Salò, Lolita, and the Aesthetics of Hegemony, Part 4: Ezio’s Salute
I have spent the last three essays laying out an argument for the articulation of aesthetic norms within hegemony as both a means by which sexual violence can be carried out and a process constituted on the bedrock of sexual violence in the first place. I have argued for Salò and Lolita as texts which develop their discourse out of the conditions of hegemony, circumscribing their victims on particular discursive terms such that the very process of literary construction can intervene on their humanity and render them legible only as aesthetic subjects; I have then argued for a reading of those aesthetics as consolidating ideas around sexual violence and death, and death as a site of active and ongoing discourse such that we understand both texts to take place in a kind of deathlike state that nonetheless exists eternally under threat of intervention from the hegemony to which it has all but ceded control. In the final of these essays on Salò and Lolita, I intend to contravene my own argument.
Whilst I have no doubt that this totalising force of aesthetic circumscription is a goal of sorts in the minds of Humbert Humbert and the libertines, I do not think that it is successful; on the contrary, the points at which the narrative resists total capitulation to the terms set by its most prominent and antagonistic actors are crucial in understanding both texts not as works of unilateral misery uninterested in saying anything of note about the violence they depict save for the blunt fact of its existence, but as nuanced and complex works as interested in challenging the ethos powering their own discourse as they are in depicting it.
What draws Lolita and Salò into one another’s orbits — beside their shared position at the periphery of subject matter generally thought of as digestible without casting extreme moral aspersions on those who engage with and enjoy it — is that the momentum of each work is derived from the production of tension at the site where the fascist’s imposition of a regime of strict order and containment meets with resistance on the part of its subject of a sort that reveals the superfluity and porousness of such a regime in the first place. This resistance may not be successful insofar as Dolores Haze and the captives of the libertines are able to save themselves from the inevitability that such a containment imposes — they are not, and they do not — yet this does not mean that it is useless. On the contrary, Humbert Humbert and the libertines seek to reduce their subjects down to an absolute pliability devoid of personhood that allows them to establish and sustain the parameters of their own control; to have Dolores, Renata, or Ezio breach the terms of this agreement and assert themselves as beings with directed wills and interior lives, even if only for a minute fraction relative to the rest of the narrative, amounts to the suggestion that such parameters are neither successful nor total after all.
Nabokov, when he wasn’t writing novels on the reconstitution of one human being into the literary discourse and cultural currency of another and figuring such a reconstitution as coterminous with the subject’s death (see also: Pale Fire), was an accomplished lepidopterist, a fact which has leant easy credence to the rhetorical trick of assuming Dolores Haze to be another of his butterflies helplessly pinned down by the narrative that marks her for death.[1] Whilst I can’t wholly refute the claim that Lolita holds a certain grim fascination with its subject’s doom, I find the suggestion that Nabokov’s relationship to Dolores’ abuse can be rendered down to one of voyeurism indistinguishable from the subjectivity imposed on Poe’s string of poetical dead women incongruent with the moments at which he places her outside of the artifice of Humbert’s creation.
The narrative is something of a game of cat and mouse — ‘hunter’ and ‘hunted,’ ‘enchanter’ and ‘enchanted,’ if Humbert is to be believed — yet it is not at all certain that Humbert (or Quilty, for that matter) succeeds in trapping his prey. If the terms of the hunt are that Humbert seeks to lock Dolores down in the narrative (so to speak), we ought to pay attention to the points at which she appears ephemeral, evasive, a being that neither Humbert nor the reader can ever quite touch. Her name of course identifies her as a ‘dolorous haze’; attention is drawn not to the sensuality or seductiveness that Humbert wishes to impart when he speaks of his ‘nymphet,’ but to her sadness, and to the incomplete, amorphous figure who evades direct capture yet always exists behind Humbert’s Lolita as a reminder that Lolita is only real within the narrow boundaries of his narrative construction. If Lolita is a butterfly pinned to the page, Dolores remains a haze, having no form distinct enough to be trapped by the constraints imposed on her discursive double. Humbert presents the story of Annabel Leigh as a ‘tangle of thorns’; here, again, there is a gesture towards difficulty, knottiness — a being who exists behind Humbert’s literary creations and complicates the construction of the aesthetic subject by resisting total effacement.
