EYES WHICH DO NOT SEE: October 2012

PRERAMPLE:

I do genuinely believe Lolita is the greatest love story I have ever read. This perhaps says more about me than it does about Lolita, but all the same. When my professor pitched the paper to us he specifically said he didnt want us to write about two things, pedophilia, and love. This hurt a bit, because ive read Lolita twice now, and the overwhelming thing I took from it both times was how absolutely tragic of a love story it is. Between all of Naboko's word play and humor and backhanded complements to american culture there runs the deeply inscribed love story that provides the whole theme of the book. There are particular sections, ugh, look at this, if you cant relate to this kind of romanticism just kill yourself:

“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.”

This endless and infinite and terrible unrequited love. This vicarious and imaginary love, ohh man, it hits me hard:

“We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.”

I think I could go all night just pulling lines from this book. The quality of the writing is incredibly high right from the first page and remains throughout. You would be better served highlighting the sections that arnt worth quotes than highlighting the ones that are. Id only rank it below Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian for sheer literary craftsmanship. I dont know what kind of mindless goon you have to be to read Lolita and then stop, or put it down for good, because of the, *gasp!* immorality of it. Or the amorality, or whatever. I dont know.

Anyway, the Adrian Lyne film, though no were near as good as the book, is still an alright movie. Jeremy Irons is pretty good in it actually, though I imagined humbert as a bit more of a buffoon. But because Lynes film, as well as kubricks absolute crap fest, were both so markedly different I latched onto that as a subject. The Marshall McLuhan quote "the medium is the message," is near and dear to me and, frankly, has shaped and continues to shape my entire world view. I should make a blog post about it at some point . . .

So, for this one I left the work cited notes in because the essays I cited were actually pretty interesting. Also a note about the title . . . "Get out of my dreams, get into my car" (WATCH THE VIDYA MAN!) is actually a reference to an old ringo star song, which was a cover of another song which was titled "You're Sixteen" by the Sherman Brothers. It contains the line:

You walked out of my dreams, into my car,
Now you're my angel divine.
You're sixteen, you're beautiful, and you're mine.

Which parallels nicely with the story of Lolita of course. And then the Billy Ocean song, which flips the line and syncs up with the final meeting between lo and humbert,

“Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.”

Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car:

An Exploration of Private and Public Space in Lolita

      Perhaps one of the most audacious story lines conceived in the last century, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita at first seems an improbable classic. The novel documents the tale of our humble narrator, Humbert Humbert, an itinerant and worldly incroyable with a Hollywood handsome face and a "fancy prose style" (Nabokov 9). Humbert's cool visage, however, conceals monstrous secrets. Not only is he no stranger to sanatoriums or Parisian prostitutes, Humbert is a life long pedophile, incestuous stepfather, and by the end of the novel, a murderer. It might be expected that Humbert would alienate readers, but Nabokov so exquisitely manages his novels aesthetic that many have been able to look past Humbert's unseemly acts. As Jen Shelton observes in her essay "'The word is incest': Sexual and linguistic coercion in Lolita," "Nabokov plays with readers, whom he pushes towards a moralistic reading of the text and then taunts out of that reading" (Shelton 273) . Lolita confounds typical methods of analysis. Nabokov himself characterized his explanations for the origin of the book as "a conjurer explaining one trick by preforming another" (Nabokov 329). This complex sexual drama being what it is, it is no surprise that the book has twice been adapted into film, most recently by director Adrian Lyne as Lolita. Although still functionally the same story, Lyne's Lolita differs predictably. Speaking of Lyne's film adaptation, Sarah Miles Watts in her essay "Lolita: Fiction into Films without Fantasy," argues that the lack of Nabokov's prose in the film leaves the characters bereft of anything but perfunctory dialogue (Watts 298). Although Lyne "fails to probe Nabokov's depths of language," (Watts 299) it is not Nabkov's prose but the very architecture of the novel itself that leads to such difficulty in creating a film adaptation. Artistic possibilities differ in film and literature and the radically different structure of these two media taints any adaptation of Nabokov's novel.

