Recent uproars over Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, Martin Scorsese’s film, The Last Temptation of Christ, and the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano have raised again the vexed question of how society should treat offensive or shocking content in art.

In one of his hard-punching, voice-of-the-common-man columns, Patrick J. Buchanan mocked a critical establishment that had permitted works like Serrano’s “Piss Christ”—a photograph of a crucifix immersed in a jar of the artist’s urine—so much as even to lay claim to the status of art. Although Buchanan may not have been in command of all the aesthetic ramifications of this issue, he intuitively put his finger on one of the weak spots of the criticism that has arisen in this century in conjunction with artistic modernism.

To be sure, offensive and obscene elements have always existed in art, but modern criticism especially has had to deal with the insistent and progressive artistic exploration of the forbidden frontiers of the human experience. In their efforts to justify such explorations, however, critics have not always carefully and systematically thought out the full implications of the aesthetic claims they were making.

The current debate often polarizes around what could be seen as two extremes—either one is a moralistic yahoo, eager to impose his own impossibly lowbrow tastes upon society, or one is a defender of absolute artistic freedom and the sacred integrity of the artist tout court. In the dinner-party discussions in which one may find oneself embroiled nowadays, the case of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita is often cited as a vindication of the necessity for total artistic freedom. Lolita at first had trouble finding a publisher and, once published (in 1955), ran into censorship problems both here and abroad. The subject of a two-hour debate in the British Parliament, Lolita was assailed by public figures and reviewers and pronounced by John Gordon, chief editor of the London Sunday Express, to be “about the filthiest book I’ve ever read.” But the novel also attracted notable supporters like Graham Greene in England and F.W. Dupee and Lionel Trilling in America, where it became a huge best-seller and managed to achieve the status of a literary masterpiece and, for some, a permanent place in the canon.

Against this backdrop, the recent publication of a collection of Nabokov’s letters¹ provides an occasion to address at least certain aspects of the question of offensive content in works of art. Some reviewers, indeed, have read in these letters yet another enactment of Nabokov’s noble aesthetic stand against the philistines. Yet here and there emerge hints that the lessons of the Lolita episode may not be so self-evident after all.

_____________

Of course we must begin by acknowledging that, offensive content notwithstanding, with Nabokov’s Lolita we are a long way from photographs of crucifixes submerged in urine. Nabokov was a master prose stylist, and the forbidden but thoroughly consummated love of the middle-aged and preposterously named Humbert Humbert for his twelve-year-old step-daughter Dolores, a.k.a. Lolita, is narrated not only with exquisite artistry but with a meticulous intensity and a high, arching, piercing humor as well.

Nevertheless, a purely aesthetic defense of Lolita proves insufficient. For one thing, Nabokov himself was not always consistent about it. It is true that from the heights of artistic hauteur, he on more than one occasion assailed the “common scolds and old philistines” who branded Lolita obscene, and in the essay that is now appended to all editions of the novel, his defense certainly rests on purely aesthetic grounds. For Nabokov, Lolita’s stylistic elegance and formal integrity were what set it apart from pornography. Furthermore, he reiterated in that essay his disdain for didactic fiction and has insisted that Lolita had “no moral in tow.”

Yet elsewhere Nabokov did attempt a moral defense of Lolita. His biographer Andrew Field reports that when the subject of the novel came up, “Nabokov would have only two things to say about it: that it was a work of art, and that it had a high moral content.”

In a remark from the present collection that has impressed several reviewers, Nabokov seems to clarify the confusion: “I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art,” he wrote in 1945, long before the Lolita imbroglio. “What I do deny and am prepared to fight to the last drop of my ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every vestige of art in a work however skillfully written.”

One gets the impression from these letters that Nabokov would very much have liked the aesthetic to be a sufficient sacred world unto itself, but was often drawn willy-nilly into the confusions and messes of the real world which the novel, “bright book of life” (in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase) that it is, must after all portray. Some of his references to Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago reveal this ambiguity. Nabokov frequently insists in his denunciations of that novel that he is “not concerned with any but the artistic aspects of the book. From this point of view,” he claims, “Zhivago is a sorry thing, clumsy, melodramatic, with stock situations and trite characters.” But it is not long before he is wandering into the “novel’s historical background,” which he finds “muddled and frequently quite false to facts (thus his ignoring of the liberal revolution and its Western European ideals in the sequence of events leading to the Bolshevik coup d’état is quite in keeping with the Communist party line).”