Writing to his publisher regarding the cover of Lolita, in a quip now oft-quoted to defend him against asinine allegations of the novel representing some pedophilic desire on the part of its author, Nabokov specified:
I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls. […] Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for Lolita (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway — that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.[2]
Though I understand the impulse to take such a statement solely as Nabokov’s personal stance against a cultural articulation of Lolita which essentially takes Humbert’s word for it (of which there are more than enough!) reified through the gaze of the readership landing on Dolores in much the same way as did that of his narrator, I think we ought also to consider this position relative to the question of visuals in the rest of the book. When Humbert and Dolores play tennis, Humbert — writing retrospectively, we are suddenly reminded — laments that he never took a photograph of her. Dolores Haze ought not to be visually captured because, tautologically, she was not visually captured; the discourse of the book is one in which the construction and entrapment of ‘Lolita’ functions as a substitute for such a capturing.
There are, I think, two ways in which we can take this question of the photograph’s absence. One is perhaps the more cynical view — that it participates in the totalisation of Humbert’s control by allowing his drive towards literary legitimation and literary subjectivity to replace that which could be accomplished by a photograph; the ‘enchanted island,’ a state of undeath, Dolores Haze captured as a young teenager forever. A photograph is no more ‘true’ than a novel is ‘true’ — both are discursive constructions and both are in a sense capable of lying to us — such that the absence of a visual representation matters very little when we know Humbert seeks not to represent something ‘true’ but to construct a discourse in which we as audience are forced to participate. Humbert tells us towards the start of the book that he ‘[has] only words to play with’ — words to manipulate, to couch allusions and hidden meanings within, to construct an artifice from — and the novel resolves itself by allowing such a playing with words to succeed.
At the same time, however, I am drawn to the notion that the absence of a photograph necessarily forces ‘Lolita’ — our composite, separate from Dolores — to the fore of the narrative in such a way that Dolores herself can be allowed to retreat into the ‘haze’ of her namesake. Attention drawn to the absence of the visual can call subtle yet necessary focus to the artifice of Humbert’s work and the precarity upon which it rests; it is easier to read deliberate construction and thus unreliability into the text when the subject he attempts to pin down is slippery and evasive and ultimately lost to him in any capacity beyond that which he himself can create. Dolores escapes him before ageing out of ‘nymphethood’ and meets him again for the last time when she is ‘frankly and hugely pregnant,’ a sure sign that she is exiting her childhood by becoming a mother and thus no longer an inhabitant of the enchanted island — we remember that earlier in the text, Humbert imagines a scenario in which he impregnates her and raises her child to be her successor, ‘Lolita the Second,’ implicitly casting ‘Lolita the First’ aside in transposing her from an object of desire to a mechanism of reproduction. Though the novel may well be an ode to preserving her in that state of ‘nymphethood,’ we might think of her inability to be captured on camera in the way she can be captured on the page as comparable to this escape; not enough to save her and certainly not enough to articulate her in full outside of the conditions imposed by Humbert, but a limitation imposed on the amount of her he could cannibalise, a keeping of certain parts of her shrouded in ‘haze’ or mystery that Humbert’s discourse fails to communicate. As I spoke about in my last couple of essays, precision through ordering and taxonomy is a key mechanic of fascism; perhaps the illegibility and unknowability encoded in Dolores’ surname holds her at a distance from such a fold.
There are slivers of the novel where Dolores emerges through cracks in the artifice of Lolita. Such instances occur when we see her describe what was done to her at the Enchanted Hunters as rape; when she bluntly suggests to Humbert that he killed her mother; when a schoolteacher informs Humbert that Dolores is morbidly uninterested in matters of sex. We see her hoard money, make several concerted efforts to run away before finally succeeding — we see her encouraging her friends of a similar age to be around her stepfather, presumably in the hope that attention normally paid to her might instead be spent on them. In chapter 32 of Part Two, Humbert recalls an incident in which Dolores witnessed a loving embrace between a father and a daughter:
I saw Lolita’s smile lose all its light and become a frozen little shadow of itself, and the fruit knife slipped off the table and struck her with its silver handle a freak blow on the ankle which made her gasp, and crouch head forward, and then, jumping on one leg, her face awful with the preparatory grimace which children hold till the tears gush, she was gone — to be followed at once and consoled by Avis who had such a wonderful fat pink dad and a small chubby brother, and a brand-new baby sister, and a home, and two grinning dogs, and Lolita had nothing.
