Transcend the Transgressive
Echoes of St. Paul in Lolita.
The two noblemen, Lucius and Mamercus, strode ahead of their followers and expected the two prisoners were not far behind them. They’d gained nearly two dozen of their countrymen, fellow veterans and men of respect, en route to the magistrates’ portico beyond the marketplace. The high sun cut among the tents to the ground, to light their way. So weak were the two vagrant prisoners that they’d needed only three bystanders to seize them.
The noblemen surged through the portico, shoving aside attendants until they stood before the magistrates themselves. They bowed and said, “Ave.” The magistrates said the same from their seats. They looked from the noblemen, to the captive vagrants, to the impromptu contubernia arrayed behind them, and back to the noblemen.
“These men are insurrectionists,” said Lucius. “They are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us to accept or practice.”
“What are laws for,” demanded Mamercus, his voice churning to a bellow, “if not the punishment of vagrants like these?” The men of the contubernia raised their voices to his, to deafen their charges and themselves with their own complaints against these men, charges of personal dislike and divine offense and inappropriate appeals to family members and plotted slave revolts. The prisoners flinched at the cacophony, pinioned and barely able to raise their heads. They already bore discolored eyes, swollen lips, and bruises beneath their clothes.
The magistrates already agreed, and they already had severe punishments in mind. The Roman colony needed public enemies like these, to forge opinion by public might, the joining of men, and outrage of gods and home. “Strip them,” the eldest magistrate called to the lictors in attendance. “Bind and beat them, and empty a cell for them.”
Two of the lictors untied the leather thongs from their bundles of rods, which Lucius and Mamercus were happy to receive for binding the captives. The contubernia set about tearing the vagrants’ clothes from them to deliver them naked to the two pairs of authorities—the noblemen to bind, the lictors to batter them with rods.
To Transgress, We Need Only the Word
In the histories written in Acts, here were several scenes of public turmoil like the specific incident above (Acts 16:16-22). Paul and Silas, the above vagrants in the eye of the Roman colony of Philippi, faced mobs and magistrates in Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus, and Jerusalem. In one of their previous trips, the two missionaries had been mistaken for Greek gods in Lystra. Paul was stoned and left for dead in the dust beyond the city walls when he emphatically rejected his own godhood in favor of “the living God, who made the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything in them.”
These bearers of the early church couldn’t help but transgress by the gospel. They were reborn through an unwelcome sect deemed heretical by their Jewish brothers, and the new life they preached (from the metaphysical paradigm of gracious salvation by the resurrected Christ to the daily practice of egalitarian love and refusing the cult of the Caesar) was too total, too keen to the core of every person’s life, for many nonbelievers to tolerate.
Even the cross—the very vehicle Christ selected to love His people for all time—was a Roman torture so shameful that both Romans and Jews refused to speak of it. According to the historian Tom Holland, the earliest formal account of Roman crucifixion came from the gospels. Crucifixion was a taboo symbol of shameful, groveling death for the enslaved enemies of Rome. Speaking of it, much less testifying to its significance for all people, was socially and politically unwelcome.
Staid as we might like to think Christianity today, it began in transgression. At its Spirit-led best, it continues in transgression, at odds with the world that the Lord so loves.
So, too, do artists. The means and ends of the transgression differ, but the hair-raising act is inescapable.
Offensive art has its own centuries of history, from Martialis to Chaucer to Robert Burns to Bret Eason Ellis (I’m not speaking here of artists who offend in their living). The act of transgression, for the writer creating a text of multiple meanings, is aesthetic and itself inescapable. To unfurl it, I take as my aesthetic guide the Apostle Paul, alongside an unlikely late saint of Western literature.
Does “saint” seem the wrong word for the subject?
I venture the artist and writer Adam Lehrer would think so. His preference is for the mythologized bad boys of previous centuries: “Where are the rules breakers? Where are the Genet’s? Where are the Acconci’s?” Lehrer demanded in the essay, “Amanda Gorman And The Rise Of The Poet Propagandist.” That 2021 essay introduced me to Lehrer and his pantheon of troublemaking elect through his rejection of Gorman, the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States and speaker at the 2020 presidential inauguration.
