Nicholson's Airbrushing Of Lolita's Perceived Moral Transgressions example essay topic

'Lolita' and Censorship The twentieth century's two most infamous literary censorship cases - 'Lady Chatterley's Lover' and 'Ulysses' were brought to trial ostensibly because of fears about the public's exposure to obscene material. There were undoubtedly a number of other tacit reasons for prosecution bound up in the social, sexual and political economies of the early twentieth century. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the danger, in Britain and the US, was seen to lie in the textual representation of sexual acts thought to be either retrograde or simply the preserve of the private domain. In this context, Lolita would appear to offer the greater transgression because it represents not just a sexual taboo but takes as its theme a paedophilic relationship that was (and continues to be) illegal. However, Lolita was never banned in the United States and its publication in Britain was uncontested in 1959, three years prior to the 'Trial of Lady Chatterley'. This is not to say that Lolita went unnoticed - one of the interesting features of its passage into print is the extent to which publishers engaged in self-censorship, holding back from publication in the US and Britain for fear of their own reputations.

Equally, Nabokov, for some time, persisted with attempts to put the novel out anonymously in order to protect his academic position at Cornell. This is hardly surprising given that the very premise of the book invites a debate about aesthetic and moral responsibility and the extent to which they should be connected. It is a debate intensified by the rhetorical strategies at work within the novel which, in an ongoing subversion of the judgement making procedure, support and then denounce the gamut of moral, psychological and existential interpretations of the Humbert-Lolita relationship. A further layer of engagement with this discourse is added by Nabokov himself, whose anticipation of, and responses to moral outrage, are intricately enmeshed with his novel's unwillingness to be drawn conclusively on the matter.

The relative availability of Lolita meant that a vigorous and impassioned debate about the novel flourished in the US and British media, in academic circles and around middle class dinner tables in the late 1950's. One of the recurring elements of the critical outrage expressed in certain quarters concerned what was thought to be a disparity between the preternatural magnificence of Nabokov's prose and the moral status of what it conveys. As a reviewer for the New York World Telegram put it, "Lolita has a tone which says that if you cannot swallow its exquisitely distilled sewage with a good appetite then you better go back to where you belong and read Elbert Hubbard's 'Scrapbook'". On the other side of the Atlantic, Kenneth Allsop of the Daily Mail noted that "it is a remarkable book with a rancid taste", reinforcing the idea that literary brilliance and moral palatability could be two quite different things. These comments betray abhorrence not merely towards the representation of a taboo relationship but that this relationship could co-exist with high-art. In this regard, Lolita differs greatly from the legal attacks on Lady Chatterley's Lover and Ulysses, whose offences were more easily characterised as prima facie.

Lolita was therefore somewhat unique as a controversial literary work, in that its erotic power is not fuelled by obscenity's conventional signifies. A tally of 'four letter words', of the kind undertaken in the aforementioned trials, reveals nothing; yet, what might be considered to be a transgressive form of sexual desire, and the range of emotional states it inhabits, resonates throughout the text. The Sunday morning divan encounter between Humbert and Delores exemplifies the formal elegance of Nabokov's erotic evocations. As Humbert grows increasingly aroused by his proximity to young Haze, the reader is ever more in the thrall of anticipation built up without any kind of sexually denotative language. Instead, the eroticism builds so the moment of orgasm is deferred by a poetic rapture, an extended act of sublimation: "Everything was now ready. The nerves of pleasure had been laid bare.

The corpuscles of Krause were now entering the phase of frenzy. The least pressure would suffice to let paradise loose". It is a scene suffused with pathetic humour (as Humbert, surrounded by the kitsch detritus he so abhors and, almost overwhelmed with desire, desperately tries to recite the words to a 'romantic' popular song), in which the full implications of the act - a middle aged man defiling a twelve year old girl - are disassociated from the act itself. The dissociating effect of Nabokov's poetic-erotic mode is intensified by the fusion of the comic and the euphuistic that frames the majority of the book's sexual encounters. The claim that this renders the novel pornographic is a surprising one given that pornographic writing relies on a signifying relationship so mechanically literal that, as Nabokov points out, "action has to be limited to the copulation of clich " es". The shock is quite different in Lolita, for it does not occur in that synchronic moment of sexual fulfilment.