Physical violence outside of rape is sparing in Lolita, which makes its occasional appearance — brought to us with all of Humbert’s upper middle-class European predilections colouring the prose — all the more worth paying attention to. When Humbert reports Charlotte’s death (for which we later learn he was responsible), he describes ‘mangled remains,’ the top of her head being ‘a porridge of bone, brain, bronze hair and blood.’ He at one point talks of having ‘sucked til I was gorged on [Lolita’s] spicy blood’; he describes having stopped with her to look at ‘some smashed, blood-bespattered car with a young woman’s shoe in the ditch.’ When he dreams of Dolores as a ‘complex ghost’ coming to him in an ‘atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust’ before transforming into Charlotte and Valeria, he imagines ‘vivisecting parties’ and his wives weeping in his ‘bleeding arms.’ Blood in Lolita is paramount; Dolores’ innards are just as sacrosanct as her exterior, such that Humbert sucking on her blood and thus imbibing some secret interior asset of hers is a moment of consumptive intimacy. When blood is spilt, it is a sign of expendability and weakness — Charlotte’s head can be ‘porridge’ because Humbert sees no reason to preserve her working body and nor to render her corpse desirable. Blood can communicate ideas of inheritance, legitimacy, the social value of a person encoded through hierarchies enforced at the level of bloodline; Humbert’s interpolation into the Haze household and his desire to create a ‘Lolita the Second,’ ‘Lolita the Third,’ etc. ascribes an elevated significance to Dolores’ blood through the use of antiquated aristocratic enumeration and ties together ideas around reproduction and the family unit as a means by which the ruling class can sustain itself that were discussed in the first of this series of essays.
Thus when Dolores injures herself, it is a moment of debasement which can for a second bring her down to Charlotte’s level as someone unfortunately human enough to have insides that operate independent of Humbert’s occasional desire to access and consume them. It is difficult to imagine that the Lolita descended from Annabel Lee and Beatrice could be human enough to bleed; though it is not clear whether she injured herself enough to draw blood, the presence of a knife at least allows such a possibility to hang over the narrative, and there is a rebellion of sorts in the idea that Dolores’ insides might be made to leak out not dissimilar to that of a façade being suddenly punctured. At the same time, it is indicative of great vulnerability; as with Humbert’s bleeding arms in his dream, it is a loss of control over the undisciplined body. Part of Humbert’s protracted control over Dolores involves precisely such a disciplining; in dropping a knife on her foot and then reacting as a child would, she cuts through the narrative that disciplines her body out of such behaviour — made all the more pertinent by the fact that she dropped the knife in the first place out of distress upon seeing a father interact with a daughter in a way that would never be made available to her.
Such moments in Lolita cannot quite be said to contravene Humbert’s morbid project of literary immortality, but the narrative he presents to us wavers a little in these slight, tempered reminders that his convoluted deployment of literary artifice is a poor concealment of the rape of a child. If his aim was total sublimation of the living Dolores in favour of a zombified corpse known as Lolita, built wholly as an aesthetic repository and a lynchpin of literary discourse, then he failed, as was Nabokov’s intention in constructing so clear an ironic gap between narrator and audience. However, Lolita is ultimately limited in its acts of rebellion. Humbert’s control spans the whole narrative; even these moments of contradiction must come to us filtered through him and thus ultimately assimilated into the work that he constructs. Anything more significant than Dolores crying herself to sleep or dropping a knife on her foot could well be excised; the only narrative we have is the one that Humbert crafts. Lolita falters at the final hurdle; to better develop our understanding of what can be accomplished through challenges posed to an apparently totalising force, we have to turn to Pasolini.
