Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  This work, which, thanks to the success of Lolita, would be revived in multiple re-editions and translations, is ‘literary’ to a degree that only one other contemporary of Nabokov – Jorge Luis Borges – would manage to achieve. By ‘literary’ I mean entirely constructed out of pre-existing literatures and possessing an exquisite intellectual and verbal refinement. Lolita has all these hallmarks. But in addition, and this was the great novelty within Nabokov’s work as a whole, it is a novel in which the almost demonic complexity of its craftsmanship is garbed in an apparently simple and attractively brilliant story: the seduction of a young girl of twelve years seven months – Dolores Haze, Dolly, Lo or Lolita – by her stepfather, an obsessive forty-year-old Swiss man known only by a pseudonym, Humbert Humbert, and the passage of their love through the length and breadth of the United States.

  A great work of literature always provokes conflicting readings; it is a Pandora’s box in which each reader discovers different meanings, nuances and even stories. Lolita has bewitched the most superficial readers at the same time as it has seduced, through its torrent of ideas and allusions and the delicacy of its style, the most demanding of readers who approach each book with the insolent challenge that a young man once made to Cocteau: Étonnez-moi! (Surprise me!)

  In its most explicit version, the novel is Humbert Humbert’s written confession to the judges that are going to try him for murder, of his predilection for precocious girls, that began with his childhood in Europe and reached its climax and satisfaction in Ramsdale, a remote small town in New England. There, with the cynical intention of having easier access to her daughter Lolita, H.H. marries a relatively well-off widow, Mrs Charlotte Becher Haze. Chance, in the form of a car, facilitates Humbert Humbert’s plans, knocking over his wife and placing the young orphan literally and legally in his hands. The semi-incestuous relationship lasts for a couple of years, until Lolita runs away with a playwright and scriptwriter, Clare Quilty, whom Humbert Humbert kills after a tortuous search for the couple. This is the crime for which he is going to be tried when he begins to write the manuscript that, within the lying tradition of Cide Hamete Benengeli, he calls Lolita.

  Humbert Humbert tells the story with the pauses, suspense, false leads, ironies and ambiguities of a narrator skilled in the art of keeping the curiosity of the reader constantly aroused. His story is scandalous, but not pornographic or even erotic. There is not the slightest pleasure taken in the description of sexual activities – a sine qua non of pornography – nor is there a hedonistic vision that could justify the excesses of the narrator-character in the name of pleasure. Humbert Humbert is not a libertine or a sensualist: he is scarcely even an obsessive. His story is scandalous, above all, because he feels it and presents it as such, because he keeps talking about his ‘madness’ and his ‘monstrosity’ (these are his words). It is the protagonist’s account of himself that gives his adventure its sense of being unhealthy and morally unacceptable, rather than the age of his victim who, after all, is only a year younger than Shakespeare’s Juliet. And what further aggravates his offence and deprives him of the reader’s sympathy is his unpleasantness and arrogance, the contempt that he seems to feel for all men and women, including those beautiful, semi-pubescent, little creatures that so inflame his desires.

  Perhaps even more than the seduction of the young nymph by a cunning man, the most provocative aspect of the novel is the way it reduces all of humanity to laughable puppets. Humbert Humbert’s monologue constantly mocks institutions, professions and everyday routines, from psychoanalysis – one of Nabokov’s pet hates – to education and the family. When filtered through his corrosive pen, all the characters become stupid, pretentious, ridiculous, predictable and boring. It has been said that the novel is, above all, a ferocious critique of middle-class America, a satire of its tasteless motels, its naïve rituals and inconsistent values, a literary abomination that Henry Miller termed the ‘air-conditioned nightmare’. Professor Harry Levin has also argued that Lolita was a metaphor that refers to the feelings of a European who, after having fallen madly in love with the United States, is brutally disappointed by that country’s lack of maturity.

