Though Cowards Flinch

Due to having some time on my hands, for a change, I checked a bunch of fiction books out of the local library. The first was Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel, Lolita. This is a strange book, repeatedly referred to as one of the defining English-language novels of the 20th Century and I’m still not quite sure what to think.

The plot is relatively simple: Humbert Humbert, ephebophile, marries the mother of a twelve year old girl Dolores Haze. Following the death of her mother, Humbert kidnaps Dolores, known as Lolita, and tours the United States while indulging in a sexual relationship with her.

If literature is simply there to tell us something about ourselves, or about our world, then the character of Humbert Humbert certainly does that. His wit is incisive, deadly even; his manipulative nature worthy of any Machiavelli and his ruthlessness total, yet also totally concealed from all but his unfortunate victims.

In everything that Humbert does, he is inescapably human and we can recognise in him many things that feature regularly in our somewhat more banal lives. No one who has ever wondered about where our moral perspectives on any subject come from can fail to be moved by Humbert’s rationalisation for his heinous actions.

What I cannot reconcile for myself is that my perspective on this book boils down to something so monochrome as condemnation for Humbert, disgust at the eloquence and erudition of his perversion and sympathy for the young girl who cried herself to sleep as soon as she believed Humbert to have succumbed to it himself.

Surely there is something more? If anything the beautiful prose and dry sardonicism (e.g. Humbert’s initial, easy dismissal of Charlotte’s advances) further irritated me, as did the conclusion to Martin Amis’ Observer review, ‘You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent’.

Rubbish. Amis approach to Nabokov’s oeuvre in Koba the Dread, that Lolita is a study in tyranny is much nearer the mark. Perhaps it is the bloody single-mindedness in me that is causing my failure to appreciate a great literary endeavour, but tyranny is to be resisted at all occasions, not to be gloried in, which is what such prose feels like.

What I found intriguing is that Humbert’s use of treats, of permissions withheld or granted, of money to enforce his control…all of these are standard parenting methods. The only thing that Humbert has done differently to a ‘normal’ parent is extend his dominance to the sexual sphere as well as the more traditional areas of behaviour.

With tyranny in mind, Humbert’s self-deception as regards his relationship with Lolita can be read as a metaphor for the relationship of the privileged Party with its subservient people in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany or the various other totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. As Humbert justifies his exploitation of Lolita by her supposed corruption (suggested, for example, by her seduction of him, after a prolonged ‘courtship’), so too these privileged elites maintained themes of paternalism and almost-divine election.

Nabokov’s Lolita is comparable to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in some respects. Neither offers the possibility of redemption to its protagonists; tyranny is all-encompassing and either extends onwards to infinity (thus Orwell) or destroys everyone it touches – Humbert, Lolita, Charlotte, Valeria, Quilty and Lolita’s child – even after it has released them from its immediate grip, by distorting the course of their lives. The solipsism of Humbert is the analogue to the ultimate capitulation of Winston Smith, each reflecting the great divides of our time.

Tyrant and tyrannised, or state tyranny and the tyranny of patronage and private property.

It is a thoroughly depressing book. There is no Yossarian escaping on a raft, no Krymov whose victimisation by the state cannot annihilate the forward-looking character of the novel Life and Fate, gazing past the Russian fall into the hands totalitarianism, towards the core of the communist ideal. There’s no Jake Barnes who, despite having been visited in both public and private spheres with disaster, still lives and learns, emerging wiser than when he began. This is where the pathos of the novel emerges; in how people deal with the knowledge of futility.

Even Humbert faces this, though he does so with his incisive, calculating rationality as when he considers Lolita’s inevitable move beyond the ‘prime age’ at which we find her during the story, and at which Humbert takes his greatest pleasure.

In this regard, the novel escapes my monochrome moralising and my utter detestation of Humbert, accentuated by his refusal to repent – a refusal the self-obsessed Humbert finds delectable, as evidenced by his toying with readers as though they are a mock jury – and failure to find his ass slapped in the electric chair for his crimes. Not far enough, however, for me to decide whether or not I enjoyed the novel.

