Mass Culture in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita by Lewis Duncan

Mass Culture in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

BY LEWIS DUNCAN ILLUSTRATED BY SAMANTHA FRIEND

Lolita is a novel crafted with an exuberant and lavish style of prose. Indeed, Nabokov was a writer who placed aesthetics above socio-political engagement. Any “ethical concepts and metaphysical preferences emerge from… the connotations of [his] definition of ‘aesthetic bliss’” found within the foreword for Lolita. He portrays a state of heightened awareness and ecstasy within which the individual can engage more thoroughly with their environment than ever before. His novel is stylised and his protagonist’s consciousness is constructed through his decadent writing in order to purposefully draw the reader into a temporal state where artistic exuberance is present within every facet of his character’s, and therefore the reader’s, perceived sense of reality. Nabokov said himself that he does not believe in ideological abstractions but rather that meaning is extracted from prose through examination of the details. Indeed, this is reflected in Lolita, a novel which appears to the reader as a finely spun silken web of extravagant phraseology, transcendental language, and yet, at its core, a sense of overtly rational, almost scientific precision and attention to detail is dominant.

Contextually, Lolita is a novel written and set in post-War America. The post-War (or Cold War) years were a period of time concerned with methods of re-normalisation – of rectifying the damage done throughout World War II and returning America to a state of comfort and peace. Perhaps influenced by America’s growing fear of com-

munism (demonstrated through its conflicts with Soviet Russia), America became introvertedly concerned with maintaining its own sense of ideological and socio-cultural Americanism. Emphasis was placed on creating a sense of suburban and marital normativity as well as a glorification of values in line with America’s sense of Christian religiosity and capitalist culture. This rejection of alternative methods of social organisation (such as communism in the Cold War and fascism in World War II) fuelled the growth of Western consumerism. Capitalism became ever-more ingrained in the American psyche and the Average American became engrossed in gorging themselves on the fruits of mass-production, media culture and Americanism.

Lolita is a novel very much concerned with this transition. Through its treatment of intense modes of obsessive desire (the semi-relationship between Lolita and Humbert), it explores the pornification of youth culture and the development of an appetitive nature in America’s children. Through the sham marriage of Humbert and Mrs Hayes, it examines and critiques the emergence of a hollow suburban dream where a person’s social status is comprised of mediocre and mundane sociality and the consumption of goods and services. The tale as a whole is a tale of indulgence, appetite, the hyper-sexualisation of pubescence and a carnal obsession with beauty that more than ever consolidates itself in the culture of post-War America.

It seems logical to firstly begin with the central and catalytic relationship of the novel (Humbert and Lolita). Ellen Pifer stipulates that there is a correlation between the monster in Frankenstein and the young girl in Lolita – “The linguistic parallels are … remarkable: the analogy … between Humbert’s self-styled ‘deadly demon,’ the alluring nymphet, and the dreaded ‘daemon,’ in Dr. Frankenstein's words, who haunts his creator.” Through the branding of Lolita as a Nymphet, Pifer is insinuating that like Frankenstein’s monster, Nabokov presents Lolita as captivating her ‘creator’ or pseudo-father figure.

It is arguable to an extent that Lolita is somewhat seductive as a character. Throughout the novel, she is portrayed as a typical pre-teen consumer, devotedly idolising celebrities, reading magazines and watching films – feasting on America’s avidly sexualising and glamorising pop-culture. Even at her young age, she has a preoccupation with style and applies makeup and even develops a sense of vanity: “short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and, to complete the colour scheme, she had painted

her lips”, “she stood … and stared at herself contentedly, not unpleasantly surprised at her own appearance, filling with her own rosy sunshine the surprised and pleased closet-door mirror.” Does her preoccupation with prematurely, yet perhaps unknowingly, sexualising herself, as influenced by American media culture, possibly place some of the blame for Humbert’s morbid fascination on herself? Certainly, towards the end of the novel, Lolita, during their road trip and pseudo-family life, in a sense, becomes aware of the power she has over Humbert, and perhaps calculatingly, uses her beauty, and his obsession, purposefully to manipulate him.

However, it is also arguable that, unlike Frankenstein and his monster, Humbert create Lolita through imaginative distortion. It could be argued that Humbert is the archetypal unreliable narrator and that through tarnishing Lolita as a concept with so much carnal lust that an illusion of reciprocity is created, for the reader, she is transformed into the nymphet that he envisions her to be.

Although Humbert’s fascination with Lolita is singular, prior to their meeting, he treats his fascination with nymphets generally as a scientific and fetishist impulse. When unable to enact his sexual perversions into reality, his desire becomes a vague motif that he placates through visiting parks and psychiatric wards to voyeuristically fantasise about children and he even purchases a prostitute who most closely resembles the nymphet archetype he has conceived. Does he love Lolita? Or is Lolita simply the best actualisation of his fetish that he can find?

