Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 60
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Popular Culture Review
elaborate analyses of Lolita's subtle morality, the marketers choose instead to let
eros and art supercede questions of morality and ethical imperative.
In this way, the packaging of the novel reproduces the conflation between
aesthetic and erotic pleasure celebrated by Lolita's pedophiliac anti-hero. For, as
one critic so aptly reminds Lolita's readers, Humbert’s theory of art merges with
his theory of perversion precisely in his explication of the “nymphet” (Wood 122).
To identify the nymphet, one must have a particular aesthetic sensitivity. As Humbert
details to his reader, “You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite
melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous
flame permanently glowing in your subtle spine.. ., in order to discern at once, by
ineffable signs— the slightly feline outline of a cheekbone, the slenderness of a
downy limb, and other indices which despair and shame and tears of tenderness
forbid me to tabulate—the little deadly demon among the wholesome children”
(17). “Artist,” “madman,” and aesthetically discerning observer, the “nympholept”
confirms his perversion in the complete identification of his aesthetic with his
erotic desire. Moreover, as Humbert places himself in the tradition of Dante, Virgil,
Petrarch, and Poe, he implies that his perversion is not just evidence of his aesthetic
sophistication but proof-perfect of his art (19). Ironically, then, insofar as Random
House’s paperback advertises L olita as the fusion of eros and art, it recommends
the book as an object of desire that conforms precisely to the definition of perversion
provided by the pedophile in the body of the text.
Echoing the marketing tactics of Random House, the pages of such journals
as Entertainm ent Weekly, Esquire, and Prem iere offer a popular discourse that
implicitly theorizes cinematic adaptation as the successful blurring of aesthetic
and erotic desires, that is, as perversion.^ Just as Random House reproduces and
naturalizes the relations within the novel as relations between director and text,
these journals faithfully reproduce the scandal over the novel’s content as a scandal
over the adaptation of the text: Lyne is to Humbert as the novel Lolita is to the
character of the same name. Just as Lolita is the object of desire in Nabokov’s
novel, subject to Humbert’s misinterpretation, so too, the novel is the innocent, if
precocious, object of desire, vulnerable to the bumbling, misinterpretation, and
exploitation of the cinematic medium. Like Humbert, Lyne is portrayed as an artist
seeking to achieve “aesthetic bliss,” to remain “faithful” to his object of desire, to
vindicate himself through his aesthetic prowess, and all the while, to occupy the
position of the renegade, the free thinker, the smasher of taboos.^ Thus, as these
journals defend and/or celebrate Lyne, they do so through their insistence that he
“loves” the novel he seeks to incarnate in another form, and that such love legitimates
and gives license to dissident nonconformity.
Yet, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire, and Prem iere all link Lyne’s aesthetic
daring with his erotic desires, thus underscoring his identification with Humbert.