Scandal's Second Life: Lolita and the Perversion of the Text

Abstract

By way of concluding the section of Lolita dedicated to her supposed “precursor” (9), narrator Humbert Humbert informs his reader, “I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (15). In his own account of his primal scene of arrested sexual development, Humbert thus makes available yet another layer of the novel's thoroughgoing critique of Freudian psycho-sexuality. For by offering a childhood “precursor” and the consequent need to replace the object of thwarted desire, Nabokov's novel so perfectly conforms to a Freudian explanation for Humbert's adult perversion as to render the reductiveness of that model inescapable.1 Yet, the incarnation of a substitute object of desire suggests both the utopian possibility of the cinematic adaptation of a novel and its greatest danger. For the cinematic incarnation may substitute for the original object of desire but only at the cost of “breaking the spell” of that which it replaces. The controversy surrounding the recent film version of Lolita directed by Adrian Lyne reveals the anxiety attendant to cinematic adaptation as the danger, to use Humbert's terms, of “eclipsing” a fictional “prototype” (40). Moreover, as it mirrors the language of erotic attachment dramatized in Nabokov's novel, the popular discourse addressing Lyne's film offers an alternative model of cinematic adaptation premised on perversion, here understood as the conflation of the aesthetic with the erotic in the articulation of desire. In this way, popular discourse returns to the scholarly conversation about cinematic “fidelity” to a literary “precursor” which it has routinely repressed: the implicit eroticism of its model. What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen into an instant's vision, but a mirage because only the illusion of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem's words, (xvi-xvii) Miracle and mirage, ekphrasis is an “instant's vision,” an ideal wherein words create a verbal equivalent of the visual image. In the adaptation of novel into film, on the other hand, the word has temporal and conceptual priority, as the word “adaptation” itself confirms. Yet if the adaptation of a novel into film requires precisely the opposite movement of ekphrasis, it is, too, a “miracle and a mirage.” For to follow Krieger, in the cinematic adaptation, images aspire precisely to the “time-ridden and paradox-ridden character of texts” that ekphrasis struggles against (xv), and the miracle of re-incarnating the fictional precursor “in another” is the celluloid mirage promulgated under the aegis of “fidelity.” Perhaps because of the ways it thus reverses traditions of image-word translation, scholarship on the cinematic adaptation of literature tends to concentrate more on the distinctiveness of the two genres than on the relationship between them.2 Writers hone in on the problems of point of view and description as the key sites of conflict in film adaptations of novels. Similarly, they pinpoint the problem that emerges when the novel is itself about language, as is clearly the case with Nabokov's Lolita. The popular appraisals of the cinematic adaptations of Nabokov's novel reflect these sentiments, affirming that what is “lost” in the translation to screen is specific to verbal artistry. More pointedly, however, the popular discourse echoes the language of fidelity used by scholarship to characterize the relationship between a literary “precursor” and its cinematic incarnation. Fidelity criticism depends on a notion of the text as having and rendering up to the (intelligent) reader a simple, correct ‘meaning’ which the filmmaker has either adhered to or in some cases violated or tampered with…. That is, the critic who quibbles at failures of fidelity is really saying no more than: ‘This reading of the original does not tally with mine and in these and these ways.‘ (8-9) The dangers of fidelity criticism, McFarlane implies here, lie in its tendencies to naturalize an interpretation and to sacralize the novelistic text.3 And yet, while the “near fixation on the issue of fidelity” has certainly “inhibited and blurred” the study of adaptation (McFarlane 194), it has also remained an under-examined trope. For embedded in the conversation about faithfulness lies a more complex theory of adaptation belied in the terms of the fidelity argument itself. As foregrounded in the controversy surrounding the latest cinematic incarnation of Lolita, contemporary popular culture regards the relationship between the novel and its cinematic adaptation, between word and image, as an essentially erotic one, subject to the same scandals and ambiguous redemptions of movie-star romance. The pages of Louis Giannetti's popular Introduction to Film textbook make manifest the latent scandal of filmic adaptation as it is articulated in its full complexity in the popular press. Here, the film student comes across three types of relationships between novels and films: the loose, the faithful, and the literal (387). Although adaptations of plays come closest, Giannetti tells his students, the “literal” is largely impossible. “In each case,” he writes, “The cinematic form inevitably affects the content of the literary original” (389). Dismissing the “literal” as unceremoniously as does Giannetti, popular media locates its controversies in distinguishing the “loose” from the “faithful.” In those controversies, the words “loose” and “faithful” recover