At any rate, for all his mocking of the “stuffy philistine,” Nabokov’s resolution in Lolita of the extreme behavior he has depicted is morally quite conventional—Humbert’s lustful obsession for Lolita turns into a deep, unconditional love as he achingly repents his wickedness in having destroyed her childhood and ultimately her life. Thus any purely aesthetic defense is undercut not only by some of Nabokov’s own pronouncements but by the novel itself—presumably the “aesthetic bliss” of rendering Humbert’s intoxication with Lolita was not, finally, sufficient even for the author. In the end, it is the moral element that for Nabokov rescues Lolita from the charge of obscenity, and the same element would also seem part of any claim the novel might make to greatness. By contrast, the purely aesthetic defense turns out to be something of a pose, a dialectical riposte to what Nabokov saw as the narrowness and bigotry of Main Street America.

_____________

Given Nabokov’s evident seriousness about the moral dimension of Lolita, it is especially interesting that even some of its admirers who did not find this dimension truly convincing nevertheless celebrated the novel as a major work of art. F.W. Dupee, for example, staunchly opposed the idea that “Lolita is no more than a very brilliant joke or literary burlesque” and insisted that the novel be taken seriously, pointing to the depth and intensity of Humbert’s remorse. But then in a strange twist, the implications of which he did not fully acknowledge, Dupee almost seemed to see in this aspect of the novel the kind of clumsy moralizing Nabokov himself deplored:

It is the author’s intervening on Humbert’s behalf and playing the role straight in order to make a vital point. So, too, with Humbert’s belated love cries for his Lolita, which seem to be dictated by some principle of compensation and ring a little false (to me).

Likewise Lionel Trilling insisted that

the legitimizing of Lolita must not mislead us about its nature. It must not tempt us into taking the correct enlightened attitude—“Well, now, what was all the fuss about? Here is the book brought back into the full light of day, and of course we can very plainly see that there is nothing shocking about it.” The fact is that Lolita is indeed a shocking book. It means to be shocking and it succeeds in its intention.

Even further, Trilling contended,

we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents. . . But we have only to let the immediate influence of the book diminish a little with time . . . we have only to move back into the real world . . . to feel again the outrage at the violation of the sexual prohibition. And to feel this the more because we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know is revolting.

Although he acknowledged that Nabokov might have simply “wanted to shock us merely for shocking’s sake,” “to make us uneasy with ourselves, less sure of our moral simplicity than we have been,” Trilling argued that “the real reason why Mr. Nabokov chose his outrageous subject matter is that he wanted to write a story about love”-not our present-day, sanitized, rationalized, healthy-marriage, good-relationship kind of love, but mad, scandalous, obsessive, erotic, abject, quivering “passion-love.” The only way Nabokov could expound this type of love, in an age like our own, said Trilling, was through the still-forbidden attraction of a mature man for a young girl.

Like Dupee, Trilling did not entirely trust Humbert’s moral transformation at the novel’s end, and wondered if it might not have been intended ironically. Yet Trilling went Dupee one further by refusing to take his own “uneasiness with the tragic Humbert” as reflecting a flaw in Nabokov’s presentation:

Indeed, for me one of the attractions of Lolita is its ambiguity of tone . . . and its ambiguity of intention, its ability to arouse uneasiness, to throw the reader off balance, to require him to change his stance and shift his position and move on. Lolita gives us no chance to settle and sink roots. Perhaps it is the curious moral mobility it urges upon us that accounts for its remarkable ability to represent certain aspects of American life.

Without taking anything away from the brilliance of Trilling’s essay, it is possible to see in it an example of the values of modernist criticism—with its emphasis on the unexplored, the forbidden, the anti-social—fastening themselves fatally onto the critical consciousness and extinguishing all other critical values. Thus for Trilling, Nabokov chose a shocking subject in order the better to bring us to an extreme experience of the kind generally unavailable in our contemporary existence, while Nabokov’s awkward handling of the moral transformation of his main character translates into a rich plethora of modernist “uncertainty” and “ambiguity” and “uneasiness.” The moral difficulties raised by the novel—described so well by Trilling as “the fact that we have been seduced into conniving in the violation [of a child], because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know is revolting”—are resolved in favor of the critical values of modernism.

Before discussing Lolita specifically, Trilling had digressed to reaffirm that “the explicit representation in literature (or the graphic arts—or music, for that matter) of the actual sexual conduct of human beings . . . is a perfectly acceptable artistic enterprise,” and “that, if it is carried out with some skill, it will raise lustful thoughts in the reader,” and “that this in itself provides no ground for objection.”