Nabokov was a well-known lepidopterist who eagerly collected and categorised beautiful creatures – butterflies. This mode of harnessing something natural, or possessing something beautiful, through comprehensive analysis and categorisation is mirrored in Lolita through Hubert’s analysis of the nymphets he encounters – “photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (‘nature study’)” – and through merely presupposing a particular sort (or species) of young-girl as a nymphet, Humbert is categorising them and this in turn paints him as a sort of morbid and perverted connoisseur. This typically modern preoccupation with luxury and beauty is perhaps being suggested by Nabokov as being encompassing of more than just possessions but also of people and their romantic relations. Is Lolita just his prized specimen? Is the love, depicted in Lolita, in this sexualised cultural modernity, merely an assessment of aesthetic symbols which leads to a con-

clusion on the romantic and sexual value of the individual? Humbert’s preoccupation with Lolita’s physical attributes would certainly suggest so.

Apart from just the pornification of American culture, however, Lolita is very much concerned with the appetitive pandemic and banality of suburban consumerism. In Nabokov’s essay Philistines and Philistinism, he describes an archetypal member of society who he calls a Philistine: An individual who is by their very nature anti-artistic, a walking cliché comprised of stock ideas derived from a pre-conceived vulgar pop-cultural pallet – “A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.” Lolita’s mother (or Mrs Haze) is the central Philistine in Lolita.

According to Nabokov, a defining characteristic of a Philistine is the all-encompassing need to conform. Mrs Haze is instantly characterised as a conformist who is depicted as ideologically and intellectually shallow yet a master of benign sociality – “She was obviously one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul … women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlour conversation, but very particular about the rules of such a conversations.” Upon her and Humbert’s marriage, her first act as a married woman is to promptly interrogate Humbert about God, when throughout the novel, apart from the societally expected visits to church, she has shown little or no spirituality. The next step is to appropriately decorate the house with the correct furniture and ornaments. Vapid and superficial Mrs Haze is the embodiment of American suburban mundanity; she is a gossiping socialite who is insistently focused on materiality.

However, perhaps it is not Lolita and Humbert’s American road trip, the ultimate leisure activity and the vessel for Humbert to actualise his erotic obsessions upon Lolita, or even Mrs Haze’s insipid and congenial vapidity that forms the central example of “poshlust” – Nabokov’s phrase that encapsulates low-brow and materialistic pop-culture – within Lolita. “The leading example of poshlust in Lolita would not be its heroine's immersion in mass culture … Nor … would it be Charlotte with her weakness for Humbert's ‘European’ cultivation. Instead it is Beardsley School with its much loftier pretensions to culture. After all, by sponsoring a student production of that fashionably arty play The Enchanted Hunters, Beardsley was the agent that in delivering Lolita from Humbert drew her into Quilty's orbit.” The play represents a turning

point in the relationship dynamic between Lolita and Humbert of which Humbert is unaware. In the lodge (The Enchanted Hunters) Humbert is the hunter and Lolita is the pray. In the play, Lolita is the huntress or seductress and synonymously, in the plot, she gains increasing amounts of power over Humbert as the novel progresses. Theatre, in the novel, becomes symbolic, an encapsulation of artifice, and Humbert, aside from aligning Lolita with Quilty, blames the play The Enchanted Hunters for Lolita developing the ability to lie and manipulate him.

All in all, Lolita deals with issues surrounding mass culture in post-War America with devastating insight and through incredibly well-crafted prose. The novel was received with incredulity and shock and yet went on to consolidate itself in our cultural psyche as a prominent symbol of sexualisation, carnal obsession and the rise of consumerism. In 21st-century pop-culture, the character Lolita has been distorted. Lana Del Rey, a pop-singer, even devoted an album thematically to the character Lolita by metaphorically identifying herself with the figure of the young girl used and abused by older men by sampling lines directly from the book and using them as lyrics in her songs.

Through glamorisation and further sexualisation of Lolita as a motif, it has become clear that as time has gone on, we have become only more introvertedly and increasingly concerned with our own sexual perversions to the point where the victim of molestation is culturally celebrated as a sex symbol. Whether Nabokov intended the novel Lolita to read as a warning against cultural pornification or not, Lana Del Rey’s version of Lolita is deeply ironical. Lolita from the outset was a victim of the sexualised mass culture she was born into, and of predatory older men, and yet Lana Del Rey takes part in the very evil the book is concerned with through her perverse influencing of children’s sexual sensibilities. In the novel, Lolita ends up emotionally scarred, pregnant and poor by the age of 17, and Humbert ends up heartbroken and imprisoned. Although Nabokov states that he wishes to distance himself from ideological abstractions, I cannot help but feel that this novel enacts itself as a warning against the polluting capacity that mass-sexualised culture can have upon our fragile and easily-influenced sensibilities.