      An explicit reenactment of the text in the public medium of film would be inconceivable, not because it wouldn't be able to bring Nabokov's "fancy prose" to the film (Nabokov 9), but instead because the prose style exists specifically to obscure what humbert himself is terrified of; the explicit public examination of his sex life with Lolita. Jennifer L. Jenkins, in her cleverly titled essay "Searching high and Lo: unholy quests for Lolita," makes the point eloquently: "Humbert takes refuge in ornate prose and ritual circumambulation to shield himself from the devastating reality of his sacra" (Jenkins 213). Oddly enough it is Lolita in Lyne's film that best captures this tension between internal ideation and external reality: "You look one hundred percent better when I can't see you!" she barks at one point in the film (Lyne). Lolita's youth defines her status as a nymphet: "I would have the reader see 'nine' and 'fourteen' as the boundaries" (Nabkov 17). It is the very youth of the "fey child," not Nabokov's prose, that makes her on screen depiction so difficult (Nabkov 132). Shorn of her youth, Lyne's Lolita is played by the seventeen year old Dominique Swain. Too old to be Humbert's Lo.

      The fact of Lolita's age is no small thing. Shelton observes that "the presence of the incest taboo separates 'civilized' societies from uncivilized ones" (278). Although Shelton speaks specifically about incest taboos, analogous cultural attitudes exist towards pedophilia. As strong as any social taboo may be "In practical effect . . . incest that is not publicly narrated is acceptable "(Shelton 278). A public demonstration, such as film, that violates these taboos flies in the face of the social order, and so must "lead to disciplinary action" (Shelton 278). But unlike film, Literature creates a direct dialogue between writer and reader. The interior of the readers mind if much less subject to such invasive "disciplinary action" (Shelton 278).

     Literature operates in a private sphere. Bereft of images, a novelist must create within the mind of the reader with only words on a page. The experience of the reader is encoded within the text. The author stimulates and simultaneously anticipating the readers own imagination, something Nabokov does quite well incidentally, such as in Humbert's final meeting with Lolita: "Then I pulled out my automatic – I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me" (Nobokov 297). The signification of the author's word is given meaning inside the readers mind. We can imagine what we cannot say, and we can imagine what cannot be.

      Film is different from literature in that it is a public forum and a public spectacle. An actor emotes into a camera, not into the audience. Stripped of Nabkov's "linguistic leaps into thought, memory, and imagination" and put under the glare of the spotlight, Humbert is "no longer a poet, obsessed with creating his aesthetic dream; he is a pedophile" (Watts 297). The medium of film sets a narrative boundary to the communication possible within the medium. This recalls Marshall McLuhan's old aphorism that "the medium is the message". Live action film is tied to reality in a way literature is not. In film the map most emphatically is the territory. Film, by nature of the medium, is especially concerned with surface textuality, principally that of its actors. The narrative of a film is public and is therefore publicly scruitable. Herein lies the impossibility of bringing Nabkov's work to film.

     Nabokov's complex game of bombing out the very trenches he digs to fight from has proven to frustrate and fascinate readers and directors alike. Lolita's age and Humbert's pedophilia provide the framework for the story, but also revolt many. Though distasteful, these elements cannot be removed. "The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn't heal" (Lyne).

Works Cited

Jenkins, Jennifer. "Searching High and Lo: Unholy Quests for Lolita" Twentieth Century Literature 51/2 (2005): 210-43. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

Lolita. Dir. Adrian Lyne. Perf. Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain and Melanie Griffith. 1997. Lions Gate Films Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Everyman's Library, 1992. Print.

Shelton, Jen. "'The word is incest': Sexual and linguistic coercion in Lolita" Textual Practice 13/2 (1999): 273-94. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

Watts ,Sarah Miles. "Lolita: Fiction into Films without Fantasy" Literature Film Quarterly 29/4 (2001): 297-302. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.