JM: Francine Prose mentioned both
Freud and Lacan in her text.
From Freud, we have "Eros versus
Thanatos" (although Freud never used this word: "Thanatos"),
present in her argument in favor of Eros as a life force and as an
added element used to distinguish erotic and pornographic
novels.
F.Prose notes:"If Eros is the life force, then Lolita is—for all its
ironic remove and tragic desperation—Eros between the covers".
O, yes. Life saving,
indeed. F.Prose concludes the sentence on Lolita as a novel
that enchances the life force: "...each time we open the book, even now,
especially now, at this moment in our history when it so often appears that
Thanatos has Eros pinned like those sex offenders on the front lawn."
And yet, Lolita (-,my Lolita)
represents a literary experience with its normal blend of "eros and death
drives", and where we follow how HH crosses
the bridge that carries him over from nymphet to
pregnant Mrs. Schiller - when he admits his loss ( the nymphet)
but can see to cherish his Lolita.
What a pity that F.Prose didn't remember the distinction
(introduced by Lacan) concerning to "love as Eros" (
Lolita is a love-story, too).
Lacan considers that a person's life and history will take
a different course whether "erastes" ( to love ) or "eromenos" (
to be loved) predominate.
In HH's case (some have argued against
this positive view) it's no longer a story of "pederastes", but about
a prevalence of "erastes" as un-dated "love".
Poor Lolita. she merely let herself
be loved or be carried away by fads and Mom's love-interests (Quilty, Dad HH).
So it's Humbert who gets to tell their
love story. The novel as an expression of VN's "erastes" ( "pity,
compassion, beauty")*
......................................................................................................
*
-I hope I got the distinction
correctly such as it was described in "The Symposium", re-examined by Lacan in
his Seminar III
extracts: Some vestiges of a broader understanding
of Eros and the erotic have managed, against all odds, to survive. One could
still claim that the dinner scene in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is
erotic in its depiction of gastronomy as foreplay. A restaurant critic might
claim that the effect of the fish lightly kissed with a tomato-licorice foam is
positively erotic, without confessing he wants to have intercourse with the
halibut on his plate [...]
While certain works of erotic art from the past [...]would still easily
earn an "R" rating, others (James Joyce's Ulysses, Édouard Manet’s
Olympia) seem now[...]as mild as a baby aspirin. Given how our sense of
the erotic and the pornographic has changed over the last half-century, it's
interesting to consider a work, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita [...] and to
look at how it appears to us now in light of the changes that have since
transpired in our culture.
In his essay, "On a Book Entitled Lolita," written in 1956, shortly after
the novel's publication, Nabokov offers a characteristically incisive and useful
description of pornographic fiction: In modern times the
term 'pornography' connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and certain strict rules
of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of
aesthetic enjoyment has to be replaced by simple sexual stimulation which
demands the traditional word for direct action upon the patient…. Thus, in
pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.
Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust.
The novel must consist of an alternation of sexual scenes. The passages in
between must be reduced to sutures of sense, logical bridges of the simplest
design, brief expositions and explanations, which the reader will probably skip
but must know they exist in order not to feel cheated… Moreover, the sexual
scenes in the book must follow a crescendo line, with new variations, new
combinations, new sexes, and a steady increase in the number of participants (in
a Sade play they call the gardener in), and therefore the end of the book must
be more replete with lewd lore than the first chapters….
It was similarly characteristic of Nabokov to want to define [...] whether
or not Lolita was pornographic.[...] its nominative subject matter
(Humbert Humbert's pedophilia) is fully as controversial as it was in the
forties and fifties, perhaps even more so, since it is so often the first thing
we think of when we see a priest's cassock, a coach's whistle, or a boy scout
troupe-leader's chestful of merit badges
Check out the section, early in the book, in which Lo has her legs across
Humbert's lap." During that scene, which I hadn't recalled, Humbert contrives to
sing a popular song as the pressure of Lo's legs (she is munching on an apple):
"By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity, but I also
had the cunning of the insane..."[...] Is the moment erotic? [...]
The scene at once celebrates and exemplifies all those aspects of
Eros—energy, passion, vivacity, humor—that include and go beyond the merely
sexual[...] But does it go beyond the erotic? Is it pornographic? Gentlemen of
the jury, I'd argue that the passage is too cerebral, too humorous, too ironic,
and above all, too giddily verbose to perform the work of pornography. The
dazzle of language distracts us from the concentration that sexual excitement
requires and provides[...] It's hard to imagine a reader whose sexual buzz could
remain unaffected by phrases such as "the hidden tumor of an
unspeakable passion" or "the corpuscles of Krause were entering the phase of
frenzy." [...]
Defending his novel against the charge that it was pornography, Nabokov
focused on its form, on the ways in which the novel's structure differs from
that of the conventional pornographic narrative[...] But just as important,
clearly, is the question of content.In making a case for Lolita as art
[...]
let's return for a moment to the wider way in which pornography is
currently defined: voyeuristic, exploitative, decadent [...]
But sexuality is a mystery, as individual as our fingerprints
[...] Among the qualities—beauty, intelligence, grace, complexity, facility
of language, wit, among countless other literary virtues—that distinguishes
Lolita as a work of art is the fact that it functions as the opposite
of and the antidote to programs like To Catch a Predator.
Lolita deepens our well of compassion and sympathy [...]
If Eros is the life force, then Lolita is—for all its ironic
remove and tragic desperation—Eros between the covers, Humbert Humbert's loopy,
unpleasant, celebratory, obnoxious human voice erupting like a jack-in-the-box
each time we open the book, even now, especially now, at this moment in our
history when it so often appears that Thanatos has Eros pinned like those sex
offenders on the front lawn.