Trilling wished

to be entirely clear on this point. I am not taking the position of liberal and progressive lawyers and judges. I am not saying that literature should be permitted its moments of pornography because such moments are essential to the moral truth which a particular work of literature is aiming at; or because they are essential to its objective truth; or because, when taken in context, they cannot really arouse the normal mature reader to thoughts of lust. I am saying that I see no reason in morality (or in aesthetic theory) why literature should not have as one of its intentions the arousing of thoughts of lust. . . .

But following D.H. Lawrence, to whom he acknowledged himself indebted for this discussion, Trilling conceded that “there are discriminations to be made among kinds of lust, of which some tend to humanize, others to dehumanize us.” Since this “gives society an unusually high stake in sexuality as a literary subject,” Trilling was willing to let the distinction be made by the courts, even at times to the point of censorship.

Although Trilling insisted that Lolita would pass any court test of censorship, he never made himself clear on the question of whether Lolita is humanizing or dehumanizing. Moreover, his discussion, in which Humbert’s passion for Lolita is a variation on the courtly-love tradition of a man’s adoration for an unattainable and indifferent mistress, quite blithely ignores certain immensely unsavory aspects of the novel.

It is true that Lolita does not return Humbert’s passion, and remains emotionally remote from him, but it is also true that she is in virtual captivity to Humbert through most of the novel, that she tries repeatedly to register her childish protests against the “filthy things” they do together, that she sobs herself to sleep at night. Nabokov also does not shrink from portraying the truly corrupt dimension of their coupling in which her vulnerability, her helplessness, even her tiny size against Humbert’s bulk give rise to a cruelty which is not incidental but part and parcel of his enjoyment of her, as when in bed he tussles with her, rolling her head on his knee, her face “bright with tears,” or when he quietly but forcibly separates her from her playmate “for a quick connection before dinner,” or when he laughs heartily at her hysteria after lovemaking.

Many have implied in the recent debates that it is as much the aesthetic impoverishment of a work like “Piss Christ” as its presumed moral offensiveness that should have debarred it from any claim to the status of art. But this skirts the problem that something can be well done and still be morally repugnant, in fact be even more morally repugnant because so well done. We have only to think for a moment of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, a film which glorifies not only Nazism but actual Nazis, and not only Nazis but Hitler, and not an actor impersonating Hitler but Hitler himself. The fact that such a mesmerizingly haunting movie could be made to extol so evil a philosophy tells us something about the limits of pure aestheticism, for Triumph of the Will is magnificently executed, and rest assured that no awkward moral revisionism is trundled in at the end.

_____________

One of the wonders of modern criticism has been its ability to see art on its own terms, as a “sacred wood,” a separate universe, a self-contained sovereignty; this approach has yielded some superb criticism, and is certainly an excellent way to teach literature in the classroom. When asked if the artist was responsible to society, Nabokov loftily replied that the artist was responsible to no one but himself, and of course such a sentiment is meant to contain the idea of a responsibility that is really larger than that embodied in the question—the poet as unacknowledged legislator of humanity. But there may be something of a delusion behind this notion, the same delusion evidenced in these letters when Nabokov sings of “the inherent morality of uninhibited art,” the same romantic delusion about the inherent morality of the uninhibited person freed from social constraints from which so much suffering has arisen.

At its best, modernist literature has itself criticized the aestheticism that it so often embodies; the possibility that an excessive emphasis on beauty and form may actually be dehumanizing is dealt with by Henry James, by Thomas Mann, and even at times by Nabokov. Yet modernist critics have often surrendered the very duty that a perhaps naive Patrick Buchanan seems to feel belongs to the critical enterprise—distinguishing between good and bad, or good and evil, or the humanizing and dehumanizing elements in works of art.

Simon Karlinsky of Berkeley once declared that the publication of Lolita in America and England signaled the final “collapse of the Victorian moralistic censorship that had persisted in Western countries till the end of the 1950’s.” But it might be added that the critical discussion of Lolita signaled the collapse of a certain type of Victorian critical authority as well. Would Matthew Arnold have surrendered to the courts his judgment of the humanizing or dehumanizing effects of a work of art, as his disciple Lionel Trilling was prepared to do?

No wonder, then, that the government has now stepped waist high into the critical gap.

_____________

¹ Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters 1940-1977, edited by Dimitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 582 pp., $29.95.