Notes on the Lolita Case

Lolita, it is often said, is a beautiful book about an ugly thing. Nabokov writes in a manner so as to groom and demoralize his readers, making us complicit in the crimes that the novel describes. Thus, as Martin Amis says, Lolita leaves us 'ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent'.

But just what is it that we say Yes to: deceit, murder, and child abuse; or simply to the event of literature?

It's arguable that, ultimately, we are encouraged to say Yes to all of the above - and to everything - as belonging to what Nietzsche terms a general economy of the whole. For the world is as it is and the strongest individuals are those who not only accept it, but affirm it, as it is; embracing the tragic character of life and loving fate.

That said, from somewhere comes a growing dislike for Humbert Humbert and an increased sympathy not only for the girl-child, but for her mother, the Haze woman. One doesn't want to become John Ray Jr., full of paper mâché pieties, but perhaps Richard Rorty might have a point when he suggests that Humbert is a monster not only of perversity and of cruelty, but of incuriosity. 

That is to say, Humbert is not merely nymphet-desiring, but intensely self-obsessed and self-idealizing; he is very little interested in the thoughts and feelings of others, even those he claims to love. Thus, writes Rorty, despite the author's insistence to the contrary, the novel does have a moral in tow:

"But the moral is not to keep one's hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you they are suffering." 

                                           - Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CUP, 1989), p. 164. 

(Of course, Sade might well point out that there is no good reason why someone else's suffering should in any way infringe upon or prevent one's own pleasure; indeed, it might usefully serve to heighten the latter. Or, as Nietzsche would say: pain is not an argument.)

Alice in the Empire of Signs

The loss of personal identity and of those things that secure such is central to the story of Alice. But if she loses her name, her face and even her body (Deleuze insists that to pass through the looking glass is to become incorporeal), still, just like the Cheshire Cat, she leaves something behind; not a smile in this case (Alice hardly ever smiles), but a look. 

And this is why Alice remains a crucial fashion icon and why Kiera Vaclavik's current research project is of such great interest. For if, somewhat naively, she isn't entirely ready to abandon her analysis of the fictional girl-child in relation to conventional notions of age, gender, and biology, she seems nevertheless to appreciate that what really matters is the fact that Alice can be best understood as a question of style.

That is to say, Alice can be separated from all of those attributes that are usually understood to exist as natural pre-givens, but not from her hooped stockings, blue dress, white apron, and hair band. These items of adornment do not simply serve to make her look pretty, but to display her non-essential essence; they conceal the fact that there is nothing to conceal beneath appearance. Alice forms an indivisible unity with her own image.

It's an image, however, that many have chosen to adopt (and adapt) as their own; not least those breathtakingly beautiful and super-stylish Japanese girls who, around the area of Harajuku, have created their very own Wonderland, free from any weight of meaning or moral seriousness. In this empire of empty signs and artifice, fashion, forms and femininity are triumphant and Alice is Lolita Queen.          

Tentacle Erotica

I was thinking again the other day of that rather queer exchange in Women in Love when Birkin tells Gerald about his experience of wrestling naked with a Japanese housemate in Heidelberg, presumably during his student days:

"He was very quick and slippery and full of electric fire. It is a remarkable thing, what a curious sort of fluid force they seem to have in them, those people - not like a human grip - like a polyp ... They are very repulsive when they are cold, and they look grey. But when they are hot and roused, there is a definite attraction - a curious kind of full electric fluid - like eels." [WL, CUP, 1987, 268-69]

This - as far as I'm aware - is as close as Lawrence comes to exploring the interesting world of what is now commonly termed tentacle erotica and which refers to a type of pornography, popular in Japan, in which people engage in sexual activity with monsters who have come from either the ocean depths or outer space and either are or resemble octopuses, squids, and similar though unrelated creatures, such as eels and sea-serpents.

Although sometimes the sexual activity is of a consensual nature, frequently the horror is intensified due to the non-consensual elements and shokushu goukan or 'tentacle rape' is frequently a key component of the genre, particularly when there is a woman involved. 

Whilst most tentacle erotica tends to be animated, there are a number of live action films for those who like this kind of thing. It's a theme, however, that can be traced back in Japanese porn long before cinema, anime, or manga. Doubtless, the best known illustration of such is that by Katsushika Hokusai entitled The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife (1814). 

This image, taken from the book kinoe no komatsu, which has since been reworked by many Western artists, is really rather beautiful I think, even for those of us who don't share the sexual fascination for lecherous cephalopods. And, crucially, it would seem that the woman, a pearl diver, has not fallen victim to a pair of sexually predatory octopuses, but is rather fully enjoying their attention - just as Birkin enjoyed his naked wrestling with a hot and roused Japanese gentleman.     

In Memory of Malcolm McLaren

Just as when my father passed away, when Malcolm died it was appropriately enough my mother who rang to tell me. For, in a sense, as Julie Burchill once rightly acknowledged, we are all his children; he was the man who spawned an entire generation.