Courtesy of Chris Dillow’s oft-excellent ‘Top Blogging’ selections of material from around the Interwebz, always posted on the right of his own blog, I noticed that Norman Geras has an article up entitled “Liberalism and the radical Left” in which Professor Geras roundly berates Slavoj Žižek for a bunch of different offenses. I often like what Žižek writes: if nothing else the man delivers a new perspective on time-worn dilemmas in an engaging way. I tend to simply ignore the Lacanian baggage that he carries with him – and often he is quite intelligible without it.

On this occasion, however, I think Professor Geras is massively mistaken in some of his attacks – and quite ungentlemanly, it must be said. As I have noticed in the past, this seems to be a regular feature of Žižek’s reviewers: they don’t much like to engage with him on his own terms, preferring instead to read out of context and ridicule without substantive engagement.  Norm focusses on the following paragraph from a Žižek essay (note, the numbering is down to Norm – but it’s handy as his subsequent criticisms are directed by the numbers):

[1] “The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (liberal center, populist Right, radical Left), they locate them in a radically different topology: for the liberal center, radical Left and Right are the two forms of appearance of the same “totalitarian” excess, while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist “radical” Right as nothing but the symptom of… liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat. [2] When we hear today a politician or an ideologist offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking a (purely rhetorical) question “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocking of religion to be punished by death?”, what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer – who would have wanted that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence. [3] This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. [4] One should accomplish here a Hegelian step back and put in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals have long ago lost their right to judge. [5] What Horkheimer had said should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk (critically) about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.”

I want to respond to Norman Geras’ attacks: as Norm has numbered the paragraph in order to better specify which bit he is attacking, I’ll follow the same formula. Anyone wishing to play the game should read Norm’s article first, then read mine.

[1] What Žižek is saying here is neither new nor remarkable. For liberals, radical Left and Right are two forms of the same totalitarian excess. I have to use Žižek’s words because they are so well chosen. How many times do socialists come up against the argument that Fascist tyranny and Soviet tyranny were the same thing? One doesn’t even have to engage with the Trotskyist idea of deformed and degenerated workers’ states to see that, whether or not their methods were similar (and in his In Defence of Lost Causes, Žižek makes a good case that at the semiotic level, the methods weren’t the same) , the two represented different configurations of social forces.

One was born of stalled workers’ struggle, the other was given birth to crush that struggle – and this is true whatever one thinks of the subsequent behaviour of the new Soviet Russian elite. Similarly, for the Left, the major opponent is liberalism. I give liberalism the lower-case ‘l’ as a means to note that this is not the list of policies held by one political party or another, but the ideology which underpins the whole system of capitalism and the basic prejudices of all three major parties of the British parliamentary system: Right, Centre and Left. I don’t see anything startling here – nor any reason for Professor Geras to dismiss it as idiocy.

When Žižek subsequently says that “the populist “radical” Right [is] nothing but the symptom of…liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat”, again, he is saying nothing new. The conception of fascism as the reaction to the global eruption of militant class struggle around the world following WWI is not new. On a smaller level, I was saying something similar myself in my previous article: the populist Right latch on to solutions to symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself (e.g. immigration rather than a free labour market).

Capitalism creates two interests, liberalism only has room for one. Under capitalism, the first interest is that of the worker, who would prefer if cheaper labour could not be used to supplant his own or drive down his wages. The second interest is that of the employer, who has the opposing interest. Liberalism, the defence of the equal rights of the individual, stands with the employer: individuals should be able to move around unrestricted, which is an implicit justification of capitalist practice. To assert otherwise is to constrict the liberty of some.

Thus politicians, caught between pressure from below, which is angry at one of the natural practices of capitalism, and the natural and logical extension of their own liberalism, adopt Right-populist slogans and concepts: the restriction of immigration, British Jobs for British Workers etc. Here it is the rhetoric which is important: the practical effect of such measures  is to produce scapegoats rather than to actually halt immigration; all the draconian immigration laws in the world don’t stop the free flow of labour – as witnessed if we compare the actual practices which caused the Lindsey Oil Refinery Strike versus the number of laws New Labour have passed to tighten up immigration.

