Monk

Before we forget about the Nic Kelman novel “Girls”, I want to get one more little section on Nabokov’s “Lolita”. He riffs on the idea that, although Lolita was a terribly young lass, she still was coming fast into her teenage years, and therefore she was not exactly wildly outside the normal spectrum of heterosexual male desire, teasing that Nabokov was playing on at least a hint of prurient interest.

It reminds me of a note that Nabokov made in the afterword of at least one of his editions of “Lolita”, that a publisher told him that he could publish the novel if he changed Lolita into a boy character, because otherwise the book can come off as being a little too pornographic, and of the worst sort, with this teenish girl, at least as far as the overwhelming heterosexual male population goes. Fortunately, for the world of literature, Nabokov did not heed that suggestion.

Remember that Kelman’s book is a fictional novel, and that he is assuming the voice of one of those ultra-alpha-male assholes. The writing here is sexually raw and crude. I think of it as the male id unleashed.

( WARNING: Rather nasty pornish stuff )

I started writing this book the summer after the death of Peter Curran, whom I met when I was seven and had a relationship with for fifteen years, right up until he committed suicide at the age of sixty-six.

-- “Tiger, Tiger” by Margaux Fragoso

When it comes to the critical work on Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita”, one will come across from time to time the lament that we don’t get the little girl’s perspective. Well, in Margaux Fragoso’s novelistic memoir, we get a more than adequate remedy for that deficiency. Indeed, after reading this starkly realist account of pedophilia and child abuse, I find myself thinking of Nabokov’s work as being absurdly caricaturesque, a laughably over-strained piece of romanticism, as we get the focus on the poor, tortured soul of Humbert Humbert, a tale of pedophiliac love gone wrong.

This isn’t to say that I will cease reading “Lolita”, as it is a wonder of literary craftsmanship, and there is still all of the rich spice of the sexually provocative material. One simply appreciates that it is an artsy confabulation rather than a realist treatment of a pedophile’s crimes. And let it be noted that Nabokov never promised more than literary art, not science or biography.

Now, Monk being Monk, I was going to type out a few nasty excerpts, but due to the incendiary nature of the material, I am doubtful about the wisdom of such a move. However, if at least three people will encourage me to go ahead and give up these nasty tidbits, I will do so. You may do this in a comment or in a private message that shall remain confidential. I don’t want this just to be about me trying to push things on people that no one really wants. And you can check back over the next couple of days to see if this has been done, as I will add the excerpts to this post if it has been duly requested

I found it and I named it, being versed

in taxonomic Latin; thus became

godfather to an insect and its first

describer — and I want no other fame.

-- Vladimir Nabokov

He expressed himself clearly and repeatedly on this point, that he felt more pride over his scientific work in lepidoptera than in his literary success as a novelist. Just this Tuesday, the hypothesis he made in 1945 on the evolution of the Polyommatus blues butterflies was proved correct.

One also gets this rather touching biographical note on the origin of his interest:

Nabokov inherited his passion for butterflies from his parents. When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities, the 8-year-old Vladimir brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift. As a teenager, Nabokov went on butterfly-hunting expeditions and carefully described the specimens he caught, imitating the scientific journals he read in his spare time. Had it not been for the Russian Revolution, which forced his family into exile in 1919, Nabokov said that he might have become a full-time lepidopterist.

Of course, he will probably remain more known for his eloquent expression on the study and pursuit of nymphets, but that probably wouldn't conern him, not being a lowest-common denominator kind of guy, being content that "Lolita" at least made him independently wealthy.

I doubt I ever would have been able to connect Charles Dickens and Vladimir Nabokov on my own, but such is the pleasure of reading good exegetic works that literary scholars will draw such combinations for us, as Ellen Pifer does in her essay “Nabokov’s Novel Offspring: Lolita and Her Kin.” If one should have any doubts over whether Lolita was entirely innocent and wronged, on the grounds that she was a fast little number herself, Ms. Pifer draws for us a full, vivid picture of the offense, the despoiling of romantic childhood, just in case the prosecution needs more firepower, not that it really does. A well-made literary argument can be a work of art in itself.

_ _ _

The affinities between Nabokov’s and Dickens’s visions of the child confirm what careful readers of “Lolita” may discover for themselves: far from sounding a death knell for the romantic myth of the child, Nabokov breathes new life into that resonant myth. For him as for his literary precursors, the child - whose innocence has not yet been ravaged by experience, whose wonder at the world is still fresh - emblematizes the human being’s creative potential. In a manner that recalls Wordsworth’s immortality ode, Nabokov marvels in his autobiography at “the dark-bluish tint of the iris” in his infant son’s eyes. Their depth of color seems “to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests… where, in some dappled depth, man’s mind had been born.” The birth of human consciousness, he postulates, was a sudden, glorious flowering - an intuitive leap, a “stab of wonder” by which the dreaming mind awakened to the world. Each child, in turn, repeats the miracle of that original awakening - which Nabokov calls “the initial blossoming of man’s mind.” To borrow from F. R. Leavis’s comments on Dickens, Nabokov “can feel with intensity that the world begins again with every child.”

