A Philosophy of Literary Style
Beauty has been a problem for philosophy. It seemed obvious to history’s great thinkers that value comes from learning to live in this world or in glorying God, not in indulging the senses with beauty. The obvious problem with this is that one good does not exclude another, but does beauty—specifically, in literary style—hold any philosophical merit on its own?
The vehicle I’ve chosen for this consideration is Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, for it is often cited as one the most beautifully stylized books, and yet when critics grapple with its subject matter, its hard to find justification for it in any stance the book takes or any moral it teaches. Nabokov didn’t chose a pedophile as a narrator to celebrate the crime, but denouncing its evil isn’t the point either. Nabokov takes the evil as granted and presents the project as an aesthetic exercise in unreliable narrators. While no justification given by Humbert Humbert is ever meant to be taken at face value, we aren’t meant to grow from this realization. It simply is. The world is not a better or worse moral place for the existence of Lolita, at least not because of its subject matter. The reader is confronted with something ugly, something the reader already knows to be ugly, and that subject matter is never made beautiful—but the language in which it’s presented is. This was Nabokov’s challenge to himself and his reader, and the question that remains for us is simple. Is there any merit to the beauty of Lolita?
I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery—”the piazza,” sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.
Part 1, Chapter 10, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
We have complex emotions described by a metaphor, a vivid and concrete image in the reader’s mind: a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart. This is so much more than describing how he felt and instead paints a picture that we see, and by the feeling evoked in that picture, we experience the same sensation as the character.1
We are carried along the moment in a stream of consciousness, the thoughts of an educated man whose language, despite his sinister nature, is poetic and lyrical. His descriptions of the girl tumble over themselves in a frenzied rush: from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees…
All of this is juxtaposed against the banality of his tour, interrupted by a sudden burst of greenery, and Lolita’s mother sings out, intending to display the piazza but presenting, instead, the prey to the predator.
It’s a single sentence.
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
Part 1, Chapter 1, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Presumably, these are the first words of the story, a parade of alliteration and assonance, introducing his obsession with a phonetic playfulness,2 but they aren’t the first. The fiction begins a few pages earlier with a forward which pretends to exist outside the narrative:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start.
Forward, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Compare the difference in voice and style between this supposed authority and the book’s supposed author. While remaining educated and intelligent, nothing could be further from Humbert’s playful language that the stiff reporting of John Ray, Jr., PhD, and I can easily imagine the first passage I presented but written by this writer; all the reported facts but none of the emotion—none of the shared experience.
But Thaddeus, we don’t want to share in Humbert’s experience.
No we don’t, and that’s part of the reason for the book’s existence, part of the argument for the philosophical merit of its existence. One could see Lolita as a challenge to the view taken in many schools of art. It’s easy to create art about a beautiful subject. The true artist creates beauty out of ugliness.
“Yes, but not like this,” they’d say.
The value of Lolita, Nabokov might argue, is precisely not in her subject matter but in the style in which its presented. The book is an argument for style for style’s sake, an argument for beauty, for aesthetics.
Along with ethics, Aesthetics part of axiology: the study of value or value judgments; and some have likened beauty to moral goodness.3 Perhaps the connection can be seen in the fact that we call morally corrupt behavior ugly and a morally sound act beautiful, and Nabokov paints the ugliest of human corruption with the beauty of his prose.
Beauty is the point of Lolita, not the beauty of the girl but of the work itself. By design, the book holds no other value—at least by my argument, and if we take my argument as sound,4 is that reason enough? Can beauty be its own merit, especially if we’re considering works of art and not the natural world?
The Greeks thought beauty was a natural component of an object, distinct from the mental processes of the beholder. As long as that beauty remained in nature, fine, but in art, beauty became a danger, one that Plato argued should be carefully censored. Art has the capacity to inflame and manipulate. The value of art was in making one a better citizen.
Aristotle was kinder to art, but we were slow to grow out of our mistrust of beauty. Art required a moral or religious purpose, and beauty was the pleasing of the senses, an appeal to our basest instincts. Our misogynistic tendencies dismiss it as feminine and frivolous, and this is an aspect of our collective psyche not relegated to the past.5
As a society, we’ve moved away from art for the sake of the divine and replaced it with a saturation of pornography. What role does beauty have in such an age?
I think the contrast of Lolita against our modern glut of pornography is telling and demonstrates the book’s virtue, precisely because the beauty is not Humbert’s predatory view of the girl but the quality of the prose style. Lolita holds the capacity to challenge our culture without moralizing within its narrative. Instead it offers contrast by the merit of its language. In that light, it becomes a moral declaration for style.
Literary style is prose gift-wrapped in the fine art of poetry. Literary style is music accompanying tales told around a virtual campfire. Literary style is our love for pattern, a subliminal connection between an intellectual tale and ancient pools of mathematical emotion.
Beauty isn’t purely within the object the way the ancients believed, nor is purely a tantalization of the senses as medieval moralist thought. Neither is beauty determined by a rational reasoning out of the evidence displayed. The recognition of beauty is a response to an unconscious connection, a subliminal judgement. It is a declaration of merit from our innermost self, that part we cannot see at work, a part of ourselves, ironically, without language—older than language as Cormac McCarthy liked to say—and it judges language as beautiful (or not) without understanding its meaning.
Beauty is in the eye of the unconscious.
It doesn’t come from an instinct to provoke sexual arousal nor a fear-response to remove us from danger. The beauty of literary style is a recognition of patterns in place with the rhythmic repetition of sounds: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. The frequency of the language finds the tuner of our unconscious minds, and everything is determined to be as it should be—a creation of the highest order.
— Thaddeus Thomas
If you’re interested in reading more about literary style, check out my series at Literary Salon:
Aping the Styles of Classic Authors: Ernest Hemingway