The Sacred Terror of the Aesthetic Encounter
I recently went on a date with a woman in her twenties. The prospect of a girlfriend less than half my age appealed - naturally. I’m 53, a writer, and extremely vain – I have children with multiple women, and my surname is French, which should surely temper my critics. A young girlfriend does seem a natural prop.
What was I thinking? I wasn’t. I rarely am when it comes to women, of any age. Still, even before the entrées had cooled, I could sense this flirtation had the shelf-life of supermarket sushi.
We drifted into literature, fumbling for common ground. She was clever and well-read; unquestionably woke yet a fan of intellectually honest writers such as Orwell and Sontag. I sensed it was time to lob a grenade.
“Do you like Lolita?”
You probably won’t believe me, but I had done my best to strip the question of its obvious innuendo. A Herculean task.
“I wouldn’t read Lolita,” she said. “On principle.”
“Which one?”
The question hung in the air like a puff of incense at a séance, to be left unanswered like an attendee’s hopes for a spectral reconciliation. I gathered that she felt some books are so irredeemably stained by their subject matter that even reading them is an act of complicity. That to open Lolita is to slide willingly into Humbert Humbert’s palm and join him in a waltz down a main street lined with your peers.
Yes, Humbert is a predator. But Nabokov is not his defense lawyer: he’s his executioner. And with every exquisite line of prose Humbert is dragged closer to the scaffold.
As a Gen X relic, I was raised on the idea that art – good art - earned its keep not just by being dangerous but by putting the reader in danger. Like ingesting a strong dose of LSD, could my blackboard of knowledge, choked with chalk, be suddenly scrubbed clean to be rewritten by an alien hand? Will even shards of my former self remain?
This is the sacred terror of the aesthetic encounter: the possibility that I might not return from it whole. That art could unmake me and not gently, but with violence. It would not flatter my sensibilities or affirm my worldview. It would drag me, if necessary, kicking and screaming into the unfamiliar, the dissonant, the grotesque - to my own scaffold to stand beside a resigned Humbert. G-d bless the arts’ bloody-minded refusal to accommodate.
On the drive home, she asked me if I’d rest my hand on her bare thigh. I obliged. Her mouth was unnaturally hot, and I briefly considered surrendering. But I resisted.
Some things are worth surrendering for a night.
Lolita - and yes, I still mean the book - is not one of them.