In the spring of 2001, on the final night of a German book tour during which I had become convinced that, evening after evening, in city after city, I was reading to a group of catatonics who had bused in from the local mental hospital, I was staying at an appropriately eccentric hotel on a hilltop high above Zurich. The hotel—founded (or so I was told) in the previous century by a group of Swiss women’s-temperance health nuts who had arranged matters so that twenty-first-century guests still couldn’t get a drink—seemed like the perfect culmination of a Kafkaesque travel experience.
It was late. My husband and I were flying home the next morning, and we couldn’t sleep. We flipped through the TV channels, past the badly dubbed Steven Seagal action films and the ultra-boring, deliriously pompous French talk shows, until at last we found an “adult” station broadcasting from Bavaria that seemed to offer some promise.
First came a sort of slide show of blonde women, built like Wagnerian heroines, with escort-service phone numbers bannered across their prodigious breasts.
This menu of local beauties was followed by a film clip. In the film, two go-go girls were dancing in a bar, both blonde and shirtless, both with a zombie-like affect, both wearing tiny leather miniskirts, which they kept lifting as they danced, and under which they were naked. This went on for quite a while, skirts up, skirts down, until it became as tedious as the French talk shows, only seedier and more depressing.
Except that there was one interesting . . . detail, you might say, an element that riveted our insomniac attention.
In the background, behind the dancing girls, was a recording, playing over and over, of Martin Luther King delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Was the film erotic or pornographic? I would have to say: neither. It certainly didn’t seem to reflect some sexy, sensual welling up of the life force, and quite frankly—though you’ll need to take my word for this—after seeing the film, the last thing in the world that anyone (excepting, I suppose, a few Bavarian maniacs) would want to do was have sex.
Like many distinctions, the border between the erotic and the pornographic has been blurred and redefined, not by the natural evolution of language and culture but by capitalism’s imperative to help the consumer readily locate the product he wants to buy. Beyond any meaning they once possessed, beyond the connotations that still reward consideration, which I’ll consider in a moment, the words erotic and pornographic have by now become niche-marketing tags, designed, like the film-rating system, to answer the logical questions any potential customer might sensibly ask. How naked? How deep? Which orifices? Most important is the unspoken inquiry beneath every purchase decision: What do my desires reveal about who I am?
Erotic now means R-rated, perhaps edging toward NC-17, while pornographic suggests X and the more alarming XXX, a cautionary designation that (like the new meaning of adult) hardly requires a Roland Barthes to deconstruct its semiotics. The harried office worker stopping by the bookstore for something to enliven a solitary weekend might be drawn to a volume entitled Best Erotic Fiction but might shy away from an anthology of the year’s Best Pornographic Fiction, just as the business traveler, returning to the hotel after a day of stressful meetings, may hope to order up some straight-up porn—as opposed to erotic cinema—on the pay-per-view channel.
Meanwhile, the nuances distinguishing the erotic from the pornographic have effectively been reduced so that both locutions suggest nothing more than different degrees and intensities of sexual content and arousal, much as those tiny chili peppers on the Szechuan menu promise or warn of heat and spice. Do you want your twice-cooked pork with the one-pepper icon or two?
What’s been lost in the process is the broader meaning of Eros and erotic, words that have always included the sexual but have also suggested the mysterious, even metaphysical connection between sex and life, between sex and pleasure, between the origin of life and the celebration of life—between the way that life begins and the will to live. If I were asked to design the curriculum for the junior high sex-education class of the future (obviously, a wishful fantasy predicated on a future that permits sex education), I might begin by telling students about the contrast, in Greek culture, between Eros and Thanatos, between the realms of life and death.
Some vestiges of this wider understanding have managed, against all odds, to survive. One could still claim that the dinner scene in Fielding’s Tom Jones is erotic in its depiction of gastronomy as foreplay. Indeed, the erotic is regularly (and most often preciously) invoked in food writing. A restaurant critic might claim that the effect of the fish lightly kissed with a tomato-licorice foam is positively erotic, without (let’s assume) confessing he wants to have intercourse with the halibut on his plate. One can say that the warmth of the sun on the skin, on a cool autumn day, is erotic, again conjuring up the atmosphere of sex but not, specifically, the mechanics of sex.
By contrast, pornography is all about the mechanics, and has always been less about aesthetic content than about physiology. The Greek origin of the word (where it meant “writing about prostitutes”) obviously implies a narrower focus than a word derived from the name of Eros, the god of love. Erotic literature or art can be judged by a wide range of criteria (Is it beautiful? Is it true? Does it reflect the viewer’s own experience of sex or love or pleasure?), whereas the requirements and standards for assessing pornography are, by contrast, simpler: Does it, or does it not, succeed in getting its audience hard?