The middle portion of Salò’s Circle of Blood comprises a series of betrayals that culminate in a guard and collaborator, Ezio, being caught in the middle of having sex with the palace’s slave girl. As he jumps to his feet upon being discovered, the libertines (here led by the Bishop) prepare to shoot him — only to be caught off guard when he raises his fist in a socialist salute. Ezio is shot to death, inevitably, as is his lover — but he and the libertines look at one another for a good few seconds first. The libertines are taken aback; they are shocked and afraid. It is the first and perhaps the only time in the film that we see them genuinely caught off-guard, genuinely disoriented such that their course of action is derailed.
The murder of the captives at the end of the film is as highly ritualised and premeditated a process as was the rest of their time at the palace. Ezio’s murder, on the other hand, is a frenzy; it is a reactive panic. When the libertines finally shoot him, it is frenetic and enraged — it mimics a death by firing squad more than it does a swift, sterile execution in the middle of the night. It is the most triumphant moment in the film — the very possibility of communism is enough to inspire terror in the fascists of a kind that drives them to the violence of blind panic so far from the dignity and ritualism governing their behaviour up until that point. Even if all Ezio can do is die with his fist in the air, doing so forces a rupture in the narrative of a sort that it becomes difficult to believe, after this point, that the fascists are unflappable or that their reign of terror constitutes a totality over the lives of the captives after all.
Before Ezio is interrupted, he is nakedly intertwined with the girl kept by the libertines as a slave. They are caught in what are presumably her quarters, off from the main palace though still a part of it — at once within and without, both infiltrating and evading. There is a particular eroticism to the embrace, though what we see of it is fleeting — we only catch them together for a couple of seconds before the libertines burst in — yet it stands in juxtaposition to the scenes of dispassionate rape that characterise sex in the rest of the film. In a text which uses sexual violence to metonymically articulate broader forms of violence enacted by the bodies of hegemony on the bodies of the dispossessed, erotic and reciprocal sex which transcends divisions of race and class then becomes a vision for the end of such violence altogether. If Ezio’s salute is then to be believed, this is the promise of communism.
The optics of this scene and the assumptions shaping it are of course imperfect. All the same, it is a moment which wholly contravenes the popular reading of Salò as a work that approaches misery and suffering with bland gratuity and has nothing to say for itself besides a statement of the fact of this misery existing. Faced with the apparent totality of fascism — as was the real Republic of Salò — the promise of communism is that, even in death, it is still possible to find the cracks in that totality, and it is still meaningful to die with one’s fist raised.
If Ezio’s death represents a crack in the façade of fascism, there are to be found other pockets of resistance in the film articulated not through tearing down the stronghold of the libertines but by refusing to let the audience forget the humanity of those that the discourse of the film otherwise threatens to dispose of by way of the absorption into aesthetic intentions and aesthetic subjectivity that I have already outlined. The captives form relationships with one another; they comfort each other, as in the banquet in the Circle of Shit or the weddings in the Circle of Blood, or else betray one another to secure whatever precarious promise of their own survival they can. Eva and Antiniska enter into a lesbian relationship with one another; when discovered, Eva betrays Ezio in the act that leads to his execution, thus rendering lesbianism a non-normative sexual formation forced to capitulate to fascism.
Perhaps the most notorious scene in the film is that in which the Duke forces Renata to eat his shit off the floor. It is a viciously difficult scene to get through, but only some of that difficulty can be chalked up to sheer repulsion. Signora Maggi tells the story of how she killed her mother for disputing her sex work and her relationship with a nobleman, at which point Renata begins to sob upon remembering how her own mother was killed by the same fascists who have now entrapped her. She cries for her mother before calling out to God and begging for death, which would be preferable to what she is being put through whilst still alive; it is for her appeal to religion here that the libertines decide she ought to be punished, hence the eating of shit off the floor.