Lehrer’s rejection of Gorman’s poetry and her place in American culture is forcefully consistent with his preferred transgressive exemplars: “She certainly isn’t materializing the ‘violent contradictions’ that Deleuze found so thrilling in the work of Artaud,” he writes. “Nor does she seem to ‘desire the impossible’ in the way that Bataille noted that Baudelaire did. And while Richard Wright’s poetry was a vicious lyrical assault on the ideology that legitimized inequality and is credited with improving race relations leading up to the civil rights movement, Gorman’s work harbors the illusion that electing agents of the carceral state to the highest office in the land should be accepted as proof of material progress for the many (deeply vulgar and grotesque).”
Gorman the poet and American phenomenon is “repugnant,” Lehrer writes, because she doesn’t or can’t make the good trouble an artist should. “Gorman’s work and her success are,” Lehrer writes, “[a] testament to how far we’ve fallen. A pillar to our acquiescence to the mystified power of the owners above us.”
He clarifies by way of the philosopher of transgression, Georges Bataille: “[Poetry] can be a disruption of the natural order of things.” Gorman is no artist worth having because her poetry does not disrupt “the natural order of bourgeois democracy in late capitalism in an empire on the decline.” (These last words reveal the material sociopolitical ends of Lehrer’s preoccupations, but his argument also has the aesthetics I seek.)
If you find Lehrer a little much, you’re not alone. Grant Tyler formally rebutted of Lehrer’s anti-moralistic artistic stance (“Art’s Moral Fetish”) in Caesura Magazine and, oddly, cemented the escapability of art that transgresses even subtly.
Part and parcel of a printed showdown, Tyler calls Lehrer on hypocritical aesthetic thinking: “As a critic of the collapsed distinction between art and artist, he commits that very offense. An advocate of moral ambiguity, he prescribes the correct cynicism.” But Tyler’s affirmation of the aesthetic experience is where it gets interesting.
“The aesthetic experience of great works of art can be best described as an ambivalent one; not a lukewarm ambiguousness, but an experience that is at once piercing cold and scalding hot,” Tyler writes. “Great artworks are a crystallization, a condensation—yet, not an ossification—of the subjective experience of the commodity-form, which is an experience of conflict, crisis, and self-contradiction. This does not rebut Picasso’s quip that ‘art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth,’ but instead captures it in a different register: art is just as false as it is more real than reality.” His refutation of Lehrer’s shock-to-the-system aesthetic still commends an art that transgresses.
When was the last time you had “an experience of conflict, crisis, and self-contradiction”? Those are the experiences of dull discomfort low in the skull, of lost minutes lying awake to ponder just where the sweet envenomed hook took hold in the heart. They are certainly troubling, if they’re any good.
For the writer, leaving a reader untouched is to miss them. But to truly touch them is to transgress.
If the subtlest transgression is unavoidable, then the question isn’t whether to offend. The question is why and how.
Vladimir Vladimirovich, the Apostle of Artifice
In literature, certain offenses linger. Browsing only among the poster-boys of the 20th century, the accusations of indecent obscenity lobbed at Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover died with their time’s prudish public policies. The political inconvenience of Animal Farm dissolved along with the USSR and American anti-communism which it had so troubled.
Not so for Lolita, that 1955 paragon of offensive literature by Vladimir Nabokov. Its cloud of bitter yellow-alyssum smell continues still, and not only among devoted readers. Twice, when describing in a group how much I enjoy reading Lolita, I’ve met stares blank enough to make me justify my taste. The first time was from my family of Christians, and the second was my atheist friend and his wife. That’s to say nothing of critical polarization over the novel, which began in the 1950s and recur periodically in rejections, affirmations, and ambiguous reappraisals.