Professor Geras contends that by asserting all this, that Žižek elides a bunch of differences between Right-populism and liberalism: I don’t think this is so. I think Žižek simply recognizes the deficiencies of liberalism and the circumstances under which liberalism will be transformed into Right-populism by its inability to reconcile popular disaffection with the results of capitalism and the first principles of liberalism itself. I’m sure all of this is open to challenge – but it’s hardly fitting for Norman Geras to go about calling it ‘political idiocy’.

[2] The next attack launched is that Žižek is trying to eliminate the distinction offered by the notional politician he creates. Said politician asks, “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocking of religion to be punished by death?” Obviously the expected answer is “No”, and the implication is that only liberalism can deliver on that “No”, whilst a whole host of fundamentalisms will happily deliver the organised suppression of women and the censure and execution of free-thinkers.

Agree or disagree with him, Žižek’s point (a more extended version of which can be found in his book Violence) is that actually the distinction is a false one. Liberalism delivers for Western Europe (relatively) empowered women and the right to say what we want – but as a result of our liberal system, our armed forces are off doing the work of totalitarians and fundamentalists in foreign countries. Indeed the same rhetorical cover has been used for such military interventionism since the days of slavery and beyond.

We can want different freedoms etc, but so long as these remain on a liberal basis, they come at the expense of coercing other nations to be just like us. Which sounds fine: a few broken eggs to create a global liberal democratic omelette. But the reality, when the rhetoric is stripped away, is that ‘just like us’ simply means that countries are open to foreign investment, that their State has the same attitude towards opening up public services to private profiteering and so on and so forth. This is what happened in Iraq: it will no doubt happen in Afghanistan.

Bottom line: I don’t think Žižek is minimizing the real differences in quality of living between British people and people living under fundamentalist regimes – and this is what I take from Žižek’s remarks, though I have the advantage of having read quite a portion of other work. What Žižek is attempting to do is show that these freedoms and differences in quality of life aren’t abstract and politicians who counterpose the differences as a means to defend liberalism (muscular or otherwise) ignore the global effects of this ideology, denuded of its innocence.

[3] Again the liberalism-fundamentalism distinction. I agree with Professor Geras that those things he lists – e.g. throwing acid at girls for attending school – are barbaric. But the opposite of ‘barbarism’ is certainly not liberalism. See the above comments on our ‘liberal’ involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq – and they are not the first. The only thing added to the discussion is that Žižek contends that liberalism generates fundamentalism; if Žižek had said ‘capitalism’ in place of liberalism I think he’d have been more accurate – but even still, all is not lost.

Liberalism is the dominant discourse of capitalism; the doctrine of  rights, which are inalienable to the individual. Export of liberalism is part and parcel of capitalism, breaking down moral economies and traditional ties in favour of market exchange. People can react to this by attacking the symptoms, such as the surface discourse of liberalism rather than the practicalities of capitalism, in defence of ‘traditional’ forms of exploitation. The form that capitalism takes, i.e. liberalism, thus begets if not the fact then the form of its enemy: illiberal fundamentalism.

For this reason, Osama bin Laden and his crew attack homosexuality, fornication, intoxication and gambling (all defended by liberalism based on the right of the individual to do as they will, so long as they harm no other) in the same breath as usury – i.e. modern banking, the necessary prerequisite of a free market. Even the attitude of such people to advanced technology, that other symptom of modernity, is one of suspicion – though no doubt hypocritical, since OBL himself is reportedly surviving due to a dialysis machine.

I shall leave [4] and [5]; the former seeming to me a bit of gobbledegook (what the hell is a Hegelian step back and is that any different from the regular English idiom ‘to step back’, i.e. to gain perspective?) and the latter seeming like an excuse for a pissing contest over how far people like Norman Geras do or do not critically analyse liberal democracy (that is, cast the mote) before they attack religious fundamentalism. They hardly require much explanation – and I think my point is already made in any case.

Namely, when Žižek drops the Lacanian silliness, his points are pretty traditional – and agree with them or disagree with them, they are not as immediately nonsensical as Norman Geras would make out.