Is there anything to be said about the idea of sexual normality, other than that it records a double confusion – between human sexual desire and animal tumescence, and between the norms of biological existence and the obligation of the moral life? Certainly, contemporary writing on the subject of perversion has often shown little awareness of what is at stake. Freud, for example, describes as perverted any sexual impulse which is diverted from the “biologically normal” aim of sexual union – Hence all acts which do not involve or tend towards the insertion of the penis into a female vagina, are, for Freud, “abnormal and the disposition to perform them “aberrant”, “deviant” or “perverted” . Freud refrains from drawing any moral conclusion from this description, aware of the moral fragility of the concept that is expressed in it. In which case, it could fairly be said that he has not really introduced a concept of perversion at all, but merely a concept of variety. For is it not part of human nature to go beyond the limited repertoire of conduct which is instilled in us by our simian instincts?
Clearly, the first task for any theory of perversion is to analyze the idea of normality. This idea has an important place in biological science, enabling us to draw a vital distinction without which the concept of a species would be of dubious explanatory value: the distinction between the normal and the average. If our idea of sexual normality is governed by biological thinking, we shall indeed agree with Freud in limiting normal sexual performance to the straightforward act of heterosexual copulation, together with its preliminaries and sequels. In which case, we shall have to describe many acts which occur quite naturally and spontaneously between heterosexual couples as abnormal. Nagel notes that fellatio, for example, and cunnilingus, both of which have immense symbolic significance, and neither of which can be excluded from the natural lyricism of the kiss. To exclude these acts from the exercise of normal desire for those reasons alone is to deprive the idea of normality of any truly human significance. To put the matter shortly, what is biologically normal is governed by the demands of the species. But this may be neither normal conduct for a rational being nor compatible with what is so. Norms of rational conduct and norms of animal activity may in fact be totally incommensurable. It is, for example, conceivable that all straightforward sexual activity might be described as perverted. Plato certainly came near to describing ordinary heterosexual intercourse in such a way. We must look elsewhere, too, for an account of the “norm” of sexual conduct. The rational being is a personal being, characterized not only by his ability to reason but also by his possession of a first-person perspective, responsibility and the rich interpersonal emotional life which those entail.
As Nagel construes, the human person is a human artifact, the product of the social interaction which he also produces. He can exist only in those conditions which permit the emergence of a fist-person perspective – in other words, only when attached to the public linguistic practices which give sense to the concept of self. He is by nature, therefore, a social being, not merely in the sense of being made for society, but in the stronger sense of being made by society. Hence one must count his most important motives the interpersonal attitudes which express his recognition of his social nature. These attitudes are not merely necessary to our happiness; they are also constitutive of our personal existence. A person who lacks them is, in a real sense, “depersonalized”. In other words, these attitudes are elements of normal human nature, and to lack them is to be a deviant, such in the case of sex.
Sexual desire involves the marshalling and directing of animal urges towards an interpersonal aim, and an interpersonal fulfillment. It is, moreover, a powerful and all consuming motive. Our life-projects coalesce about it, and are little able to place obstacles in its path. Hence we think of sexual desire as at one and the same time an animal fore which overtakes us, and a personal choice whose direction expresses our will. In desire we experience the unity of our animal and personal nature, and our sense of the first as governed by an objective norm transmits itself to our perception of the second. I believe that the concept of perversion which explains the sense that perversion is morally contaminated is also that which has the greatest explanatory value: the concept which descries as perverted all deviations from the unity of animal and interpersonal relation. We may, whether or not wittingly, detach the sexual urge from it interpersonal intentionality, and reconstitute it in impersonal and purely “bodily” terms. But this won’t be just a case of bad manners – in sexual desire the companion is also the object of what is felt, and what is done is done to him. The complete or partial failure to recognize, in and through desire, the personal existence of the other is therefore an affront, both to him and to oneself. Moreover, in so divorcing sexual conduct from the impulse of accountability and care, we remove from the sphere of personal relations the major force which compels us to unite with others, to accept them and to compromise our lives on their account. In other words, we remove what is deepest in us – our life – from our moral commerce, and set it apart, in a realm that is free from the sovereignty of moral law, a realm of curious pleasure, in which the body is both sovereign and obscene. This, I believe, is the major structural feature of perversion, and the feature which justifies the moral condemnation of perverted desire.
As the analysis here servers as a tool to examine the morality of Lolita, two main forms of perversion displayed in the book will be explored, Pedophilia and Fantasy. In Lolita, the paradigm form of perversion is pedophilia. Pedophilia, as a form perversion, presented a situation where the other is wanted, not in spite of the fact that he is a child, but because he is a child. There is a natural instinct to cherish what is young, and to vent our desire upon what is fresh and beautiful. The pedophile, however, directs his attentions not to a “young human being”, but to a “child”. The difference is that the idea of the childlike belongs not to material, but to intentional, understanding. It records our sense that the life of the person is divided into two episodes, the one a prelude to the other. The child is a creature – however developed in physical form – whose personal nature is as yet unformed, who cannot bear the full weight of interpersonal responses, and in particular who is regarded as only partly responsible for what he says and does. The child is the prelude to the person, with a child full reciprocity is neither possible nor desirable. It is true, in the tenderness of desire it is natural to wish to protect the other as one protects a child, but this feeling is no more than a premonition of the ultimate privacy of the sexual bond, and of its domestic fulfillment – its fulfillment apart from the world.