  I am not sure that Nabokov invented this story with symbolic intentions. My impression is that within him, as in Borges, there was a sceptic who was scornful of modernity and of life, and who observed both with irony and distance, from a refuge of ideas, books and fantasies, where both writers could remain protected, removed from the world through their prodigious inventive games that diluted reality into a labyrinth of words and phosphorescent images. For both writers, who were so similar in the way they understood culture and approached the task of writing, the distinguished art they created was not a criticism of the existing world but a way of disembodying life, dissolving it into a gleaming mirage of abstractions.

  And for anyone who wishes to go beyond the main plot of the novel, and consider its mysteries, try to solve its puzzles, work out its allusions and recognise the parodies and pastiches of its style, Lolita can be read as a baroque and subtle substitute for existence. This is a challenge that the reader can accept or reject. In any event, a purely anecdotal reading is very enjoyable in itself. But anyone who is prepared to read it differently discovers that Lolita is a bottomless well of literary references and linguistic juggling tricks, which form a tight network and are, perhaps, the real story that Nabokov wanted to tell. A story as intricate as that of his novel The Defence (which appeared in Russian in 1930), whose hero is a mad chess player who invents a new defensive game, or that of Pale Fire, a fiction that adopts the appearance of a critical edition of a poem and whose hieroglyphic story emerges, seemingly at variance with the narrator, through the interplay of the verses of the poem and the notes and commentary of its editor.

  The search for the hidden treasures of Lolita has given rise to many books and university theses in which the humour and playful spirit with which both Nabokov and Borges transformed their (real or fictitious) erudition into art is almost always sadly lacking.

  The linguistic acrobatics of the novel are very difficult to translate. Some, like the quotations in French in the original, just lie there, mischievous and rude. One example of many: the strange hendecasyllable that Humbert Humbert recites when he is preparing to kill the man who snatched Lolita away from him. To what and to whom does this refer: Réveillez-vous Laqueue, il est temps de mourir? Is it an actual literary quotation, or one made up, like so many in the book? Why does the narrator call Clare Quilty Laqueue? Or is he inflicting the name on himself? In an interesting book, Keys to Lolita, Professor Carl L. Proffer has solved the enigma. It is, quite simply, a convoluted obscenity. La queue, a tail, is French slang for a phallus; to die means to ejaculate. So the verse is an allegory that condenses, with its classic rhythm, a premonition of the crime that Humbert Humbert is about to commit, and his reason for the murder (the fact that the phallic Clare Quilty has possessed Lolita).

  Sometimes the allusions or premonitions are simple digressions, for Humbert Humbert’s solipsistic amusement, that do not affect the development of the story. But on other occasions they have a meaning that alters the story in significant ways. This is true, for example, of all the bits of information and references regarding the most disturbing character of all, who is not Lolita or the narrator, but the furtive playwright who is fond of the Marquis de Sade, the libertine, drunk, drug-addicted and, according to his own confession, semi-impotent Clare Quilty. His appearance disrupts the novel, sending the story in a hitherto unforeseeable direction, introducing a Dostoevskian theme: that of the double. It is thanks to him that we suspect that the whole story might be a mere schizophrenic invention by Humbert Humbert, who, the reader has been told, has spent several periods in mental asylums. As well as stealing Lolita away and dying, the function of Clare Quilty seems to be to place an alarming question mark over the credibility of the (assumed) narrator.

