In Rough Country (5 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
What a queer little woman this was, he thought, with her large eyes and her sullen, resentful air. Her features, which must have been quite pleasant once, had now gone completely. The mouth was slack, the cheeks loose and flabby, and the whole face gave the impression of having slowly but surely sagged to pieces through years and years of joyless married life.
Mary's revenge too is one of comic-book simplicity: she will take her husband's brain away with her, and blow smoke rings into the permanently opened eye: “I just can't wait to get him home.”
This is the art, if “art” is the appropriate term, of caricature that prefers to jab, stab, slash its subjects instead of attempting to present them with any degree of complexity or sympathy. Grotesque descriptions of flat, cartoon characters are Dahl's stock-in-trade, intended perhaps to be amusing but often merely peculiar, as in this thumbnail sketch of a mildly deranged gentleman named Mr. Botibol:
He resembled, to an extraordinary degree, an asparagus. His long narrow stalk did not appear to have any shoulders at all; it merely tapered upwards, growing gradually narrower and narrower until it came to a kind of point at the top of the small bald head. He was tightly encased in a shiny blue double-breasted suit, and thisâ¦accentuated the illusion of a vegetable to a preposterous degree.
Elsewhere, in the jokey “Dip in the Pool,” Mr. Botibol, or his namesake, is described as resembling a “bollard” with “skinny legsâ¦covered in black hairs”: his fate is to drown in the ocean as a senile old woman gazes on unperturbed. Dahl's females are particularly grotesque specimens, like Mrs. Ponsonby of “Nunc Dimittis” who is “so incredibly short and squat and stiff, [she looked as if] she had no legs at all above the knees,” has a “salmon mouth” and fingers “like a bunch of small white snakes wriggling in her lap.” The narrator of this sour little anecdote is an elderly bachelorâa “vicious, vengeful old man”âwho takes revenge upon a woman friend for having gossiped about him by displaying a portrait of her part-naked, unattractive body to their mutual friends; that the poor woman wears
a hefty brassiere (“an arrangement of black straps as skillfully and scientifically rigged as the supporting cables of a suspension bridge”) and is “bow-legged, like a jockey” is presented as particularly shocking. (The portrait painter of “Nunc Dimittis” would seem to have been modeled upon Gustav Klimt, known to have painted his female subjects nude before clothing them in their elaborate fin-de-siècle finery.) Most notably, there is the formidable president of the Daughters of the American Revolution, yet another, presumably unrelated Mrs. Ponsonby:
The door was opened by the most enormous female I had ever seen in my life. I have seen giant women in circuses. I have seen lady wrestlers and weight-liftersâ¦But never had I seen a female so tall and broad and thick as this one. Nor so thoroughly repugnantâ¦I was able to take most of it inâthe metallic silver-blue hair with every strand glued into place, the brown pig-eyes, the long sharp nose sniffing for trouble, the curled lips, the prognathous jaw, the powder, the mascara, the scarlet lipstick and, most shattering of all, the massive shored-up bosom that projected like a balcony in front of herâ¦And there she stood, the pneumatic giant, swathed from neck to ankles in the stars and stripes of the American flag.
It must be that such misogynist female portraits are self-portraits of the misogynist's malformed soul, they draw forth such quivering, barely containable loathing.
3
As Jonathan Swift is the most obsessively scatological of English satirists, so Roald Dahl is the most obsessively sexual,
in stories as casually lewd as “The Great Switcheroo” (two men, wholly ordinary husbands and fathers, plot to “switch” wives in the night, without the silly wives' knowing) or as doggedly protracted as “Bitch” (the womanizer Oswald Cornelius finances the development of a perfume with irresistible aphrodisiac powers, brand-name “Bitch”) in which the very man who is revolted by massive Mrs. Ponsonby ends up having sex with her in what, one assumes, Dahl means to be a comic scene:
I was standing naked in a rosy room and there was a funny feeling in my groin. I looked down and saw that my beloved sexual organ was three feet long and thick to match. It was still growing. It was lengthening and swelling at a tremendous rateâ¦Bigger and bigger grew my astonishing organ, and it went on growing, by God, until it had enveloped my entire body and absorbed it within itself. I was now a gigantic perpendicular penis, seven feet tall and handsome as they come.
In the breezy “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel's Coat” the unnamed narrator, presumably speaking for the author, with the impassioned lunacy of Philip Wylie ranting about womenâ“Momism”âin the long-forgotten screed against women
Generation of Vipers
(1942), informs us:
America is the land of opportunity for women. Already they own about eighty-five percent of the wealth of the nation. Soon they will have it all. Divorce has become a lucrative processâ¦Young men marry like mice, almost before they
reach the age of puberty, and a large proportion of them have at least two ex-wives on the payroll by the time they are thirty-six years old. To support these ladies in the manner to which they are accustomed, the men must work like slaves, which is of course precisely what they are.