It is not the first time we have been reminded that a captive is a captive and thus an individual with the capacity to feel and respond to their environment, but it is thus far the most prolonged and certainly the most memorable instance in which the façade of order and precision is broken. If Salò posits the aim of fascism to be an ordering of the world that facilitates and sustains violence and relies upon the containment or legibility of its subjects in order for such a process to take place, Renata’s anguish threatens the coherence of the project even if she has in that moment no real power to prevent all manner of awful things happening to her. It is for this reason that the libertines respond as they do; the Duke’s response is a disciplining tactic not only in relation to her having broken one of the rules (ie. in her referring to religion), but also one which seeks to narrow her back down to the position that she occupied before.
The betrayals that characterise the end of the Circle of Blood remind us that we have seen one story among many; that we have seen the world as drawn up and delineated by the fascists, but in being constrained by that perspective, we have missed more than we might ever have thought to notice. We never find out how Eva and Antiniska’s relationship developed, or that of Ezio and the unnamed slave girl, and nor do we get the intimate details of how other friendships formed across the seemingly impermeable barrier created by impossible circumstances. We see very little of the Pianist’s mental anguish until the moment she gets up and throws herself out of the window. To interiorize the captives or the defectors in such a manner would draw focus away from the narratological pains taken to render them within the process of aesthetic subject-production; that this process aims to be a totalising force engulfing narrative and audience alike and yet still fails speaks to the profound belief that Salò holds: that the dispossessed under fascism can never be made to forfeit their humanity.
Of course, almost all of the captives die; those who don’t become collaborators on a thin and spurious promise of eventual freedom. Salò is not a story about the triumph of love and communism over fascist regimes. What hope we can glean from it comes far more from the sense that defeat is never absolute, and nor is resistance ever useless; that if death is a continuing site of discourse (and therefore one of malleability and vulnerability), it is not a site that we ought to relinquish.
I can appreciate why people find such an artistic vision somewhat wanting, and come away from Salò believing it to be a kind of macabre indulgence in nihilism or else a capitulation to the inevitability of fascism. Similarly, I can understand why so many find Salò unwatchable; even though it does not generate the kind of shock and fear that other horror films tend to rely upon — even though, put straightforwardly, it is not especially “scary” — it cares very little for the discomfort of the viewer at all, presenting a series of assaults that feel relentless with so detached and clinical a tone that I could see how someone might wonder if Pasolini cared about or even understood the violence he was putting onscreen. There is no protagonist to root for, no question of whether what we know is going to happen will really happen; the helplessness of the captives extends to the audience, all of us together watching the dull clinicality which is, after all, the only way that fascism can be enacted. The clearest way I can think to explain this is through the framework of syuzhet and fabula, if you’ll allow me the indulgence of Russian formalism — whilst fabula refers to the events of a text in their chronological order (what ‘happens’), syuzhet describes their narratological arrangement; the order of events as we receive them, and how ordering a narrative in a particular way can crucially alter its discourse.[3] An asynchronous syuzhet and fabula — one in which we receive events out of order, be it through flashback, recollection, the withholding of crucial information until the last minute, or any number of other such techniques — can create all kinds of discourses, compelling the audience towards intrigue, horror, the retroactive reframing or recontextualization of old information, and similar such responses which ultimately serve to create an engaging and emotive narrative discourse.
Salò’s syuzhet and fabula are completely synchronous; it is a synchronicity which gives the impression that the narrative doesn’t much care if the reader is compelled towards intrigue, horror, retroactive reframings and recontextualisations or not. There is no foothold for the viewer to grasp, no driving tension produced through threatened stakes; the narrative advances as a progression of fact wherein interiority and emotion appear as occasional perforations used only when a contravention is taking place (Renata, Eva and Antiniska, Ezio). This is what sets it apart from the majority of horror media even if its subject matter is only about as disturbing as some of the more gratuitous and graphic works; what Pasolini crafts to mimic the clipped banality of fascism is simply a difficult text to engage with, one which resists investment on the part of the audience. There is not a moment where you are asked to imagine that there can be any other outcome than the one towards which the narrative advances; there is no glimmer of hope for the captives, no possibility of rescue. All you can do is watch.
