by
Jascha Kessler
Tabula rasa, we're born: helpless, able to distinguish only elementary pain or pleasure; from our first cry to that last, weak sigh, we're required to learn from every sensation, or suffer by our ignorance. Suffering companions us nonetheless. Waking and sleeping, how obtuse we are, subsisting more or less semi-conscious, scarcely sentient, though presuming we wake. If so, we are not much more awake than a somnambulist. So trammeled up by these dulled senses — blind to the light of light, deaf to the sound of sounds, — and so abstracted from our own phenomenal being and from that of those who present themselves before us, we must momently be beginning, even at our very end. Inattentive unless roused, we apprehend
by fits and starts and accidentally the reality we are immersed in, like that creature Caliban, who lived on a blessèd isle yet believed himself mocked by music from wandering spirits glimpsed like a rainbow-hued flash on the tropical air. Deficient as we are, fortunate is the one that finds a teacher.
[ ... ]
The notion of Art's secular epiphany takes us to Vladimir Nabokov, a reader of Joyce. As I recall, it was about 1956 or so that an excerpt of his then unpublishable LOLITA appeared in an early number of Anchor Review. I was working at Harcourt, Brace & Company that year. I was convinced from just those few pages that here was something serious and important, and did my best to try to talk senior editors into recognizing a wonderful opportunity. As we know, it was Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press, a Paris firm subsisting on pornography and a few "avant garde" writers, which seized it. The rest is history. I read the novel in 1957 in Olympia's paperback edition, which I came upon already
catalogued, in the library at Hamilton College, where I'd gone to teach. In its thrall, I "taught" LOLITA at UCLA from the 1970s on, and reread it yearly with an eye to finding new things to disclose to students — not that college-age kids clawing their way out of adolescence could clearly remember or understand that period from nine to twelve in their own lives or grasp what its author meant by "æsthetic bliss," the effect he aimed at. Nabokov used that term to make a distinction between the novel that provides "æsthetic bliss" and those that purvey what he put down as "topical trash."
In an era like ours, saturated by easy and ubiquitous pornography, Nabokov's readers will have become inured to the vapid and vulgar avatars of Lolita advertised everywhere, in her "real" as well as her fancied permutations. There's a too-easy notion of what the author meant by
"nymphet." Whether it be a child-girl, an incipient girl-woman, that vicissitude in the life cycle of the butterfly, or the ghost of E. A. Poe's Annabel Lee that hovers over the pages of Humbert Humbert's pseudo-confession, all our Lolitas are poor facsimiles, commercial and sterile icons coarsely fleshed — too-too solidly fleshed. Stand-ins for an ethereal, ephemeral trope, they display what Humbert loathes: their immanent resemblance to Dolly Haze's hungry, hapless mother. The mystery of their ephemeral attraction, I mean Lolita's mystery, is hardly resolved when Nabokov informs us that his inspiration derived from the germ of a short story suggested by a newspaper piece about an ape caged in the Paris zoo. That creature, supplied with paper and crayon, had scrawled the world he looked out at — a world seen through his bars. How is one to connect the crude,
vertical lines of such a sketch, and its vague shadowy forms with the story of Humbert Humbert's sad life, written in jail while awaiting a jury's verdict? Even if there ever was a French experiment in animal psychology, the anecdote smacks of parable — it is au fond Humbert's imprisoned apologia for the former mad quest of the Platonic erotic by his hirsute self.
I suppose the rejection of LOLITA by 17 and more American publishers, and the subsequent (and continuing) revulsion of critics and readers in this country when it did at last appear, was driven by their subconscious affinity and denied affiliation with Humbert (the Hummer). The value of virgins, even pre-nubile girls has always been very high. Such readers, who are legion, may have felt they were indeed his semblable, all-too capable of committing his crime, if too untalented to write about it in such superlatively witty and captivating prose. The outrage of envious inferiors is what they express. In any case, the girl Dolores Haze was no longer a nymphet on the night Humbert drugged her and took her as his "bride" in their room at The Enchanted Hunters in Briceland, since that night was the time of the onset of her first menses. For that matter, her virginity had been lost earlier at a summer camp.