When the childhood of the other plays a constitutive role in desire, desire is deflected from its interpersonal aim. Like the bestial man and the necrophiliac the pedophile cannot surrender himself to the full challenge of another perspective, but must confine his attentions to that which he can control. This is constantly stated in Lolita. a good example is the case where Humbert describes how he achieved, surreptitiously and onanisitically, his first sexual ecstasy with Lolita – as the child, muching an apple, lay sprawled on his lap – Humbert admits that “Lolita had been safely solipsized” (L60). “What I had madly possessed” he goes on to say, “was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita – perhaps, more real than Lolita…and having no will, no consciousness – indeed, no life of her own” (L62). Nabokov’s later Russian translation of the novel makes the point even more bluntly, informs us Vladimir Alexandrov. Instead of the sentence “Lolita had been safely solipsized”, the Russian version reads: “Real’nost’ Lolity byla blagopoluchno otmenena,” which in English means, “Lolita reality was successfully canceled.”
Further more; it allude to a disposition, in all dealings with children, to consider the child as innocent – innocent, that is, of the polluted motives which govern the lives of adults. We look on children in two incompatible ways. On the one hand, they are pre-moral, unable to do wrong because unable to do right. On the other hand, they are innocent, acting always from pure motives which justify our praise. The truth of the matter is simple: children are partially moral, and act sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly, but never with full responsibility for what they do. By looking on the child as innocent we connive at our own desire to make his so. We protect him from evil motives by supposing that he cannot have them. One of the most important ingredients in this idea of innocence is that of sexual unreadiness. Our perception of sexual development involves an image of “initiation”. This image is sometimes given objective reality in a ceremony, conducted perhaps by a minister of sorts. But, even in the absence of such ceremonies, the image persists, playing an important role in the traditional conception of marriage. The divide between virgin and non-virgin is one that we seek to align with that between child and adult, and, even if this alignment is without ultimate justification, it causes us to establish, as a legal principle, that sexual intercourse ought not to occur before the “age of consent”. This legal fiction denotes the age of responsibility, the age when the person is complete.
Sexual initiation abolishes the inhibition that postpones the habit of intercourse. Nagel shows that we desire that initiation should not occur before the “age of innocence” has expired, since we desire sexual expression to withhold until it can exist as an interpersonal response. Our perception of the moral innocence of the child is therefore combined with a powerful interdiction: not to awaken in the child an interest in these things which are forbidden to him. This interdiction – which the Freudian call a “tabu” – as implied here, is something more than an irrational prejudice. And it is precisely what excites the greatest transport in the pedophile, who seeks to relive the child’s experience of forbidden things, so as to recreate the excitement of uncovering them. The reenacts primal curiosity, when certain parts of the body, certain words, certain actions attracted a magic quality of forbidden pleasure, and when the unveiling of sexual arousal was prefigured in the “naughtiness” of the sexual game.
This “naughtiness” is evident in Humbert’s description of the premium “nymphets” – He says, among young girls between the ages of nine and fourteen, the bewitched nympholept discovers those rare few whose true nature, “is not human but nymphic (that is, demoniac).” Humbert adds, “I would have the reader see “nine” and “fourteen” as the boundaries – the mirrory beaches and rosy rocks – of an enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by vast misty sea”. "You have to be an artist and a madman," Humbert admits, "to discern at once, by ineffable signs. The little deadly demon among the wholesome children (L16-7). Clearly, it is his own fantasizing imagination that works the demonic magic he ascribes to the nymphet. Humbert's rhetorical attempts at a distinction between a child and a nymph are never more unconvincing than when, having usurped Lolita's identity as a child, he claims the child's innocence to himself: "Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly he did. He had the utmost respect for utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstance would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child" (L19-20). The distinction Humbert draws between the demonic nymphet, who bewitches him, and the innocent child, whose purity and vulnerability he honors instantly collapses as he inadvertently admits that he would interfere with the child's innocence only if he could avoid a row.
Although elements of this kind of prurience Humbert displays survive into normal adult life, becoming a source of humor and of the gestures whereby some people overcome the embarrassing preludes to desire, we do not hesitate to describe the adult whose sexual impulses remain fixated upon the world of childish “naughtiness” as perverted – even though the child, who lives in that world, is not. The adult looks upon that world from a mature perspective which it cannot contain – the perspective of one who knows. His curiosity is really “knowingness”. For the responsible being, there cannot be naughtiness in the sexual act, even though there can be sin. The pursuit of the naughty is simply another way of refusing to enter the sexual encounter with one’s responsibility engaged, while relishing the obscene opacity of the body.