I can understand the desire to recoil from this sort of narrative, but I find that it is, if anything, what makes Salò have so immense a hold on me. The film has all but held my brain hostage ever since I watched it, helped in no small part by my immediate desire to tether it to Lolita (another work maligned for its unpleasantness). Salò asks us to believe that those moments of contravention can still be meaningful, are in fact made meaningful through the refusal to be engulfed by banality; I cannot imagine a version of Ezio’s death more resonant and more politically articulate and thus more emotionally affecting than the one Pasolini presented. For me, the idea that we do what we can even if all we can do is die is not a capitulatory narrative; there is a profound resilience in Ezio’s death, and a profound satisfaction in the fear he manages to strike in the fascists as it happens.
What I have attempted to demonstrate over the course of these four essays is that both Lolita and Salò, as works often maligned in the popular imaginary, are texts which totalise hegemony in relation to sexual abuse only to then reveal the porousness of that totality — and by extension, the artifice of those very hegemonic relations that propped up their respective narratives in the first place. Each text posits dehumanisation and the creation of the aesthetic subject as a mechanism of sexual violence (which can in turn be made to stand for all sorts of violences), yet resists relinquishing its subjects all the way over to the other side, retaining slivers of humanity that come to function as discursive appeals against the very enforcement of subjectivity that they mimic in their narratological construction. This porousness allows us to ask if something else might be possible.
Of all my discussion of points of comparison between the two texts, I found that those laid out in this essay were sites where Nabokov and Pasolini diverged most starkly, and it is a diversion that I think can fairly be chalked up to the limitations of Nabokov’s ultimately conservative politics against Pasolini’s communism. Lolita is inward-facing; how much Dolores does or does not make for an insistent presence against the subjectivity imposed by Humbert, whilst effective in refuting his appeals to her apparent enthusiastic participation and in making clear the investments of the story as ironising an account brought to us by an obviously unreliable narrator, ultimately matters little when it comes to discussing how the story interacts with the conditions of hegemony that make it possible. Nabokov presents a poignant and cutting account of the social, cultural, and economic forces which facilitate and invisibilise the abuse of a child, but he struggles to think beyond it, and he struggles to imagine that his heroine’s resistance might be as politicised as is her entrapment in the first place. Pasolini, on the other hand, has a concrete sense of that which is needed to resist the totality that the narrative of Salò imposes; as he understands the libertines to be fascists, so too does he understand their necessary counterweight to be that of communism. Nabokov deftly constructs the artifice of literary discourse as a fulcrum around which sexual abuse can be articulated, but relies on that very same discourse in making sense of his novel as a realisation of ‘aesthetic bliss’; Pasolini’s art has a particular gay communist ruthlessness to it that the staunchly anti-Bolshevik Nabokov couldn’t hope to achieve.
If nothing else, I hope that this long series of essays has brought to the fore some perhaps more imaginative ways of talking about Lolita and Salò than those which tend to dominate the cultural zeitgeist. Both texts seem to come to life when considered from the sorts of angles that I have laid out here, far more so than they might were they to continue to be thought of as works which deal in difficult subject matter merely for the sake of doing so. Ultimately, however, my aim here was not to revolutionize the discourse surrounding either work (and nor am I at all claiming that I am the first person to name Lolita as a novel which owes much of itself to horror, or to talk about Salò as a work concerned with the structuring of fascism) as much as it was simply to develop ideas which grabbed my attention — those around death, and reanimation, and suspension, and how far sexual violence can be metonymically stretched and manipulated to encompass such affects. I hope to have expounded on these points of interest with some depth and care, and hope that what was interesting to me has been made interesting to others. At the very least, I hope I demonstrated that Gothic literary conventions can be applied to just about anything if you try.
[1] Cf. Amy Parker’s Kingdom by the Sea, of which I am unfond.
[2] Quoted in Rachel Arons, Designing Lolita, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/designing-lolita. (The piece specifies that Nabokov later retracted the ‘no girls’ dictum, as is evinced by the outpour of Lolita covers depicting just that.)
[3] Coined in Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, though I first encountered a clear summary of the concept in Peter Brooks’ introduction to Reading For the Plot.
