the social unit that it stands for (here, the nuclear family) enclose and entrap Dolores Haze such that her abuse is enabled in the manner that I outlined in my previous essay. Though she may eventually leave the physical space that the Haze house demarcates, she remains for the rest of the novel thoroughly surrounded by the trappings of the social logics that it enfolds; similarly, the house only retains a meaningful literary existence for as long as she can be thought of in relation to it. Early in the novel, upon searching the house and finding that Dolores is absent, Humbert remarks that the house is ‘empty, dead.’ Similarly, when Humbert collects Dolores from summer camp after having murdered Charlotte and brings her to a hotel with intent to rape her, he identifies the two of them as “Mr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter”; Dolores then remarks that the number on their hotel room is the same as the number of their house.
‘Horror’ communicates our emotive response to the events of the novel and specifically to the conditions of the Haze/Humbert family, of course; it also communicates the internal state of the Haze home, with the disassembling of the coherent family unit being familiar groundwork by which horror stories can make sense of themselves. It might not even be beyond the pale to suggest that ‘horror’ communicates a genre framework, such as that which I am working with right now.
What happens when we add whiteness into the mix, as the white-frame horror suggests that we ought to do? Charlotte at one point tells Humbert that she would kill herself if she were to ever find out that he did not believe in the Christian God. If we are to return to the idea that the house is a physical representation of a social unit, namely that of the family — it should be remembered that the set of normative kinship relations and their legislative bolsterings that come under the aegis of ‘the family’ as understood within hegemony is a construction by which white supremacy is fortified. The social blueprint out of which Humbert operates is one of several of the novel’s touchpoints operating towards a project of white supremacist hegemony; we might think also, as I have mentioned already, of the use of the western literary canon.
Dolores, however, is not described with the ethereal whiteness that one might expect of a character cut by and large from the fabric of the literary canon; her body is ‘honey-brown,’ she has ‘brown limbs,’ returns from camp ‘brown, warm, drowsy, drugged — and ready to weep with passion and impotence.’ At the hotel before she is raped, she is ‘brown and pink, flushed and fouled.’ On one of several occasions when Humbert threatens her with institutional intervention should she try and leave him, he impels her to ‘come here, my brown flower’; the ‘brown flower’ in question likely referring at once to her vagina and to her whole self. This sort of description is consistent with Humbert’s apparent desire to insist that Dolores was sexually active and sexually enticing, presumably as a weak effort to exonerate himself; he announces to us that he was ‘not even her first lover,’ insists that ‘it was she who seduced me.’
Similarly, the name ‘Lolita’ is Spanish in origin, a diminutive form of ‘Lola’ and a hypocorism of ‘Dolores.’ Though the appellation of course can be traced to Humbert’s European origins if we are to speak of it diegetically, it cannot be ignored that ‘Spanishness’ in the American lexicon carries a particular denotation by which the perceived sexual waywardness and availability of racialised Latin American women can be synthesised with the presupposed sexuality of the Spanish European such that selective use of racialisation makes for a mimetic veneer of the exotic, sexual brown girl without risk of veering into the debased and denigrated territory of ‘actual’ non-whiteness. Combined with the desire to render Dolores somewhat ‘brown’ whilst keeping her legible within a white literary imaginary (and retaining an almost phrenological obsession with her measurements), we might well say that Humbert exploits the discursively constructed sexuality of racialised women (used as a marker of incivility and primitivity — we might then here return to Humbert’s appeals to orientalism in his efforts to present pedophilia as a question of cultural relativity) in order to maintain the very conditions for which that construction is necessary; he needs to suggest at the possibility of her being ‘brown’ in order to ensure that she is white.
What I intend to get at is that the internal logics of white supremacy play a crucial role in how Humbert is able to formulate and make sense of his abusive practices; that the normative conditions under which the social unit enclosed by the Haze house ought to operate are the conditions of white supremacy, and it is through the exploitation of their logics that abuse takes place. Here, we return to the argument of hegemony made in this essay’s predecessor: what entraps Dolores Haze is, at one level, the Haze house, but at a far broader and far more cutting level it is the interlocked networks of kinship and state relations and cultural discourses which make the internal conditions of the white-frame horror possible.