the cultural connotations that Giannetti's film text suppresses. Like the “loose woman,” the loose film is a scandal, a violation or exploitation of the object of desire. Provocatively, what the debate surrounding Lyne's adaptation of Nabokov's novel makes visible is the stark differentiation popular culture draws between the exploitations of the “loose” and the desires that define the “perverse.” In the popular discourse, perversion is the mark of the faithful adaptation, while the scandal of the loose is identified in its pretensions to literally incarnate the precursor. Effectively, the false literal claim signals that erotic desires have distinguished themselves from aesthetic ones, and that they have taken priority over them. Nabokov's Lolita is, of course, no stranger to scandal. As the account of pedophile Humbert Humbert, Lolita has been called pornographic and censured as morally corrupt. Yet, for each of the charges against Lolita, there are equally emphatic defenses, both for its artistic and moral integrity. Much of the academic debate swirls around whether Humbert suffers a “moral development” in his story or not, around the seductive language of the novel, and around the confusion of ethics and aesthetics the novel presents to its readers.4 On the other hand, the cover of the most recent paperback version of Lolita still carries Vanity Fair's comment that the novel is “the only convincing love story of our century.” On the other side of the text of the novel, it includes Nabokov's anti-apologia for the novel. In it he playfully toes the decadent line, asserting that his novel should not to be mistaken for the “Literature of Ideas” but valued strictly for its attempt to achieve “aesthetic bliss” (314-315). Before the first page and after the last, then, Random House wraps the novel in the dual defense of love and art. While scholars present their elaborate analyses of Lolita's subtle morality, the marketers choose instead to let eros and art supercede questions of morality and ethical imperative. In this way, the packaging of the novel reproduces the conflation between aesthetic and erotic pleasure celebrated by Lolita's pedophiliac anti-hero. For, as one critic so aptly reminds Lolita's readers, Humbert's theory of art merges with his theory of perversion precisely in his explication of the “nymphet” (Wood 122). To identify the nymphet, one must have a particular aesthetic sensitivity. As Humbert details to his reader, “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently glowing in your subtle spine…, in order to discern at once, by ineffable signs—the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children” (17). “Artist,” “madman,” and aesthetically discerning observer, the “nympholept” confirms his perversion in the complete identification of his aesthetic with his erotic desire. Moreover, as Humbert places himself in the tradition of Dante, Virgil, Petrarch, and Poe, he implies that his perversion is not just evidence of his aesthetic sophistication but proof-perfect of his art (19). Ironically, then, insofar as Random House's paperback advertises Lolita as the fusion of eros and art, it recommends the book as an object of desire that conforms precisely to the definition of perversion provided by the pedophile in the body of the text. Echoing the marketing tactics of Random House, the pages of such journals as Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and Premiere offer a popular discourse that implicitly theorizes cinematic adaptation as the successful blurring of aesthetic and erotic desires, that is, as perversion.5 Just as Random House reproduces and naturalizes the relations within the novel as relations between director and text, these journals faithfully reproduce the scandal over the novel's content as a scandal over the adaptation of the text: Lyne is to Humbert as the novel Lolita is to the character of the same name. Just as Lolita is the object of desire in Nabokov's novel, subject to Humbert's misinterpretation, so too, the novel is the innocent, if precocious, object of desire, vulnerable to the bumbling, misinterpretation, and exploitation of the cinematic medium. Like Humbert, Lyne is portrayed as an artist seeking to achieve “aesthetic bliss,” to remain “faithful” to his object of desire, to vindicate himself through his aesthetic prowess, and all the while, to occupy the position of the renegade, the free thinker, the smasher of taboos.6 Thus, as these journals defend and/or celebrate Lyne, they do so through their insistence that he “loves” the novel he seeks to incarnate in another form, and that such love legitimates and gives license to dissident nonconformity. Adrian is not by nature a literary type, but his feeling for the novel is exquisite. Any lover of Nabokov would naturally tremble before the notion of entrusting this most splendid of novels to the man who made Flashdance, and I did, too, when I first heard about the project. But I have long since stopped trembling. Adrian Lyne turns out to be a real artist. (Stringer-Hye 7) Here, while his “feeling for the novel is exquisite,” Adrian Lyne becomes a “real artist” not in spite of his Flashdance past but because of it; the artless erotica of Flashdance becomes art when combined with the “lover's” faithfulness to the object of desire. Premiere takes the identification of Lyne with Humbert to its logical conclusion. It is only because it renders the perversions of Humbert and Lyne as such perfect