The pleasure derived from the prose of Humbert's confession turns to unease only retrospectively as the reader becomes aware of the incremental fusion of his or her own desires with the novel's perverted protagonist. The anticipation of fulfilment adds to this sense of transgression; the pleasures of the text are allied with Humbert and all of his future escapades regardless of their position on an ethical spectrum. This is in stark contrast to what Maurice Couturier refers to as the 'primary narcissism' of D. H Lawrence's much-censored erotic writing, in which the relationship between the sexual act rendered and the reader's apprehension of it is much more direct and the reader's complicity with it, more limited. The self-consciously literary nature of Nabokov's writing made it less of a target for formal prosecution; the 1959 Obscene Publications Act made special provision for the consideration of literary merit and this partially explains why a legal challenge was never mounted. However, the absence of a clear moral telos, traditionally seen as integral to the status of great or canonical literature, intensified the debate about moral responsibility. In its more extreme incarnations this point of view has been used to condemn any literary creation that does not conform to ideal or accepted standards of sexual conduct.

A scandalized review of Jane Eyre, written in 1848 by a certain Lady Eastlake concluded that "Charlotte Bronte has committed the highest moral offence a writer can commit... that of making an unworthy character interesting in the eyes of the reader". Roughly the same argument was used against Lolita when its imminent publication was debated in the House of Commons: "It is un contradicted that the book deals with a disgusting, revolting and cruel vice and tends to encourage it", thundered Sir Godfrey Nicholson, Conservative MP for Farnham, simultaneously denouncing and paying a back-handed compliment to the persuasive power of Nabokov's writing. The similarity of the publisher's response to John Quinn's defence of Ulysses reflects the perennial nature of this type of accusation: "If this perversion had been described in such a way as to suggest the practices were pleasant ones, I would have advised against publishing the book. In point of fact, Lolita condemns what it describes". Quinn, if we remember, identified a brand of 'filth that can brace and deter', an interpretation of Ulysses' erotic passages as incomplete as Mr. Nicholson's airbrushing of Lolita's perceived moral transgressions. In the case of Lolita, it is a response that refuses to take into account the complex rhetorical game-playing at work within the novel and the overriding moral ambivalence in evidence from the outset.

Lolita presents itself as the 'real life' confessions of a psychiatric patient and as such we are invited to read it as jurors confronted with a vital piece of evidence. At the beginning of the book we are forewarned, by the fictitious voice of psychiatrist John Ray Jnr, PHD, of the manipulative protagonist whose 'hypnotic' eyes peer out from behind the paedophile's adopted persona - Humbert Humbert. We are told that we must be moral arbiters with strength enough to appreciate "a work of art" without losing sight of the "horrible" and "abject" nature of its creator. The redeeming purpose of this moral tight-rope walk is ostensibly that we may better understand how to "bring up a better generation in a safer world". This is a rigged challenge. It rapidly becomes clear that our 'demented diarist' is simply too compelling and too persuasive to resist.

Throughout the course of the book, the moral apotheosis of which our eminent psychiatrist speaks is subsumed by the sheer force of Humbert's character: so consistently scathing and self-justifying is he, so demanding of our understanding and so savagely satirical that we are soon in the thrall of his confession - our moral compass is discarded as we follow the siren song of the confessor's prose. We invest part of ourselves in the crimes of another; that is the result of the sympathy / empathy reflex activated when the logic of a character's actions is laid bare for the reader. The carefully calibrated ingratiation of Humbert's confession, with its various entreaties to the "dear", "inimical", "learned" and "gentle" reader, serves to defer moral judgements so that they may share in a diversity of responses that Humbert himself exhibits towards his actions. That John Ray's ostensible objectivity collapses back into the subjective position of the novel's protagonist, adds further tinder to the aesthetic vs. moral responsibility debate; for one doesn't have to get too far into the book to realise that doctor and patient are stylistically and temperamentally indistinguishable. Humbert's oscillations between self-recrimination / justification, cruelty and tenderness, are echoed rather than repudiated in a foreword which presents a number of inconsistent defences of paedophilic behaviour which are then papered over with sardonic talk of the 'general lesson' to be learned from it all.

This is especially evident in John Ray's inclusion of the faux-statistical claim that "at least 12 per cent of American males... enjoy yearly the special experience that 'H. H' describes with such despair". Equally, the suggestion that Humbert's crimes might amount to a "tempest in a test tube" sits rather oddly with the doctor's characterisation of his former charge as "a shining example of moral leprosy". What we come to realise then, is that the injection of a moral position at the beginning of the novel is merely a studied mockery of that very position, so much so that one can almost imagine Humbert having written it himself, alone in some sinister tower plastered with the images of pubescent nymphets. In terms of the debate about literary obscenity, this device makes a clear statement about the absurdity of opting for life over art, moral certainty over ambiguity.