Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 59

Lolita and the Perversion of the Text

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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 suiTOunding 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.^ 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