  Who is this strange subject? Before materialising in the reality of the fi
ction, when he takes Lolita away from the hospital at Elphis-tone, he has already been infiltrating the text as a result of Humbert Humbert’s persecution mania. There is a car that appears and disappears, like a will-o’-the-wisp, a hazy outline, lost in the distance, on a hill, after a game of tennis with the child-woman, and myriad signs that only the meticulous and ever-alert neurosis of the narrator can decipher. And later, when, on the trail of the fugitives, Humbert Humbert begins his extraordinary recapitulation of his travels across the United States – an exercise of sympathetic magic that attempts to revive the two years of happiness lived with Lolita, repeating their journey and the hotels they had stayed in – he discovers at every stage disconcerting traces and messages from Clare Quilty. They reveal an almost omniscient knowledge of the life, culture and obsessions of the narrator and a sort of subliminal complicity between the two. But are we talking about two people? What they have in common far outweighs what separates them. They are more or less the same age and they share the same desires for young girls in general, and Lolita Haze in particular, as well as both being writers (albeit with different degrees of success). But the most remarkable symbiosis can be found in the magic tricks that they perform at a distance, in which Lolita is merely a pretext, the elegant and secret communication that turns life into literature, revolutionising topography and the urban landscape with the magic wand of language, through the invention of small towns and accidents that trigger literary associations and surnames that generate poetic associations according to a very strict code that only they are capable of employing.

  The culminating moment in the novel is not Humbert Humbert’s first night of love – that is kept to a minimum and is almost a hidden detail – but the delayed and choreographed killing of Clare Quilty. In this extraordinarily intense, virtuoso description, which is a mixture of humour, drama, strange details and enigmatic allusions, every certainty that we had built around the fictive reality of those pages begins to teeter, suddenly riddled by doubt. What is happening here? Are we witnessing the conversation between the killer and his victim or rather the nightmarish doubling of the narrator? It is a possibility that is implied in the text: that, at the end of this process of psychic and moral disintegration, defeated by nostalgia and remorse, Humbert Humbert breaks, stricto sensu, into two halves, the lucid and recriminatory consciousness that observed and judged his own actions, and his defeated, abject body, the seat of that passion that he surrendered to without, however, surrendering to pleasure and indulgence. Is it not himself, that part that he detests about himself, that Humbert Humbert kills in this phantasmagoric scene, in which the novel, in a dialectical leap, seems to desert the conventional realism of its previous setting in favour of the fantastic?

  In all Nabokov’s novels – but, above all, in Pale Fire – the structure is so clever and subtle that it ends up carrying everything else before it. In Lolita this intelligence and deftness of construction are also strong enough to deplete the story of life and liberty. But in this novel, the content stands up for itself and resists the assault of the form, because what it talks about is deeply rooted in the most important of human experiences: desire, fantasy obeying instinct. And his characters manage to live provisionally without becoming, as in other novels – or like Borges’s characters – the shadows of a superior intellect.

  Yes, thirty years on, Dolores Haze, Dolly, Lo, Lolita, is still fresh, ambiguous, prohibited, tempting, moistening the lips and quickening the pulse of men who, like Humbert Humbert, love with their head and dream with their heart.

  London, January 1987

  The Tin Drum

  The Drumroll

  I read The Tin Drum for the first time, in English, in the sixties, in a neighbourhood in the suburbs of London where I lived among quiet shopkeepers who turned off the lights in their houses at ten at night. In this state of limbo tranquillity, Grass’s novel was an exciting adventure, whose pages reminded me, as soon as I plunged into them, that life was also disorder, uproar, guffaws, absurdity.

  I have reread it now in very different conditions, at a time when, in an unpremeditated and accidental way, I have found myself caught up in a whirlwind of political activities, at a particularly difficult moment in my country’s history. In between a debate and a street rally, after a demoralising meeting where the world was changed by words, and nothing happened, or at the end of dangerous days, when stones were hurled and shots were fired. In these circumstances as well, the Rabelaisian odyssey of Oskar Matzerath with his drum and glass-shattering voice was a compensation and a refuge. Life was also this: fantasy, words, animated dreams, literature.

  When The Tin Drum came out in Germany in 1959, its immediate success was attributed to different reasons. George Steiner wrote that, for the first time since the lethal experience of Nazism, a German writer dared face up, resolutely and clearly, to the sinister past of his country and submit it to an implacable critical dissection. It was also said that this novel, with its uninhibited, frenetic language, sparkling with invention, dialect and barbarisms, revived a vitality and a freedom that German language had lost after twenty years of totalitarian contamination.