By now, we’ve all likely heard the novel’s premise: Lolita is the story of Humbert Humbert, the urbane European boarder who lusts for, adopts, kidnaps, and rapes the preteen Dolores Hayes, whom Humbert dubs “Lolita” in the haze of his pedophilic desire. This is the transgressive plot which forced Nabokov to receive only a 5,000-copy run in a small (pornographer’s) French press in 1955, after rejection after rejection from American publishers who viewed his manuscript as pornographic or feared the controversy awaiting its appearance. This is the content which still (rightly) makes us flinch.
But, contrary to our image of the premise, Nabokov trained his fiction on a grander vista than pornography. It’s present in the form and the text of Lolita—we can’t separate the two as we’re tempted to do for our own comfort. The vista receives his subtle but final emphasis, so that Lolita is only fractionally about pedophilia, just as Pale Fire (his masterpiece and my favorite) is only fractionally about a poem, as Invitation to a Beheading is to an execution, or as Laughter in the Dark is to an affair.
When Nabokov transgresses in Lolita, he seeks the end of all his fiction: the examination of artifice in self-consciously artificial works of fiction, where our seduction by the unreal walks hand-in-hand with the madness of characters who are both unreal and inescapable. His transgression doesn’t serve the juvenile thrill of its own naughtiness, but the mission of naming the reader’s net of lies.
For Lolita entraps not only Dolores but also the reader.
Humbert is, by his admission. the paranoid, cultured, sly, deluded, insomniac, murderous, self-mythologizing seducer whose madness simmers around the edges of his narration. He admits to inventing dreams and traumas to torment psychiatrists for fun and to fashioning his own inane pseudonym, the only name which we ever know for him. Lolita smuggles this unmatched criminal into the mind through the framing device of having the convicted Humbert write his murderer’s confession, but it still nimbly allows glimpses through and past him. He deludes himself (and us, in our unsuspecting moments of weakness) that his is a grand love story, but the form Nabokov parodies in Lolita—a medieval romance where Humbert casts himself as the hero and his Lolita as his love—leaves cracks through which the truth of Humbert Humbert can sometimes creep.
But mostly, Humbert’s visions of aesthetic beauty seduce all reality and readers. In sly sympathy-fishing, he recollects his first and last childhood tryst with the doomed Annabel, in a lovely poetic distortion of loving a preteen:
“Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards-presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy.”
The prose throughout Lolita hums with this deft, bewitching beauty, so that its maneuvering becomes ever harder to notice. For example, when Humbert introduces his concept of the nymphet:
“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 aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!), 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 deadly little demon among the wholesome children; she stands unrecognized by them and unconscious herself of her fantastic power.”
His self-mythologizing and dehumanizing beauty are here “ineffable.” Humbert, of course, is the one doomed to “be an artist and a madman” of the “super-voluptuous flame.” His language veers into the Romantic with “infinite melancholy” but then into the hellish with “the deadly little demon among the wholesome children,” his warped view of the nymphet (in lay terms, certain girls between eleven and fourteen). Lolita is his ideal nymphet, and so Dolores becomes the most heavenly of these demonic seducers who Humbert claims torture him to the point of rapture.
In the words “demon” and “her fantastic power,” Humbert inserts himself without a sound into the role of victim. He is powerless, he claims, before “the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-shattering, insidious charm” of these preteens. He reassures us that his mission is pure: “I am trying to describe these things not to relive them in my present boundless misery, but to sort out the portion of hell and the portion of heaven in that strange, awful, maddening world nymphet love.”
By Humbert’s obsessed design, ironic to the title, the girl “Lolita” never draws near to the reader.
Her name is not Dolores Haze, for one thing. Humbert gives her that pseudonym along with his demented pet-name. As a character, the girl feels bratty and at a constant sulky remove. Her words are complaints and inanities, nearly without exception.
But that is the novel’s great, cruel demonstration of Humbert’s manipulations. Its narration is locked within his feverish mind, where Dolores must be the symbol of demonic, sexualized, and paradisiacal nymphets. When she acts instead like a 1950s’ American girl between the ages of eleven and fourteen, Humbert resents her—and convinces the reader to do the same through his narration. In Lolita’s form itself there is bottomless tragedy: the girl can never be separate from her abuser, by his own deliberate design.