The Haze house effectively implodes when Charlotte learns of Humbert’s pedophilic intentions towards her daughter; she attempts to force him to leave, and he murders her in retaliation. I spoke before of the literary house as a litmus test of that which can and cannot be invited into the fold of hegemony; though ‘actual,’ intentional, direct sexual assault on a child might be regarded as unacceptable (or, more precisely, rhetorically presented as such), the conditions by which it is made possible (in literature, in normative kinship relations) are operant within the family home and thus conducive (even endemic) to its functioning. We see here a perversion of Humbert’s own argument for cultural relativity, perhaps reflected in Nabokov’s own sentiment that his novel should not be regarded as licentious or perverse when there exists content concerning children and young women far more erotic and sexually exploitative than his own, protected under the aegis of titillation and suggestion rather than his blunt rendition; the dominant culture insulates itself by enabling sexual violence against children only in careful moderation whilst (as I have explained) relying on the possibility of that sexual violence for its own continued existence. It is not an argument in favour of pedophilia, but one against hypocrisy.
Entrapment in Lolita does not end at the Haze house; Nabokov reenacts the process within his own narrative discourse. In short, Lolita the novel is made up of Lolita the memoir and the memoir’s peritext, the latter of which is the writing of John Ray. This is the sum total of the narrative; everything we are to learn about the events of Lolita come to us via Humbert Humbert. The mechanism taking place here is clear: Dolores lives and dies within the discourse of Lolita, and cannot be positioned anywhere outside of it. Much like Humbert’s desire to transpose the temporal limitations of the ‘nymphet’ into physical boundaries, and later to transform himself and Dolores into occupants of a space in the immortal literary imaginary such that the relative ephemerality of their actual lived existence is eclipsed by their imprint on the dominant culture, the novel itself becomes a permanent marker of where Dolores Haze can begin and where she can end.[1] She is as much trapped by the inevitability of the narrative’s promise of her rape and death as she is by the conditions which enable it; it is this sense of inevitability that looms over her re-emergence towards the very end of the novel as she signs a letter begging Humbert for money as the pregnant ‘Dolly (Mrs. Richard F. Schiller),’ the very first mention of the name of a character whom we were told at the start would die in childbirth. For the astute reader who recognises the name from John Ray’s foreword, this moment is chilling.
Yet at the same time, the obvious limitations of Humbert’s discourse (and John Ray’s, his being epiphenomenal to the main text) — that tactic of the ‘unreliable narrator’ — creates a significant ironic gap between reader and text, implying a narrative which exists beyond that which we immediately receive. In spite of what the baffling yet somehow enduring reception of the novel as a ‘love story’ of sorts might suggest, we know from just about the very first page that Humbert is lying to us and misrepresenting his relationship with Dolores; we know that there exists a “truth” to the narrative of Lolita independent of Humbert’s unspooling, and a version of Dolores Haze articulable outside of Humbert’s ‘Lolita.’
In practice, this narrative doesn’t exist, for the simple reason that Lolita is a work of fiction rather than an account of a real-life event, and Dolores Haze can only exist where Nabokov sets her down. Yet the casting of the possibility of such a ‘shadow’-narrative within the internal discourse of the narrative itself is key to Nabokov’s construction, and I will spend more time with its implications in the final of this series of essays. For the purpose of my current focus: this technique allows the entrapment of Dolores to become more apparent. The borders of her narrative are obvious, the inevitability of her end all the more emotive for how easily we feel we could imagine her beyond the rendering of her abuser. The narrative discourse traps her and makes its entrapment plain to the reader; it is only through making it as plain as it is that we can fully comprehend the horror which permeates the novel.
I can stretch the definition of the ‘Gothic house’ to accommodate the Haze family home and thus find some workability in the idea that Gothic discourse can be used to make sense of Lolita, but claiming that the palace of the libertines can be understood as a Gothic space might be a stretch too far for Salò. All the same, we can note a handful of consistencies and exploit their exegetical uses. Salò places great emphasis on isolation; shots of the palace make significant use of negative space, surrounding it with a vast and empty expanse of lawn or water (as with the image at the top of this page). A significant portion of Anteinferno is spent merely on getting the captives to the palace in the first place; before we fully understand just about anything else going on, we are made to recognise the full extent of the isolation under which they are to be placed. The establishment of a state of entrapment is clear and obvious, made all the more so by the banal ease with which we see one attempted escapee be shot to death very early in the film.