I miss him. And it has taken me almost three years to finally find the heart to make the trip to Highgate Cemetery in order to pay my respects at the graveside of a man who ordered the first champagne I ever tasted, encouraged me to smash a window in L'Escargot, taught me the importance of narrative in interpersonal relations, and once suggested that I should move to Paris in order to seduce the novelist Amélie Nothomb.

When Serge Gainsbourg died, flags in France were flown at half-mast and President Mitterand gave a eulogy in which he described the singer as a poet who elevated the pop song to the level of art. Perhaps the same or something similar could be said of Malcolm; he transformed the ugly into something beautiful and base matter into gold. 

But there was no state recognition for McLaren, who died, like his hero Oscar Wilde, in exile and, in a sense, in the failure he always celebrated over and above any benign success. Instead, there was a rather crass and vulgar funeral in which his life was reduced to a few slogans and several of those who genuinely loved him were either not invited, or told to stay away. 

And now there's just a grave without flowers, a contested will, and Dame Vivienne selling her story to The Mail on Sunday ...   

Why I Love Joan Miró's Woman and Bird

Dona i Ocell (1983) 

There are doubtless many reasons to love Joan Miró's 22-metre high concrete sculpture known in English as 'Woman and Bird' and located in the park named after the artist in his hometown of Barcelona, not far from the Plaça d'Espanya; not least of all the brightly coloured ceramic tiles added by his friend and collaborator Joan Gardy Artigas. 

But for me, what interests and amuses most is that this work deconstructs conventional gender binaries as well as the phallogocentric pretension and arrogance of the steel and glass office blocks that have since been erected by the architects of global capitalism across from where Miró's now tiny-in-comparison sculpture stands in all its pagan and primitive - yet modernist - perfection. 

The Repsol Building (1993), the Allianz Tower (1993), and the Edificio Tarragona (1998) might all be taller and shinier - and they are certainly more functional - than Miró's final piece of public sculpture, but they lack the fourfold unity that Heidegger identifies as belonging to the really great works of art.

Miró's Dona i Ocell gathers together earth and sky, divinities and mortals, and it sets something free within us in a way that the aforementioned sky-scrapers do not. For they simply bring together a work force and liberate flows of money. If they tell us something about the truth of commerce, they don't tell us much, if anything, about the truth of being.

That said, Miró was certainly not averse to accepting paid commissions from big business, as his famous logo for "La Caixa" illustrates.  

A Birthday Post on Becoming-Child

Inner Child Doll, by Beth Costello

Deleuze and Guattari are right: knowing how to age well does not mean attempting to remain young; it means extracting the molecular elements, the forces and flows, that constitute the youth of whatever age one happens to be.

In other words, it's not about diets, skin care, exercise regimes, or cosmetic surgery, but producing within oneself that child of innocence and forgetfulness, whom Zarathustra spoke of.  

Such a metamorphosis of the spirit is not easy and it has nothing to do with regression, imitation or identification. As Picasso once confessed, it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child. 

All this on the occasion of yet another birthday ...

Revenge of the Flowers

  The triumph of vegetation is total

The revenge of the flowers is an idea that has long fascinated me. I like the thought that plant life continuously conspires to challenge the supposed superiority of animals and defeat attempts on behalf of humanity to create a full idealized and mechanized world; that one day, the weed will conquer.

It is certainly worth remembering that not only do plants have ancestral reality, but we remain absolutely dependent upon them to provide the air we breathe and the food we eat. Man might dream of one day paving over the entire world with concrete and tarmac, but it's grass - that most unassuming of all plants - that provides the foundation for our continued survival and success.

Indeed, once we abandon our anthropocentric conceit, it becomes arguable that not only is our life dependent upon plants, but is in a very real sense determined by them. Like the birds and the bees and other insects, we exist - as far as the plants are concerned - to disseminate their DNA. At best, we have entered into a mutually beneficial co-evolutionary relationship with flora which renders conventional and convenient distinctions between subject and object meaningless: we shape their unfolding and they shape ours.

If you're a humanist, this is a little disconcerting and hard to admit. For it means acknowledging the fact that plants are just as complex, just as cruel, and just as exploitative as us and that in comparison to the daisy, the greatest monuments of mankind are transitory and insignificant. Plants have been evolving for millions of years and have in that time been endlessly inventing new strategies for survival and perfecting their designs. Thus, to say that we are a more advanced form of life is more than a little presumptuous. We can walk and talk and think, but, in the absence of chlorophyll, we can't photosynthesize nutrients directly from water, soil, and sunlight.

All this being said, it's surely important not to simply fall back into one of the three traditional narratives about man and nature with which we are all too familiar: (i) the heroic narrative, in which humanity is depicted as struggling against nature; (ii) the romantic narrative, in which paradise is regained and man emerges into some kind of spiritual unity with nature; (iii) the eco-apocalyptic narrative, characterized by Michael Pollan as an "environmental morality tale, in which Nature pays man back for his transgressions".