The Freudian discovery of childhood sexuality has no real relevance to the above account of pedophilia. It is true that children feel sexual urges, and attach these urges to this or that object of affection. But the resulting emotion cannot have the intentional structure of desire. A child can be sexually excited by an adult, and can obtain sexual pleasure. But the result will not be desire for the adult, nor will it express knowledge of, and consent towards, the adult’s own desire. The child’s feeling may, in the course of time, grow into desire, as he grows into personhood. But the desire will be poisoned by the memory of its origins. Like the desire of Lara for Komarovksy in Dr Zhivago, it will be felt as a compulsion, a defilement, a “vileness”, and hence as an obstacle to sexual fulfillment.
A second form of perversion is presented in “Lolita”, the sexual fantasy. In order to understand the operation of sexual fantasy, however, it is necessary to distinguish representation from substitution. Something which appears to be a representation might in fact be a surrogate or substitute. In sexual fantasy, an object is represented, often by means of a picture, but the aim is to approach as nearly as possible to substitute for the absent object: though a substitute that is free from danger. Sexual fantasy feeds upon modes of representation which are more like substitution than representation proper: photographs, video films, key-hole vision, or can simply be mental images, as in Lolita’s images. Serious erotic art, Kenneth Clark claims, moves by suggestion and by the interposition of thought between audience and object, and is hostile to surrogates. It is concerned to excite an imaginative involvement in a genuinely erotic predicament, but no to present fantasy objects for sexual gratification. The response to erotic art is an imaginative identification with the sexual activity of another. Although, in a sense, it involves the invocation of fantasy, the fantasy is controlled by the artistic medium and made continuous with, and an example of, genuine sexual feeling. In particular, the danger of sexual encounter is in no way minimized: being imaginary, it may also be realistically displayed.
When critics distinguish erotic art from pornography, the often have some distinction in mind such as that between representation, which is addressed to the creative imagination and bound by a principle of truth, and substitution, which is addressed to the sexual fantasy and bound only by the requirement of gratificatory power. They must always offend against the proprietors of art, while the former may remain obedient to them. Thus Kant considered masturbation to be the archetype of all perversion, precisely because it replaces the real object of desire by a fantasy that is self-created and therefore obedient to the will:
“Lust is called unnatural if man is aroused to it, not by its real object, but by his imagination of this object, and so in a way contrary to the purpose of the desire, since he himself creates it’s object”
In view of Humbert’s narrative account in Lolita, One can see that there is truth in the contrast, familiar, in one version, from the writing of Freud between fantasy and reality, and in the sense that the first is in some way destructive of second. Fantasy replaces the real, resistant, objective world with plain substitute – and that, indeed, is its purpose. Life in the actual world is difficult and embarrassing. Most of all it is difficulty and embarrassing in our confrontation with other people, who, by their very existence, make demands that we may be unable or unwilling to meet. It requires a great force, such as the force of sexual desire, to overcome the embarrassment and self-protection that shield us from the most intimate encounters. It is tempting to take refuge in substitutes which neither embarrass us nor resist the impulse of our spontaneous craving. As Nagel shows, the habit grows in creating a compliant world of desire, in which unreal objects become the focus of real emotions, and the emotions themselves are rendered incompetent to participate in the building of personal relations. The fantasy blocks the passage to reality, which becomes inaccessible to the will. Fantasy does not exist comfortably with reality. It has a natural tendency to realize itself: to remake the world in its own image. The reality principle by which the normal sexual act is regulated is a principle of personal encounter, which enjoins us to respect the other person and the sanctity of his body. The world of fantasy obeys no such rule, as it is ruled by illusions and myths. Myths, nurtured in fantasy, threaten not merely the consciousness of the man who lives by them, but also the moral structure of his surrounding world. Reaching this conclusion, this enables us to view the Humbert’s journey throughout America in a similar way – similar to his view of Lolita; it is obvious to the readers that although thrusting himself, literally and figuratively, upon his “nymphet” during their two-year cohabitation, Humbert and Lolita remain virtual strangers – distant, mutually uncomprehending and painfully isolated. A similar experience happens with the land they roam. “We have been everywhere,” he says of his cross-country trek with Lolita. “We had really seen nothing”. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiles with sinuous trail of slime in this lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country” (L175-76). Just as Humbert’s narrative account of his life with Lolita brings recognition of the “poor, bruised child” he exploited, so does his voyage into the past brings new discovery of America (L284). In any case, the metaphor of terra incognita is valid to his blindness induced by his mode of fantasy.
In short, Humbert in his fantasy mode, renders the world unsafe for self and other, and cause the subject to look on everyone, not as an end in himself, but as a possible means to his private pleasure. In his world, the sexual encounter has been fetished, to use the apt Marxian term, and every other human reality has been poisoned by the sense of the expendability and replaceability of the other