As with the Gothic house, or any bourgeois estate in fiction and reality alike, this isolation is made possible through the accumulation of immense wealth; it is a signifier of power that communicates untouchability in the most literal sense. Physical distance from any significant level of population density and its social ordering implies a metaphysical distance from the obligations that participation in such a social ordering ostensibly implies, garnered relative to one’s own currency of power; in the case of Salò, wherein the libertines act as metonymic representations of hegemonic bodies, it communicates not only untouchability but unknowability, as well as extensive reach (into the heart of the Republic of Salò) from a place itself far away from the reality of war and occupation.
At the same time, isolation creates an enclosed arena and guarantees a wholly internal discourse, the effect of which is claustrophobic and unsettling; unless we are to expect the last-minute intervention of external actors (which I would say it seems clear is not going to happen in Salò), everything that we are to see play out over the course of the narrative must take place in the actions and developments of those whom we have already met. This self-contained narrative facilitates the metonymy with which the film is concerned; it also creates a sense of tapering, by which through the sheer passage of time over the course of the film moving in one unilateral direction towards getting worse and worse we feel what small measure of freedom might ever have been afforded to the captives shrinking away as the space around them shrinks too. Time and space become one, not unlike Humbert’s enchanted island of childhood with its vast, misty sea; towards the beginning of the film, we see expansive lawns, huge and lavish rooms, spaces almost too big for their occupants to fill up without leaving significant gaps, yet by the end the captives marked for death are huddled together in a bathroom that can barely fit them all.
Again, we might look to this question of the ‘house’ (here, the palace) as a physical container for assimilable versus unassimilable social discourses. When the Pianist at last comes to terms with the horror in which she has been complicit, she throws herself out of the window; upon realising what she has participated in, she physically ejects herself from the palace, no longer able to rationally exist within a space built upon the acts of violence with which she no longer wishes to involve herself and certainly no longer welcome within it once she has chosen defection.
Similarly, we see the captives taken outside only when they are to be tortured to death; we might here think of what I said previously about certain extremes of violence (in the case of Lolita, pedophilia; here, death, and the finality that death affords) being inapposite to the house’s social interior despite that interior existing in the service of the very violence in question. We see these deaths through the eyes of the libertines and collaborators, we like them watching through a window-pane and hearing very little; not only are we as the viewer then put in the position of the complicit voyeur, we are reminded that even as the captives are brought to death, the violence is not meaningfully ‘over’; that death is a spectacle under fascism, but also that death is not an end-state, and that, as Walter Benjamin wrote, even the dead shall not be safe from the enemy if he wins, and the enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
The palace has already been established as purgatorial, with the captives having been told that they are dead to the rest of the world; even as that state of suspension between life and death comes to an end outside of its walls but still within the reach of its control, some measure of it carries on when the film closes on two soldiers and collaborators slow-dancing together inside as one asks the other the name of his girlfriend. This line, reminiscent of the language of warzones (and both the homosociality and homoeroticism emergent on the front lines), reminds us not only that something exists outside of the claustrophobia to which we have just been subjected, but that the whole text exists relative and arguably analogous to the fascist Republic of Salò during the Second World War.
We can note, again, a congruence between time and space as seen in Lolita. Humbert’s desire to suspend time through transforming it into an untraversable spatial boundary emerges again in Salò, with the same such purgatorial suspension of time becoming possible through the effectively absolute isolation of physical space. Time only meaningfully passes in a space where there exists social ordering of a sort as to make its passage significant; the film’s full title then becomes an ironic ‘countdown’ of sorts imposed upon a timeless space by an external agent, ie. Sade/Pasolini. The illusion is finally broken at the end, when the question about the soldier’s girlfriend reminds us that the rest of the world continues to exist in tandem with this one.
As with Lolita making significant use of syuzhet, the discursive arrangement of its events, in order to communicate entrapment to the reader on a narratological level, Salò communicates a similar sense of circumscription with the use of Dante as its primary governing structure; Dante is of course of immense importance to Italian cultural and national identity, serving as another of the many reminders that Pasolini writes about a fascism articulable within the cultural tools available under hegemony. Everything we see falls into one of the four sections, reminiscent of Nabokov’s containment of the narrative through the limited form of memoir; the respective Circles of Manias, Shit, and Blood invoke Dante’s various Circles of Hell in which particular earthly sins faced particular immortal punishments. As with Dante’s circles assigning particular spaces and therefore particular punishments to people who committed particular acts of transgression, there exists a relationship between denomination and violence; the Circle of Manias consists in large part of frenzied orgies, the Circle of Shit includes the consumption of faeces, and the Circle of Blood marks the process of torture and eventual death.