  Both explanations are probably correct. But from our current perspective, as the novel approaches the age at which, figuratively, its extraordinary protagonist begins to write – thirty years old – another reason appears as fundamental for understanding the impact that the book has continued to make on its readers: its enormous ambition, the voracity with which it looks to swallow up the world, history past and present, the most disparate experiences of the human zoo, and transmute them into literature. This colossal appetite to tell everything, to embrace the whole of life in a fiction, which can be found in all the major achievements of the genre and which, above all, defined the writing of literature in the century of the novel, the nineteenth century, can be found only infrequently in our age, which is full of temperate, timid novelists for whom the idea of writing with the ambition of Balzac or Stendhal seems naïve: don’t movies do all that, and much better?

  No, they do not do it better; they do it differently. Even in the century of the great cinematographic narratives, the novel can be a deicide, can propose such a minute and vast reconstruction of reality that it seems to compete with the Creator, breaking up and re-forming – correcting – what He created. In an emotional essay, Grass names Alfred Döblin as his master and model. Döblin, somewhat belatedly, is beginning to be recognised as the great writer that indeed he was. And without doubt Berlin Alexanderplatz has some of the tumultuous, fresh effervescence that makes The Tin Drum such a lively fresco of human history. But there is no doubt that the creative ambition of the disciple in this case far excelled that of the master, and that to find affiliations we must look to the best examples of the genre, where novelists, in the grip of an exaggerated and naïve frenzy, did not hesitate in opposing the real world with an imaginary world in which this real world is both captured and negated, summarised and abjured like an exorcism.

  Poetry is intense; the novel is extensive. The number, the quantity, is an integral part of its quality because every fiction takes place and develops in time, it is time being made and remade under the gaze of the reader. In all the masterpieces of the genre, this quantitative factor – to be abundant, to multiply and to endure – is always present: generally a great novel is also a big novel. The Tin Drum belongs to this illustrious genealogy, as a world that is large and complex, brimming with diversity and contrasts, is erected in front of our eyes as readers, to the beat of a drum. But despite its vividness and sheer size, the novel never appears as a chaotic, dispersed world, without a centre (as occurs in Berlin Alexanderplatz or in the Dos Passos trilogy, U.S.A.), because the perspective from which the fictive world is seen and represented gives consistency and coherence to its baroque disorder. This perspective is that of the protagonist and narrator Oskar Matzerath, one of the most fertile inventions of modern narrative. He supplies an original point of view that suffuses everything he descri
bes with originality and irony – thus separating the fictive reality from its historical model – as well as embodying, in his impossible nature, in his anomalous condition, between fantasy and reality, a metaphor for the novel itself: a sovereign world apart in which, however, the concrete world is refracted in essence; a lie in whose folds a profound truth can be seen.

  But the truths that a novel makes visible are rarely as simple as those formulated by mathematics or as unilateral as those of certain ideologies. They are usually, like most human experiences, relative; they form imprecise entities in which the rule and its exception, or the thesis and antithesis are inseparable or have a similar moral weight. If there is a symbolic message embedded in the convulsive historic moments that Oskar Matzerath narrates, what might that be? That his decision, at three years old, not to grow any more, is a rejection of the world that he would have to be part of as a normal person, and that this decision, to judge by the horrors and absurdity of this world, is clearly a wise one. His smallness confers on him a kind of extraterritoriality, minimising him against the excesses and responsibilities of other citizens. His insignificant stature offers Oskar a marginal and thus privileged perspective from which to see and judge everything happening around him: that of the innocent. This moral condition becomes in the novel a physical attribute: Oskar, who is not involved in what is happening around him, is clothed with invisible armour that allows him to travel unscathed through the most risky places and situations, as becomes clear in one of the key moments in the novel: the siege of the Polish Post Office at Danzig. There, in the midst of the machine guns and the butchery, the little narrator observes, makes ironic comments and tells the story with the quiet assurance of one who knows that he is safe.