But the artifice does occasionally drop from Humbert’s entrapments. There are glimpses of Dolores’s suffering, usually disguised in his Romantic melancholy but sometimes bluntly unadorned. The morning after Humbert first rapes Dolores, he drives her away from their hotel and notes her physical discomfort in her seat. “This was a lone child,” he narrates, “an absolute waif, with whom a heavy-limbed, foul-smelling adult had had strenuous intercourse three times that very morning.” But his delusion of Romance holds, and Humbert continues to hold Dolores carefully hostage through their yearlong road trip across the United States. They go west, they go north, they return east, they set out again through the horizon, all in resplendent prose of the American Southwest and other vistas that so nearly screen what is happening. Humbert bribes sex from the child with promises of new destinations and asinine shopping. But when he recalls this road trip which he’d rendered nearly idyllic to the reader, Humbert cannot escape himself:
“The lovely, trustful, dreamy country we had traversed was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.”
Here, then, is why Dolores remains spectral and nearly unknowable in Lolita: the truth of her living under her abuser is concealed. Humbert admits as much (but only once he has lost Lolita and determined to kill her new kidnapper):
“What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another, fanciful Lolita — perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her, floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness — indeed, no life of her own.”
Lolita admits illumination, but Humbert never reaches remorse for his “darling” Lolita. His abyss of delusion is unending. Late in the novel, he wishes to delay the public appearance of his confession until after Dolores has died, which seems caring in his warped way. But it is not beneficial to the girl: his wish fulfilled would still immortalize Humbert’s myth, the one intoxicated with his heavenly (or hellish) vision of the nymphet, the tale which revels in its own pedophilic poetry. “It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight,” Humbert says, lying and perhaps not quite knowing it.
In writing pedophilic poetry, I ought to distinguish Humbert and Nabokov. Much of the singed smell remaining around Lolita is the suspicion that Nabokov himself lusted for preteens, that his fictionalized pedophile was himself unbound. But the two men are not the same. The novelist does not fully write what the character lusts for, and he does not adopt the very tune Humbert wishes.
This discrepancy—between what Humbert seeks and what Nabokov implies—is the critique of delusion. It is Nabokov’s grander vista in action, transcending his exquisite authoring of Humbert’s transgression.
The Lies of the Unreal
When Humbert deceives himself with the fragrant image of his great Romance, we so nearly believe him. We’d like to dwell more on Dolores. But Humbert remains the magnetic, immoral, spectacular black hole at the center of Lolita. Meanwhile, the child he preys on (while purporting to worship her with maddened fervor) retreats down the westbound highway, shimmering like a mirage and ever more of an object in her every step.
Her treatment as an object is, to Nabokov, the crime Humbert commits in common with the mid-century American culture around him. His rape and kidnapping are far worse than the objectification of Dolores’s schools and media, but the basic mechanics of each are similar: they reduce Dolores to an image symbolic foremost to themselves, not to her. She is no nymphet winged with unearthly sexual appeal. She is no young woman needing “modern” psychiatric development through the Beardsley School for Girls. She is no young thing meant to fall for the middle-aged movie stars of her magazines, the ones who grew her first attraction to the cinema-handsome Humbert.
Nabokov relishes satirizing these elements of American culture, both by uncoiling Humbert’s caustic wit of the outsider and listing the inane objects of the girl’s catalogues. Humbert deplores what they make of Dolores’s tastes: “Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth,” making her into what he calls “a disgustingly conventional little girl.” These passages are hilarious—Lolita is often hilarious, y’all—but they churn with unease, courtesy of Nabokov’s underlying implication of artifice. These things Dolores is conditioned to desire are artificial. The thing Humbert makes of her is artificial also.
And from the unreal, ever alluring in Lolita, seeps paranoia. Are Humbert and Dolores being followed throughout their travels by a blue car whose driver changes shape between towns? Is Clarence Quilty (Dolores’s playwright and later kidnapper) real, or just a mad double bubbling from Humbert’s mind? Is Humbert telling you even a sliver of the truth? What is delusion born of insanity, and what are the contours of the novel’s labyrinth?
