who?
november fourteen | three thirty post meridiem
Saturwhine
Bored and vaguely depressed at work today, I tapped these few notes into WordPad:
Lolita --> desire self-contained and divorced from the person who inspires it
*this objectified desire then becomes a transmitter of knowledge or enabler of representation (Calasso's nymphs) and an item to be interacted with in the course of a personal awakening (Humbert)
*the person who inspires this sort of desire must be inaccessible in order for the obsessive process of desire feeding and elaborating on itself to take place. one way this can happen is for the person to appear monstrous in some way. children are monstrous for many reasons; would it be possible to make someone monstrous who isn't inaccessible through conventional roadblocks (age, marriage, distance in space, inattention) and rather through missed possibility or just a failing on the part of the person who desires? suddenly this seems like a pretty common theme. but monstrous, monstrous!
*Lolita is, in a sense, the culmination of the 19th century novel of disappointment, the one Edward Said identified by the structural irony of its main character's unrealizable hopes and dreams *being an essential and indivisible aspect of that character*. Except Lolita swerves into perversion and fetishization - essential accessories for life in the late 20th/early 21st c.
*possible extension of this: the yearning for the quasi-gravitational comfort of real bodies, with a real solidity. for a voyeur, a body appears, excites the senses, and then is left to fester, weightless, in the imagination. a fascination over the fact that other people actually *have* bodies, and that these are resistant to our attempts to intellectualize them, resist them, or control them. the effort to conjure up someone missing or inaccessible always comes back to physical objects with the right associations: gifted or neglected belongings, photographs, recordings, even *Chungking Express*-style breaking and entering. this is more primal than just a missed opportunity, since the presence of the other's body is at the root of *every* possibility; it becomes impossible to say "oh it wouldn't have worked out anyway" since "it" hasn't even been conceptualized yet, nor does it need to be.
*Humbert is a true fetishist in that he objectifies and makes symbolic what is closest to hand (the children who play around him while he sits, nervous and sweating, on a park bench). Images of women from comic books, manga, video games, etc, which are often taken to be representative of the urge to objectify the female body, are precisely the opposite of this. they stretch and squeeze and expand and distort the female form simply to exaggerate what is already there. fetishization of the ordinary starts from the realization that the ordinary is absent or inaccessible, and so the fantasies with the greatest potency are also the ones which are most realizable yet unaccountably distant (the recognition of "girlish" traits in legally-fuckable women is more plausible than a 64-22-66 ice princess with blue hair). fetishization of the ordinary reveals a deeper alienation, but which has the greater potential for cruelty? which acts more destructively on the fetishist?
*the desire excited by an unattainable object obsesses and eventually eats away at the subject because it can never disappoint him or her. because it denies interaction, resists dialogue - it doesn't change, or rather doesn't heal, like a scab which is picked at repeatedly.