-- Ellen Pifer, “Nabokov’s Novel Offspring: Lolita and Her Kin,” in Pifer’s Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook

Nabokov has written that the inspiration for “Lolita” was a story of an ape who, when taught to draw, produced a picture of the bars of his cage.

-- Thomas R. Frosch, “Parody and Authenticity in Lolita”

A poignant proposition, that. Mr. Frosch takes it that it illustrates for Nabokov the problem of the literary artist who seeks to break free of parody and imitation, desiring to be original and free, wanting to say something new, or at least to say it in a captivatingly new way. I do not doubt that this may be one level of meaning, but Nabokov was genius enough to play the multiple-level game.

The more obvious meaning has to do with the way Humbert Humbert feels constrained by the conventions of civilization. His one honest passion in life is his sexual affection for preteen girls, and wouldn’t you know it, this very thing is verboten, both legally and culturally, that is, it is not only criminal but it is a case of moral leprosy, the lowest form of scum. Hence, he must exercise a good deal of self-repression. If he cannot impose an imaginary set of bars on his passion, then society will gladly put him behind some real bars, as happens by the end of our novel.

And it’s not like Humbert did not try to repress himself, doing a pretty good job of it through his adult life, at the personal cost of finding himself in and out of mental sanatoria for nervous breakdowns. Ah, but then came Lolita, standing four ten in one sock, and he had to try to make his dreams come true. He broke down his psychological bars in a mad bid for paradise, hoping that he would be able to avoid finding himself behind real bars.

Personally, I see a more general case. Humbert and his pedophilia is an extreme case. Oh, I almost hate to borrow from Freud, since Nabokov and Humbert so disdain Freudian analytics, but maybe this anti-mirroring is appropriate. The argument is that human nature and higher civilization are necessarily at odds. Our civilized ideals are much too refined for our primate spirits, so that we have to repress our wilder desires, putting our inner ape behind psychological bars, or else risk being a fugitive from society, a wild animal that must be put in the zoo in a real cage. It would seem that if we want civilization, we must suffer our discontents.

At the risk of going beyond Freud, I suppose that human nature wins out over civilization in the long run. As a society advances, it gives rise to a super ruling-class, and one of the privileges of being in this exalted social class is that the risk disappears of being locked away in prisons, and without this constraint, these privileged people no longer see a need to impose psychological bars on their desires. The inner-ape is let free, and they can just take all the wealth and sex they want, while the common people are helpless to do anything about it. Our leaders run mad. And so even great empires decline and fall.

“Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem, sex as a platitude - all this is something I find too tedious for words… A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.”

-- Vladimir Nabokov

The part of the quote following the ellipse is actually channeled through Humbert Humbert, but it seems like a fair fit, though I don’t doubt that Nabokov, himself, did not find preteen girls to be particularly possessed of any perilous lure. As one of the college coeds with whom he had an affair put it, he liked young girls but he didn’t like little girls.

Although “Lolita” is not pornography, neither is it devoid of sexual fire and can sometimes border on the outright prurient. I’m not complaining, as I imagine this is one of the novel’s big selling points for me. As I was rereading “Lolita”, I kept in mind Graham Vickers and what he called his favorite passage, which was one of the sexually provocative bits. In it, Humbert has come to Lo’s school, and he takes a seat with her in her class, and a cute blonde girl is seated in front of them, and he has Lo give him a handjob under the desk as he gazes lustfully at the blonde. I decided to share my own favorite scene, which comes after Lo has escaped from him to be with Clare Quilty, and Hum is feeling sorrowful and guilty:

I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her - after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred - I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her gray eyes more vacant than ever - for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation) - and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again - and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure - all would be shattered.

This is the first time I have read the novel using Alfred Appel’s annotated edition. Previously, I did not care to be slowed down, constantly flipping back and forth between story and notes, but after around a half-dozen readings, I found the patience to take it easy and dig deeper into the riches offered, and it made all the difference.

Before I put away Graham Vickers’s “Chasing Lolita”, I want to raise a pleasant off-beat note that not everybody condemns Humbert Humbert as a monstrous savage while sympathetically consoling little Lo, and, no, I am not making recourse to dirty old men, though, in my humble opinion, this is an overly maligned demographic - can’t one be young at heart?

Vickers fills out his survey of the uses or abuses of “Lolita” in popular culture with a discussion of Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books”, which is about her underground reading group and their experience of reading Nabokov’s novel. Of course, this is an underground affair because in Iran women aren’t even suppose to read, or at least certainly not materials like “Lolita”, which, it is worth pointing out, is an abuse of women that Humbert Humbert would find unconscionable.

