Yeah, I've always appreciated the beauty of describing people being burned in hell too.
The following is my musing a few months ago on a similarly matter:
I read the short story
Signs and Symbols so many times that I now know certain paragraphs by heart. I’m unable however to understand it, let alone respond to it in any ‘proper’ form. For sure, I have long ago managed to stand again after having been swept off my feet by its deliberate mystery and sinister brilliance; so that I can observe with a dispassionate measure most of Nabokov’s narrative tools at work. Things like his playful patterning, his relevant imagery, his use of established rhetorical devices such as aposiopesis, chiasmus, zeugma, isocolon, hendiadys etc. All is sublunary and nothing beyond that.
Yet I do not believe he has written this haunting short story to elicit any particular response from the perspective reader, Nabokov being a high priest of art-for-art’s sake. Even today, 60 odd years having passed its publication, this story’s more or less singular legacy remains
succès d'estime.
Generally, people lose patience with Nabokov and his
Lolita when they dismiss a multi-layered work of art as a straightforward manifesto of sexual perversion without any redeeming aesthetic scope. As far as I can imagine, nobody is able to respond to Humbert Humbert’s gargantuan sense of loss when Dolores Haze finally manages to escape from him:
“This book is about Lolita; and now that I have reached the part which … might be called “Dolores disparue” [Dolores disappears], there would be little sense in analysing the three empty years that followed. While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life’s full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster.”
If you’re thinking this beauty is morally subversive then wait for the paragraph that immediately follows it:
“Singularly enough, I seldom if ever dreamed of Lolita as I remembered her — as I saw her constantly and obsessively in my conscious mind during my daymares and insomnias. More precisely: she did haunt my sleep but appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria [his ex-wife] or Charlotte [Lolita’s dead mother, also an ex-wife] or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball's bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies [furnished rooms] where I would be entertained at tedious vivisection parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.”
It is writing so beautifully about something so disgusting and hideous in
Lolita that causes so much upset and offence to most its readers even today. How could anyone be so insensitive as to miss the unconscionable misery that belies Humbert Humbert’s carnal mirth in the above two paragraphs (so deep and unbelievable misery that even the Holocaust was fleetingly eluded to)?
In fact, Nabokov himself said that his inspiration for writing
Lolita was a zoo monkey that drew the bars of its cage when it was offered a white page and charcoal. That ape couldn’t transcend its physical confinement any more than Humbert Humbert could his sexual one. This in other words is solipsism i.e. one cannot experientially connect with anything beyond one’s immediate existence, which in itself was occasioned by events, feelings and conditions that are external to what one has become thereafter.
Nabokov could have experimented with solipsistic selfhood in circumstantial morals more than he actually did; he could instead have tied up the petty criminality of a thief to their being mildly afflicted by Kleptomania, or an arsonist to pyromania. But where is the fun in that when these aren’t directly based on animal biology with which we all can easily identify?
The fun in this case was not to otherise but to humanise sexual diversity in a socially most uncomfortable way. Solipsizers are everywhere in today’s advertising industry, they’re the ones who assure you that sex sells. However, what they’re not saying clearly is that ephebophilia is more common than it is comfortable to admit.
If in doubt, survey the popular image of womanly perfection and beauty, and you should find all the things that are most evocative of the physique of young girls between 12 and 18. (This places too much pressure on any woman in her twenties or even early thirties, with all that is concomitant to advancing age, to compete with much younger girls, yes, by reason of ephebophilia. Then what’s the answer? Well, anti-aging products and Botox injections.) Thin, very thin actually, is beautiful in a woman, it says. Coupled with a woman’s thinness is her height but in a feminine proportion — this is overcome by the prosthetic aid of high heels which in turn accentuates the sexual allure of the buttocks; what else was the Victorian bustle for if not to Kim Kardashian womanly beauty?
Prosthetic beauty simply goes far beyond the incongruent ‘weave’ on a black woman’s head in that it is a matter of approximation where wearing foundation makeup, fake eyelashes, hot red lipstick, or sporting reddening cheeks in simulated post-coital glow, all do vigorously point, exaggeratingly of course, to the given properties of natural youth. This is all uncomfortable to think about even for those of us who are very Darwinian about our species, probably because we insist on our special case in our animal nature that sets us apart from the rest of the kingdom.
Inspiration apart however, this novel can easily be seen as an attack on Freudian thinking which Nabokov feuded with all his natural life. Not the polymorphous perverse but girls being sexually attracted to their fathers, boys to their mothers. But no. It is much easier for simple, moralising minds to reject and condemn
Lolita, its inspiration and not very direct or serious approach on the singular basis of its cruel topic.
Topic: Favourite Surah, Ayat, etc.?