I have always been bemused by Humbert's author, who called attention to Freud and Freudians from his first novel on, who mocked psychoanalysis yet nevertheless has Humbert discuss the origin of his "fixation" on pre-nubile girls in a cataclysmic hour of boyhood — his interrupted, never-to-be-consummated deflowering of a lovely girl-child (herself explicitly an avatar of Poe's Annabel Lee) —- an hour simultaneous with the death of his mother, absurdly struck by lightning ("All the night tide, I lie down by the side…" — in a tomb by the sea!). My bafflement is caused partly by the Joycean richness of the layer of fictive reality superimposed on "real" reality, both realities inhabited by the semblables of mythological and metaphysical "reality." "Briceland," for instance, is a variant of Broceliand, the forest where the great wizard Merlin was held captive by a fairy girl, herself retrieved dwelling in a grotto centuries later by Keats' knight errant, who only after waking ruined and abandoned after a dreamed night of love recognizes her as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." [But to pursue her archetype would lead us us back through millennia and around the world.] Taken together, and as demonstrated in Nabokov's late investigation of Time and Death in LOOK AT THE HARLEQUINS! and TRANSPARENT THINGS, they constitute a complexity that saturates our being with Beings. His nymphet is an image of images, an image of the Image, which represents the Platonic Idea itself. Perhaps that is the way artists show The Thing-in-Itself, which is impossible to know, though we may chatter about it. Though it is easy know what words say, I waited more than a half-century to glimpse what they might mean. I take Joyce's words about epiphany as my clue.
So far as concerns Woman, not that She of Goethe's Ewige Weiblichkeit, but the female in herself, I, like most males, have been acquainted with their corporeality. She is no stranger, neither in health and illness nor yet in puberty or old age. Apart from the vicissitudes of the erotic, rather, the sexual life, I have held and been held in her arms, — as infant, as son and lover, as husband, father and grandfather. This is our common experience, for both for male and female. The sex's palpable reality is a given, our banal, daily commonplace from time immemorial. Nevertheless, as anthropology, mythology and folklore tell us, her sheer physicality constitutes for men (and for women too, it may be supposed) the barrier to the perception of whatever it is that Joyce wanted to suggest by his epiphany — that instant of "realization" in which the apparition of something like yet nonetheless other, altogether and essentially other, is manifested.
In literature, that moment is what the short story seeks to come at, in Joyce's DUBLINERS, in most of Poe's fictions, as well as in de Maupassant, Chekhov or Babel. It is recognizable now and again in long forms too, in Homer, in Indian epics, in myths and fairy tales. There is a paradox when the noumenal is revealed or reveals itself, since we do not easily recognize the sacred in the instant it inhabits or assumes a form in the protean profane. An epiphany may regarded as the reverse of apotheosis. But, we should bear in mind that when Athena shows herself as herself to Odysseus, for instance, it is not an original event (if there ever was such) — it is a recounting, an event we hear about in words. All praise to the poet! Still, Homer recites what is said to have happened once upon a time. On the other hand, in LOLITA the instantiation of the Nymphet as his own nymphet is precisely what obsesses Humbert Humbert, what he has desired to take and hold so as to complete that never-consummated act of union lost by mischance in childhood when an old man, a Proteus, popped up from out the Mediterranean with a shout beside the little cave on the strand, sundering the pair of children not yet quite joined. Inevitably, since every moment from the beginning of time is novel and nothing can be the same again, he is doomed to fail.
*
[ ... ]
Yet I knew that even to incline towards her would be to profane, to violate, and betray …. Yet betray what? I might set out a handbook of injunctions; but they would beg the moral question. Worse, they would sound as inane and asinine as Humbert Humbert's hideously tortured, and grotesque, swooning ejaculations. Nabokov did after all articulate this very phenomenon. Was he spinning mere fantasy? Had he ever seen a child like the ethereal creature who stood before me?
"Good night," I said. I said, "Be careful, dear, won't you?" And added, haplessly, "Good luck."
She curtsied like a ballerina and turned away, skipping into the darkness. I
waved at that vanishing apparition in white, that fairy visitor. I was aware my wife had come to stand beside me. She looked amused when I croaked, "Did you see that?"
"Pretty thing. But — alone out there on this night?"
She sighed. Her maternal concern was nothing to me. I was exhilarated. No, no, Monsieur Humbert, I muttered, you never saw anything like that! Your Lolita, your little Lola, was but a shell, a dried, dull cocoon, a fading relic of the nymphet she had been before you ever found her. Your Dolores Haze had already left the true stage of the nymph behind her when she offered you a nibble at her apple that afternoon. This child, this nameless fairy, is the thing itself!
I closed the door. My knees trembled, my heart was choked with a sense of exaltation. Not with desire or longing, such
as Humbert Humbert had wished to invoke or evoke from out the whirlwind of time past. This was sorrow. This was that deeply deep sorrow that may drift over one on the first fleeting day of Spring. I'd been graced for a moment. What else is grace? It was something scarcely to be believed in the evanescence of our existence in this world; something seldom given credence. It was that fantastic something suggested only in art. I had seen before me what poets like Keats or Joyce or Wallace Stevens — or Nabokov — strive to express, when they attempt to convey an essence that offers itself but fortuitously — and for a moment blinds us by its glory of Beauty incarnate.
October 23, 2006
Jascha Kessler,
Professor of English & Modern Literature at UCLA,
has published 7 books of his poetry and fiction as well as 6 volumes
of translations of poetry and fiction from Hungarian, Persian and Bulgarian.