Justine Brown is a Canadian writer who was part of this reading group, and she recalls when she was twelve and people started telling her about the birds & the bees and bracing her for the world of sex. One woman gave her “Lolita” to read (an interesting choice for sex education):

I wept bitterly when I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita… A lady named Carol, who parachuted into my life like a ’70s Mary Poppins and quickly became a friend, slipped me the book. In retrospect, I see a warning featured prominently: be aware. She presented the book by way of proscription - to alert me to the erotic power of nubiles and the pitfalls of that power, to the magnetism of 12 year-old girls, for some men. It was 1977, I was 12 and so was Brooke Shields. “Pretty Baby” was shedding its soft “Penthouse” glow in movie houses around the world, and Roman Polanski would soon be on the run, leaving his adolescent lover in disarray. We had our brown limbs, our cut-offs and halter tops; we had our ice cream and lip gloss. Advice was in order but Carol was too subtle for that. (Others were more direct: “Now everyone will want to screw you,” remarked one of the grown-ups bracingly.)

Carol gave me a copy of “Lolita” instead of a sermon. And that is how I came to read it, in two rainy summer afternoons, when I was 12. And when I emerged tearfully from the bedroom, she just nodded and opened her arms, for I was a sensitive kid. “Poor, poor Humbert!” I cried. “Lolita was so mean!”

Some girls really do understand! Of course, that was her response at twelve, and interestingly enough Vickers doesn’t report on her current adult response. Maybe he is encouraging us to buy Nafisi’s book, but I think I probably just got the best part.

In my reading life, I have fallen into a mood. Instead of reading new stories or standard non-fiction, I want to burrow deeper into my favorite stories, as if to attain a greater intimacy with some of the more beloved characters that I have befriended in the course of a life that has been rather thin on friends. Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” is an obvious choice. In addition to being one of my most cherished literary illusions, she has a legion of devoted admirers endlessly writing of her, trying to get to know her better, and their courtship is not relegated solely to the secluded enclaves of obscure academic journals, but may be enjoyed at a book store near you, or at Amazon.

Hence, I have been enjoying Graham Vickers’s “Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov’s Little Girl All Over Again”. His main theme is that people have taken the original Lolita character and debased her, turning her into a conniving temptress. We have turned her into a siren luring middle-aged men to their doom, from what she really is, a normal growing girl who becomes an object of lust for dirty old men who ache to deflower and despoil immature innocence. Though, it is interesting to note in an aside that the two middle-aged men who viciously intrude upon her adolescence do meet their doom, just saying.

Vickers is probably largely correct, and it is certainly a politically correct thesis. Personally, I think he possibly goes too far in his righteous zeal, as I believe that Nabokov created a somewhat more complicated character. Remember the first time that Humbert Humbert and Lolita crossed the Rubicon and had sex. Sure, our depraved Hum meant to drug and rape her, but Nabokov zigs and zags and has her making the first sexual move, showing off to him by demonstrating on him how well versed she already is in fellatio (at sucking dick!). Remember, too, that the twelve or thirteen year old escapes from Hum because she wants to be Clare Quilty’s lover, another middle-aged man.

I am not saying that Hum is a good guy who is misunderstood, nor am I saying that Dolores Haze wanted to jump off the normal childhood track to become a sex kitten and a vixen. He is, in plain fact, a pedophile and a criminal, and she was exploited in her youth and innocence (or quasi-innocence). I just think that Vickers could be criticized for going too far in his desire to err on the side of the angels.

But I am nitpicking, wanting to have something of my own to say. The book is a fun and fast read at little more than 200 pages. He writes of popular culture’s fascination with sexualized young girls going back to the silent movie era and up through the present, including a movie from 2005 called “Hard Candy”, which has the young girl turn the tables on a pedophile, drugging him, castrating him, and finishing him off on the end of a rope, which goes to show that we no longer think of girls as just these sweet little things made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Though, they are that, too.

♠
Here is one of the funner poems that Monk has come across, and it will be good to lighten the tone after all that news on the Middle East and the Christianism at home.

___ ___ ___

The Second Rapture
by
Thomas Carew
(1594-1640)

No, worlding, no, 'tis not thy gold,
Which thou dost use but to behold;
Nor fortune, honour, nor long life,
Children, or friends, nor a good wife,
That makes thee happy: these things be
But shadows of felicity.
Give me a wench about thirteen,
Already voted to the queen
Of lust and lovers; whose soft hair,
Fann'd with the breath of gentle air,
O'erspreads her shoulders like a tent,
And is her veil and ornament;
Whose tender touch will make the blood
Wild in the aged and the good;
Whose kisses, fast'ned to the mouth
Of threescore years and longer slouth,
Renew the age; and whose bright eye
Obscures those lesser lights of sky;
Whose snowy breasts (if we may call
That snow, that never melts at all)
Makes Jove invent a new disguise,
In spite of Juno's jealousies;
Whose every part doth re-invite
The old decayed appetite;
And in whose sweet embrace I
May melt myself to lust, and die.

This is true bliss, and I confess
There is no other happiness.

xXx