Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 57

Scandal’s Second Life: Lolita and the
Perversion of the Text
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.
The particular challenge of theorizing cinematic adaptation reveals itself
within the context of the long history of inquiry into the relationship between image
and word, a provocative site for scholarly investigation since the inception of the
arts themselves. More specifically, adaptation defines itself against the practice of
“ekphrasis”, an art that seeks to translate visual images into words. As the mirror
image of the problem of cinematic adaptation, the ekphrastic tradition emphasizes
the primacy of the visual. Adumbrating the particulai* challenge of ekphrasis, Murray
Krieger writes:
What is being described in ekphrasis is both a miracle and a
mirage: a miracle because a sequence of actions filled with
befores and afters such as language alone can trace seems frozen
into an instant’s vision, but a mirage because only the illusion
of such an impossible picture can be suggested by the poem’s
words, (xvi-xvii)