As in the case of everything remotely or directly related to sex, the most puritanical and hypocritically moralistic elements of our society (a group that, sadly, includes our lawmakers) have managed to surround pornography with such an aura of evil and condemnation that, for many, it has become inextricably associated with sexual violence against women. (My own feeling, or hope, is that pornography does little to incite the would-be rapist; on the contrary, ready access to enough effective porn might prevent the potential attacker from making it out the door to commit his crime.)
The consequence—since we are speaking at least partly of language here—is that the pejorative connotation of the word pornographic has expanded to include the voyeuristic, the invasive, and any text or image that provides the reader or viewer with an inappropriate buzz of suspect curiosity or twisted gratification. I myself have employed the word pornographic to describe news photos of massacres, crime scenes, and accident scenes, pictures in which the victims necessarily have no say about how they are viewed, but in retrospect, I regret having settled for such a simultaneously sensational and approximate locution.
I can’t help wishing I’d held out for something more precise and less loaded. Harking back to its origin, the word has also become associated with exploitation, just as it has become a loosely (too loosely) used synonym for anything creepy, displeasing, or distasteful. It is also, like erotic, used about food—namely, food that is, in quantity and complication, excessive. “That platter of baby lamb’s tongues at the banquet was positively pornographic.”
By that definition, despite its being a sexual turnoff, the film of the two Bavarian women dancing to Martin Luther King was pornographic in the extreme.
In his essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” written in 1956, the year after his novel’s publication, Nabokov offers a characteristically incisive 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 entirely 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 . . .
It was similarly characteristic of Nabokov to want to define the terms of the conversation, then current, about his novel—specifically, about whether or not Lolita was pornographic. Doubtless there are learned societies devoted to the details of Lo and Humbert’s sex life, academic conferences assembled to hear Lacanian readings of what the runaway couple did and didn’t do behind the closed doors of their motel rooms.
Today, the book’s actual sexual content would seem mild (probably not even earning an NC-17 rating) compared with what is “out there.” On the other hand, its nominative subject matter (Humbert Humbert’s pedophilia) is fully as controversial as it was in the 1940s and ’50s, perhaps even more so, now that it is so often among the first things we think of when we see a priest’s cassock or a coach’s whistle or a Boy Scout troop leader’s chest festooned with merit badges.
In any case, the fact is that most readers—or so I’d be willing to bet—tend not to remember the “dirty parts” in Lolita. For whatever reasons, the first tentative gropings and fumblings, and the scenes in which Humbert possesses his adored Lo, are not what lodge in our minds.
I myself have read the novel several times. I’ve retained in memory Humbert’s childhood love affairs, his meeting with Lolita and his courtship of her mother, Charlotte Haze, Charlotte’s convenient accidental death, Lo and Humbert’s cross-country trips, Lolita’s ditching Humbert for the mysterious Clare Quilty, the lower-class incarnation of his beloved that Humbert tracks down to Coalmont, “a small industrial community some eight hundred miles from New York City,” where he finds her, pregnant and living in squalor with her husband, Dick.
And I could hardly forget the chaotic, protracted, exhilaratingly messy scene in which Humbert murders Quilty, a section that—when I was Lolita’s age, more or less—I heard read by Nabokov on the radio. (At the time, I didn’t know what book the passage was from, or who the author was, but nonetheless I somehow understood that it was extraordinary.) In addition, because I had once participated in a marathon reading of Lolita, I remembered the chapter I was assigned to read aloud, the hilarious school-admission interview in which Humbert, who is of course sleeping with his pretend daughter, is lectured by the bluestocking, “progressive” principal, Miss Pratt, who believes she has all the most liberal—the most shockingly revolutionary—ideas about girls and sex and so forth.
I remembered that Humbert was hyperaware of how many beds there were in the motel rooms in which he and Lo stayed. I knew that the couple was having sex, but I simply couldn’t remember any scenes in which they did.
When I mentioned this to a friend, he said, “Are you kidding? Check out the section, early in the book, in which Lo has her legs across Humbert’s lap.”
During that scene, as some readers (though not, evidently, this one) will recall, Humbert contrives to sing a popular song (in which “Carmen” rhymes with “barmen”) as the pressure of Lo’s legs (she is munching on an apple) against his groin arouses him.
Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety of physiological equipoise comparable to certain techniques in the arts) I kept repeating chance words after her—barmen, alarmin’, my charmin’, my carmen, ahmen, ahahamen—as one talking and laughing in his sleep while my happy hand crept up her sunny leg as far as the shadow of decency allowed. . . . And because of her very perfunctory underthings, there seemed to be nothing to prevent my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin—just as you might tickle and caress a giggling child—just that—and: “Oh it’s nothing at all,” she cried with a sudden shrill note in her voice, and she wiggled, and squirmed, and threw her head back, and her teeth rested on her glistening underlip as she half-turned away, and my moaning mouth, gentlemen of the jury, almost reached her bare neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known.
Is the moment erotic? Obviously, the force of Eros is what inspires and rewards Humbert’s faux-innocent and apparently harmless encounter with Lo. Nabokov refers to the “erotic” scenes near the start of his novel, passages that persuaded certain (subsequently disappointed) readers “that this was going to be a lewd book.” But is it pornographic? Gentlemen of the jury, I’d argue that the passage is too cerebral, too humorous, too whimsical, too ironic, and, above all, too giddily verbose to function as pornography. The dazzle of language distracts us from the concentration that sexual excitement provides and requires; it’s rather like having one’s partner begin to prattle, in the midst of lovemaking, about the weather or the stock market or the undone household chores. It’s hard to imagine the reader whose level of titillation would not be significantly lowered by phrases such as “the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion” or “the corpuscles of Krause were entering the phase of frenzy.”
There is also the scene in which Humbert first has sex with Lo.
Ever since the start of their journey (or flight) in the aftermath of Charlotte Haze’s death, Humbert has been planning to drug Lolita with some sort of sleeping pill and (to employ a Humbert-like locution) have his way with her, but—as is so often the case—things turn out rather differently from what our hapless narrator has in mind:
I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me. . . .
If we limit our definition of pornography to that which leads more or less directly to sexual arousal, there are, one can only assume, or perhaps hope, a limited number of readers for whom these scenes will function as pornography—who will feel a rush of desire in response to a heavily ironized account of a middle-aged sleazeball (however charming) attempting to drug and rape a child. Or to the subsequent passage in which Humbert fondles Lo while she is picking her nose and reading the comic pages. Or to the shorthand with which Nabokov describes the lovemaking that precedes the illicit couple’s discovery by two nymphet hikers and their chaperone: “Venus came and went.”
Defending his novel from the charge that it was pornographic, 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, erotic in its opening chapters and then increasingly less so as Humbert’s lust is increasingly transmuted into desperation and self-loathing, let’s return for a moment to the wider way in which pornographic is currently defined: voyeuristic, exploitative, decadent. I remember using the word to describe the popular TV series To Catch a Predator, which ran from 2004 to 2007, a “newsmagazine” program in which obviously ill sex offenders were lured, via Internet chat rooms, into confusing their fantasies with reality. That thirteen-year-old of their dreams wanted them! She was home alone, waiting for them, right now!
Then, exposed and busted by a suave anchorman—on national TV—they were tackled, flung down, and handcuffed, usually on the front lawn of the house in which the sting had occurred.
It’s hard to understand who, exactly, found this spectacle entertaining. But sadly, one can all too easily imagine audiences consciously or (more likely) unconsciously turned on by the vice-cop-on-pervert wrestling matches with which these unfortunate encounters culminated, and by the romance of power and violence they represented.
I’d prefer not to believe that I am living in a culture in which TV viewers got actual hard-ons watching the shaming and sadistic struggles that ended with the perp hog-tied, facedown. But sexuality is a mystery, as individual as our fingerprints, so how can I know whether the satisfaction my fellow Americans took in these performances was putatively “moral,” or physiological, or both?
Among the qualities (beauty, intelligence, grace, complexity, facility of language, and wit, among countless other literary virtues) that distinguish Lolita as a work of art is the fact that it functions as the opposite of—the antidote to—To Catch a Predator. It deepens our well of compassion and sympathy, whether we like it or not. The predator is caught, all right, but first Nabokov’s novel charms and badgers, irritates and delights us into seeing the world through the eyes of the perp.
That near-miraculous process reminds us of a near-miraculous fact: that great art manages to coexist in the same world in which, in a studio somewhere (let’s say, Bavaria), a cameraman shoots some footage of two hapless junkies (I forgot to mention the disturbing close-ups of the needle tracks on the women’s legs) gyrating to techno-pop, and then someone adds, on the audio, the sly, knowing joke. Ha ha, these grinding white girls are Martin Luther King’s dream.
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 perverts on the front lawn.