All of Lolita is caught in these unanswerable puzzles—not only its characters and readers, but also its astounding sentences and superb paragraphs. Even these lines from the master, virtuosic and beautiful and wholly unnatural, are self-conscious artifice, like a man-made chrysalis which will never give life. When Nabokov transgresses by enclosing us in the murderous pedophile Humbert, it is not for transgression’s sake. It is for the sake of seducing the reader with the beautiful lies of the unreal, itself a greater transgression which implicates us far more widely and effectively than pedophilia.
This greater transgression shares a structure with Paul and other Christians.
The Gospel, the good news for all people at all times, also implicates all people. To accept in the first place that we need a savior is an offensive premise. To accept it as a first-century Jewish leader who had spent the preceding years preparing to kill that savior was still more offensive. Where the heart is concerned, redemption in Christ requires a totalized, inescapable unmaking. The theological and social insults Paul gave his opponents through his ministry were only the words undergirding his mission to redeem.
Paul—like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and those other prophets before him—was mocked, beaten, slandered, and martyred for his message. Vladimir Nabokov was not beaten or martyred for Lolita, of course. He was certainly mocked and slandered, though in a perverse twist of (American) fortune he was also enriched for his scandal.
I connect Paul of Tarsus to Nabokov of Zembla because the two men shared an eye for the unreal and its deceptions. Nabokov’s offensive message cruelly teased the falsity of aesthetic and commerical delusions. Paul’s offensive message lovingly rejected the falsity of legalistic Judaism and pagan Roman cults in favor of the Gospel of Christ.
To Transcend Transgression
Before his many imprisonments and beatings among the Gentiles, Paul spent his early ministry among his fellow Jews. Reasoning from their inherited literature of Psalms and Isaiah in Acts 13, Paul told them, “My friends, I want you to know that through Jesus the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you. Through him everyone who believes is set free from every sin, a justification you were not able to obtain under the law of Moses.”
In response to critics of that teaching, Paul also taught the unsettling covenant of Christ (itself present in Isaiah 49:6, which he repeats): “Since you reject [the Word of God] and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles.”
And so the Word of God spread to overjoyed new believers, now set free. But to Jewish leaders who’d once counted Paul as a leader, the salvation of Gentiles (their then- and historical oppressors) by preaching of Christ’s resurrection (itself a heresy) was unforgivable. They pursued the apostles throughout the Mediterranean, inciting mob violence wherever the crowds were hearing the Gospel. Their personal, societal, and religious offense was grounded in the traditional paradigm they couldn’t relinquish.
To Paul, their offense wasn’t the point. Salvation, courtesy of unmaking the heart, was the point.
Offense for its own sake doesn’t justify itself. To transgress is easy, as any energetic schoolchild can tell you. To seriously transgress political, social, and religious mores is nearly as easy, as Lehrer can certainly attest. There exists a tradition of outraging and disturbing audiences across every artistic medium partly for that reason. But transgressing against an opposing group or ideology to stick it to that opposition is a cul-de-sac of values, where the transgressor is primarily defined by what and whom he has offended.
I’ve written before that giving up the locus of artistic meaning is a terrible mistake. When offense is inevitable as a writer and a Christian, then the offense must bring a higher value beyond what its transgression and its transgressed.
For Paul, the value worth the offense was the total salvation of Christ. For Galileo, the heliocentric universe. For Luther, the return to fides et sola scriptura. For Nabokov, the implicating seductions of the unreal.
Why should we seek anything less? The transport of the artistic experience is certainly Tyler’s “piercing cold and scalding hot” “crystallization” of the mind, and it can also be the sharp-intake eureka of what lies beyond the subjective. Every vista of indescribable beauty offends memory of what was already seen, if only in the unremembered moment of first sight.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch next month with more poetry readings.
I love to cavort with the transgressive as a hocus focus finder -- w.r.t. language.