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Journal article
Scandal's Second Life: Lolita and the Perversion of the Text
Popular culture review, Vol.13(1), pp.53-61
01/2002
Abstract
excerpt - By way of concluding the section of Lolita dedicated to her supposed “precursor” (9), narrator Humbert Humbert informs his reader, “I broke her spell by incarnating her in another” (15). In his own account of his primal scene of arrested sexual development, Humbert thus makes available yet another layer of the novel's thoroughgoing critique of Freudian psycho-sexuality. For by offering a childhood “precursor” and the consequent need to replace the object of thwarted desire, Nabokov's novel so perfectly conforms to a Freudian explanation for Humbert's adult perversion as to render the reductiveness of that model inescapable. Yet, the incarnation of a substitute object of desire suggests both the utopian possibility of the cinematic adaptation of a novel and its greatest danger. For the cinematic incarnation may substitute for the original object of desire but only at the cost of “breaking the spell” of that which it replaces. The controversy surrounding the recent film version of Lolita directed by Adrian Lyne reveals the anxiety attendant to cinematic adaptation as the danger, to use Humbert's terms, of “eclipsing” a fictional “prototype” (40). Moreover, as it mirrors the language of erotic attachment dramatized in Nabokov's novel, the popular discourse addressing Lyne's film offers an alternative model of cinematic adaptation premised on perversion, here understood as the conflation of the aesthetic with the erotic in the articulation of desire. In this way, popular discourse returns to the scholarly conversation about cinematic “fidelity” to a literary “precursor” which it has routinely repressed: the implicit eroticism of its model.
Details
- Title
- Scandal's Second Life
- Publication Details
- Popular culture review, Vol.13(1), pp.53-61
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publisher
- John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
- Number of pages
- 9
- Copyright
- © 2002 The Authors
- Identifiers
- 99380580132406600
- Academic Unit
- College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities; English
- Language
- English