analogues for one another that the article is able to equate Humbert's desire for redemption at the end of the novel with Lyne's struggle to get a distributor for his adaptation. The close of the Premiere article has Lyne paraphrasing Humbert's words as he confronts his nemesis and alter-ego Quilty near the end the novel: “'You stole my redemption,' he says ruefully, 'my chance at redemption'” (6). Just as Humbert is thwarted by Quilty, his more pornographic rival, Lyne is cheated of his redemption by the more exploitative commercial interests of the film industry. Thus, in his portrayal in the popular press, Lyne becomes a faithful artist as he is equated with Humbert and his adaptation of the novel with the art of perversion. Lyne, it turns out, agrees with the critics' first take: “Nabokov's screenplay is as bad as his novel is magnificent,” he says. “He murdered his book.” To rectify the crime, Lyne treated the novel as a holy text, searching high and low for a writer who could capture the fragile elegance of Nabokov's original prose. (Harold Pinter and David Mamet each gave it whirl, but the job ultimately went to New Yorker scribe Stephen Schiff.) He looked far and wide for the perfect actor to play Humbert, talking with everyone from Anthony Hopkins (“Too old,” he says) to Warren Beatty (“He was intrigued for about five minutes”) to Hugh Grant, who wasn't intrigued even that long: “The trouble is, that's my favorite book of all time— I didn't want anyone to make a film of it,” Grant explains. In the end Lyne chose an actor with vast experience playing dirty old men (see Irons in 1992's Damage or this summer's Stealing Beauty). That left the ultimate challenge: finding a real-life nymphet to fill Lolita's saddle shoes. Nearly 2,000 girls auditioned, though Lyne says many were “30-year-olds trying to be Lolita.” For her audition, Swain, a freshman at Malibu High, sent a video of herself reading from the novel. “One moment she looked 9 years old,” rhapsodizes Lyne. “The next you could sense her sexuality.” (1-2) The beginning of the passage portrays Lyne in the now familiar role of the faithful lover, romantically attached to his aesthetic object and protective of its treatment. At the same time he is the renegade hero. Lyne's attack on Nabokov's screenplay and Kubrick's film allows him to pose as the man against two systems at once: the system that declares Kubrick's film a classic, and the censors that declare his film unacceptable.8 Portrayed as a man with a vision and aesthetic principles, Lyne totes his project from writer to writer, actor to actor, “high and low” and “far and wide.” Ironically— or perhaps appropriately— it is with the intrusion of Hugh Grant's parenthetical self-righteousness, that Lyne shifts from Humbert the aesthetic genius and accomplished practitioner of the perverse to scandalous exploiter. Suddenly, in comparison to Grant's more absolute veneration of the text, Lyne is the violator of his own sacred scriptures. Directly after Grant's moral assertion, Lyne and his film fall into a debauchery revealed in false claims to literalness. Now, Humbert is to be played by “an actor with vast experience playing dirty old men” and Lolita by “a real-life nymphet.” Eschewing the idea that the nymphet is itself Humbert's aesthetic construction and not a phenomenon in the objective world, Lyne now fully becomes the “dirty old man” himself, “rhapsodizing” over a 15-year old girl's simulation of a 9-year old's sexuality.9 The fall from artist to exploiter, from the faithfulness of perversion to the scandal of the loose adaptation, is a short one, here in Entertainment Weekly, the slip occurring exactly where the director moves from his claims for “faithfulness” to his specious claims to a “literal” adaptation. The false literal, best represented by the search for a “real-life” nymphet, is, inevitably, a degeneration into the “loose.” As she articulates her goals in Interpreting Film, Janet Staiger describes the project of reception studies more generally. She writes, “Through the hyperbole and contradictions surrounding discussion of this film, I hope to indicate something of what is at stake in the consideration of widely divergent reactions to a moving picture and how discourse surrounding film can indicate, symptomatically and inadvertently, ideological and hegemonic notions…” (124). My study here similarly seeks to reveal “ideological and hegemonic notions” through its study of the “hyperbole and contradictions” surrounding the discussion of a film. More pointedly, however, this essay attempts to distill a theory of cinematic adaptation from a popular discourse, a theory that challenges and supplements the dominant perspectives of scholarship on the same issue. For by linking perversion with fidelity, popular discourse alters the definition of faithfulness, insisting not only on the erotic attachments implicit in fidelity but also on the aesthetic transformations necessary for the faithful adaptation. Contrary to McFarlane's complaint, the strength of the fidelity argument here ends up to be its subjective and impressionistic character, insofar as it admits the aesthetic interventions involved in the maintenance of erotic attachment. The controversy surrounding Lolita's translations from page to screen suggests that the true scandal of cinematic adaptation is not the perversion of the text, but the denial of perversion, the pretense of literally incarnating the fictional precursor in another form.