Contrary to these tired mythological storylines, I propose a speculative and realist narrative in which all forms of flora and fauna are regarded primarily as objects - not necessarily equal objects, but equally objects nevertheless, caught up in the same orgy of sex, violence, and random mutation that we like to call life.

Two Formulas for Happiness

Nietzsche once gave us his formula for happiness: A Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal. It's simple: but also a little surprising and disappointing. 

For whilst we might share his need for something to love and affirm and share too his delight in having something (or someone) to oppose and negate, there's something functional and all too German about this metaphysical ideal of the straight line and the positing of a fixed goal at the end of such. It has the unfortunate effect of transforming a formula for happiness into a sort of business plan, or recipe for success. 

Such linear thinking is certainly at odds with the picaro's idea of wandering aimlessly but joyfully in a kind of schizonomadic manner; or the flâneur's love of strolling through city streets and arcades; or the pervert's desire for deviation, aberration, and waywardness. 

None of these happy souls stick to the straight and narrow; none of them have aims, objectives, or plans of accomplishing anything. Neither, in truth, do they affirm or deny anything. At a push, they might want what Earl Butz believed to be the three things that the coloureds looked for in life - tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit - and even then they might sneer at the bourgeois notion of comfort implied by the last of these things. 

Still, as competing formulas for happiness go, this latter, for all its sexism, racism, and vulgarity, just might have the beating of Maxim 44.

Thank Heaven for Little Girls

What are little girls made of: sugar and spice and all things nice?

Whilst it's possible that these are their material elements, according to Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Proust, their individuation, be it collective or singular, doesn't proceed via subjectivity, but by pure haecceity. Which means, I think, that they shouldn't be understood as molar forms, or defined by the functions they fulfil. Rather, we should think of girls in terms of their movements and the intensive affects of which they are capable. 

Little girls, in other words, are not just young female human beings that grow up into women (although, obviously, this is true in a banal organic sense); they are something other than this and something more than this. At their best - which is to say at their most phenomenal - they are extraordinary events and so do not belong to any age group or sex.

Joan of Arc, Anne Frank, and here, with us, right now, recovering from her surgery, Malala Yousafzai, are singular beings via whom molecular politics unfolds. For these girls teach us something vital about life understood in terms of immanence, virtue and virtuality. We should be grateful to the heavens that send them our way. 

Theme Tunes in a Man's Life

In an essay written towards the end of his life, Lawrence reflected on the fact that certain hymns he heard and sang as a child continued to resonate more potently within him than many of the finest poems he had since become familiar with. It didn't matter that, lyrically and musically, these hymns were often banal and rather horrible on the ear; what counted was that they had delighted and inspired his childish imagination and so retained for him a more lasting value. 

Geoff Dyer feels the same about the Marvel comic books he read as a child and this is something he and I share, in addition to our love of Lawrence. But I also feel the same about all of those TV theme tunes that I would tape on my primitive - but precious - cassette player and then listen to over and over again.

For some reason, I was particularly fond of American detective shows and must have recorded the openings to all of them, including Kojak, Cannon, McCloud, Ironside, Starsky and Hutch, Hill Street Blues, Police Woman, Police Story, Hawaii Five-O, Harry O, The Streets of San Francisco, and, my favourite, The Rockford Files. 

These tunes suggested and still suggest a whole world of action and adventure; there has been "no dwindling into actuality, no hardening into the common place" - they excite the same feelings of joy and excitement now as then. In a sense, my childhood was as much a Quinn Martin production, as it was the result of a comprehensive school education and growing up in Essex.

But I also loved American sit-coms, such as Rhoda, and still to this day know the words to the opening song from Laverne and Shirley better than I do the lyrics to either the Lord's Prayer or the national anthem (this as a matter of pride, not shame):  

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

Schlemiel! Schlemazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!  

We're gonna do it!

Ikizukuri

Cruelty, writes Nietzsche, is one of the oldest festive joys of mankind. Indeed, to practise cruelty - to refine it into an art form and a virtue - is the mark of human culture; a means by which we express our power over life and our divine indifference to suffering, be it that of animals, slaves, or those regarded as enemies of the state.

For it is not only beasts that are tortured and butchered, or sea-creatures that are turned into sashimi. And so as my companion's plate of ikizukuri was prepared and served with all the delicate knife-work that a Japanese chef is capable of, I thought once more of Fu Chou Li, who was executed in 1905 by being cut into a hundred pieces. 

The public dismemberment of this poor wretch - guilty of murdering a prince - was something that obsessed Bataille, who kept a photograph of the event which played a decisive role in his thinking. For he saw in the picture not only great horror, but also a look on the victim's face of ecstatic joy that seemed to transcend his torment. And it was this that lent the picture an almost unbearable beauty and fascination:

"The young and seductive Chinese man ... I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin."

- Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt, Albany State University Press, 1988, p. 120.

I understand, I think, where Bataille is coming from - and why he finds the anguished eroticism of human sacrifice and sadism so rich in meaning. But as I looked down at my friend's plate and saw the still-living but semi-sliced fish attempt to take one last gasp of air, I was glad I had chosen the noodles.