The Anteinferno, coming before the Circles themselves, serves to inform us that we are witnessing a descent into Hell comparable with Dante’s own; however, unlike Dante, those descending are not willing participants themselves spared from the torment at play as they seek spiritual guidance, and nor are they to look forward to an ascent into Heaven by the end. The ‘ante-’ prefix gives some warning of this, ‘ante’ meaning ‘before’ or earlier’; the object of the libertines is not one of eventual ascension, but merely a Hell not dissimilar to that of Dante’s devising. We might even read the developing ‘Circles’ as not only calling into play Dante’s Circles of Hell, but also functioning as equivalents to the other two books of the Commedia, those concerned with Purgatory and Paradise; far from marking the development of a theologically edifying journey, they signify only a change in the nature and extremity of the violence. As temporal and spatial development work in tandem in the Commedia, moving the pilgrim from one place and canto and book to another, so too are they each stymied in Salò in order to keep the subjects fixed (and therefore trapped) in place. This ironic repurposing of Dante, again, makes clear the confluence between the language of the dominant culture and conditions of fascism to which they are open; at the same time, it is something of a relic of Pasolini’s own Catholicism, suggesting that fascism is a state of Hell without a promise of redemption.
The Commedia is a tightly ordered piece; it is split into three books (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradisio) with a total of 100 cantos. Each book is made up of 33 cantos, along with an additional canto in Inferno which introduces the premise of the poem. Often, one can identify a congruence between numerically corresponding cantos across different works; for example, Canto VI of Inferno is concerned with questions of the city and its politics, whereas Canto VI of Purgatorio is concerned with questions of the nation, and Canto VI of Paradisio questions of empire, demonstrating an expansion of perspective on a consistent core theme. The rhyme scheme of the poem is terza rima (ABA, BCB) — we see the number three crop up over and over again, likely due to the spiritual and theological significance with which the number is invested. A similar precision is identifiable in Salò, which operates instead in units of four: four sections, four libertines, four daughters, four studs, four sex workers (or three and the Pianist), four collaborators, nine men and nine women each of which are whittled down to eight when one of their respective groupings is killed early in the film, one hundred and twenty days (three lots of four). In Salò, we see — as I have established — precise order and demarcation as the structural narrative of fascism asserted within hegemony; in drawing Dante into this configuration, Pasolini once again notes how the dominant culture can be called upon to participate in and even make sense of such a process, at the same time affording it aesthetic significance.
It is not lost on me that both Lolita and Salò make substantial reference to Dante, and it would be missing a trick to treat this shared touchstone as open to two entirely different paths of interpretation with no apparent convergence. However, I intend to spend time on this connection in the next piece. I am aware that this essay spent far more time with Lolita than it did with Salò, for the simple reason that Lolita affords significant critical explanation along the specific lines taken up in this piece, and because the explanatory potential of the white-frame horror is something I’ve wanted to write about for a long time; I intend the balance of analysis in this next piece to be more even.
The third essay in this series will deal in more detail with the questions of time and detemporalisation that I touched on in this one; I intend to take up the nature of death and non-death in each text, how such a state is induced and how such a state enables the fashioning of the victim into the aesthetic subject. I will spend more time with the paranatural preoccupations of Lolita and the slipperiness of life and death in Salò; this will, I hope, be the part where my overarching arguments and meaty, somewhat convoluted readings of each text finally start to become clear and compelling. For the time being, I hope to have made good use of what structures and frames both diegetic and narratological can tell us about the process of containing the subject upon whom violence is to be inflicted; I hope as well to have made clear the connection between how, where, and why such a process takes place and the conditions of hegemony by which it becomes possible.
[1] Here, I would of course note the current prominence of questions around “canon,” and what texts which intervene in the “canonical” events of their source material in order to contradict, flesh out, or reimagine them (fanfiction, adaptations, etc.) manage to do to this notion of one singular narrative within which our discourse must be contained — I would point to Amy Parker’s Kingdom by the Sea as an example of an attempt to ‘break’ Dolores Haze out of the containment Nabokov establishes for her, though I do not think Parker is wholly successful in the story. However, this is a tangential thread of thoughts that I can’t afford to lose thousands of words litigating; for the purpose of this essay, I am operating under the assumption that Nabokov’s text remains mostly immutable, or at least is given primacy within my own discourse.
