"Had I been a painter": Lolita and the Perversity of Interart Relations

Abstract

Abstract:Discussions of interart relations have often relied on a rhetoric of sexual perversion to reaffirm artistic borders, from G. E. Lessing's Laocoön (1766) to twentieth-century theories of medium specificity. This article considers the "perversity" of interart relations embedded in Lolita, Nabokov's novel of pedophilia. While the commingling of the arts is a key aspect of Nabokov's visual poetics, the logic of this principle is interrogated in Lolita. Whether perceiving Lolita as a visual image or imagining a mural of their sexual union, Humbert repeatedly attempts to transfigure his temporal narrative into the spatial realm of the visual as a means of preserving his "nymphet" from the corruption of time. This, I suggest, is analogous to Nabokov's own artistic efforts to escape the temporal progression imposed by sequential narrative form by appealing to the visual arts. By examining Lolita within the context of a long-standing discourse that sees relations between the sister arts as perverse, I argue that the novel's overt transgression of sexual taboos discloses an underlying aesthetic anxiety about the transgression of interart boundaries, in particular the novel's aspiration towards spatial form. Central to this is the novel's reworking of the Pygmalion myth, one of the foundational myths not only about artistic creation, but about the artist as a transgressive figure who violates aesthetic as well as erotic laws. The article ultimately concludes that, in Lolita, Nabokov revalorizes the sequential aspect of narrative (and the temporality of re-reading) as a positive attribute of novelistic form, not as something to be overcome in imitation of painting.