Yet, from time to time, a clever man can exact a merciless punishment upon a woman, even when, as in “The Last Act,” the woman has been a devoted wife to her late husband, after years of mourning at last daring to revive an old boyfriend's interest in her, with cataclysmic results:
Then at last, Conrad put his tongue into one of her ears. The effect upon [Anna] was electric. It was as though a live two-hundred-volt plug had been pushed into an empty socket, and all the lights came on and the bones began to melt and the hot molten sap went running down into her limbs and she exploded into a frenzyâ¦She flung her arms around Conrad's neck and started kissing him back with far more gusto than he had ever kissed her and although he looked at first as though he thought she was going to swallow him alive, he soon recovered his balance.
In this crude misogynist fable which Jeremy Treglown in his introduction concedes that Dahl “would have done better to have scrapped,” the vengeful Conrad so humiliates Anna sexually, the poor woman is driven to commit suicide.
In the yet cruder misogynist fantasy “Georgy Porgy,” a
priggish, sexually repressed minister is both repelled by and attracted to women:
Provided they remained at a safe distance, I could watch them for hours on end with the same peculiar fascination you yourself might experience in watching a creature you couldn't bear to touchâan octopus, for example, or a long poisonous snake.
Recoiling from his childhood experience with a cartoon monster-mother, George conducts improbable experiments with white rats, determining that the female of the rat species is more sexually rapacious than the male, even when death by electrocution is involved; it's no surprise that he falls prey to a female parishioner with the ominous name Roach whose face is covered with a “pale carpet of fuzz” and whose enormous mouth, threatening a kiss, is “huge and wet and cavernous.” Soon, in a parody-paroxysm of female sexual desire, Miss Roach begins to “grunt and snort like a hog” crying, “Don't! Don't, Mummy!” George finds himself sucked into the woman's very mouth where, after a ludicrous struggle reminiscent of certain of the mock-heroic adventures of Swift's Lemuel Gulliver among the giant Brobdignagians, the virginal bachelor is swallowed: “I could feel the slow powerful pulsing of peristalsis dragging away at my ankles, pulling me down and down and down⦔
Dahl's punished figures are not exclusively sexual victims: in “Taste,” a nouveau riche wine connoisseur is insulted at his
own dinner table by a “famous gourmet” in “The Pig,” as in a cautionary Grimms' fairy tale for greedy children, a young man who cares too much for food is led off to be butchered with other pigs strung up by their ankles: “taking Lexington gently by one ear with his left hand, [the slaughterer] raised his right hand and deftly slit open the boy's jugular vein with a knife.”
Not all of Dahl's stories end so grimly, and not all of Dahl's satire is sadistic. The funniest story in the collection, and one in which no one gets killed or even humiliated, is “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” an eerily prescient fable of 1952 in which an aspiring young writer invents a computer-printing press to churn out ingeniously formulaic books:
First, by depressing one of a series of master buttons, the writer made his primary decision: historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous or straight. Then, from the second row (the basic buttons), he chose his theme: army life, pioneer days, civil war, world war, racial problem, wild west, country life, childhood memoriesâ¦The third row of buttons gave a choice of literary style: classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine, etc. The fourth row was for character, the fifth for wordageâ¦ten long rows of preselector buttons.
Within a year, the machine has produced “at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language.”
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Except for writers of major stature, in whose lesser work there may be some archival, extra-literary, or morbid interest, the
indiscriminate all-inclusiveness of a “collected stories” is not a good idea. What a dispiriting sight, a table of contents listing forty-eight short stories with no divisions into books and dates, as the author himself had intended! (No short story writer, like no poet, would simply toss a chronological arrangement of his work into a form so lacking in interior structure: individual collections of short stories and poems have beginnings, middles, and ends that have been judiciously pondered.) Though the advantage of a purely chronological arrangement of work is that the reader may perceive the development of a writer's style, his growth, and the prevailing themes that make his work distinctive, the disadvantage is that the reader may perceive the deterioration of the writer's style, his decline, and his reliance upon predictable themes. Of the forty-eight stories, scarcely more than one-third seem truly notable, and these come relatively early in Dahl's lengthy, forty-five-year career. The volume trails away in affable narrated anecdotal sketches, as if Dahl had lost interest in the craft of storytelling as he seems to have lost the sting of vengefulness. The last four or five stories might have been printed out by the Great Automatic Grammatizator or by “Georgy Porgy” who, after his nervous breakdown, seems to have become a writer-satirist whose final object of satire is writing itself:
I find that writing is a most salutory occupation at a time like this, and I spend many hours a day playing with sentences. I regard each sentence as a little wheel, and my ambition lately has been to gather several hundred of them together at once and to fit them all end to end, with the cogs interlock
ing, like gears, but each wheel a different size, each turning at a different speed. Now and then I try to put a really big one right next to a very small one in such a way that the big one, turning slowly, will make the small one spin so fast that it hums. Very tricky, that.
Laughter is the primeval attitude toward lifeâan attitude that survives only in artists and criminals.
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OSCAR WILDE
L
ike all classics,
Lolita
is a special case. An occasion for enormous controversyâbitter denunciations, fulsome praiseâat the time of its publication in 1955, the novel has acquired, over the decades, like such scandalous predecessors as James Joyce's
Ulysses
and D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, the patina of the lewd classic: far more people have heard of it, and have an opinion about it, than have read it. Individuals with virtually no interest in literature, particularly the fussily self-referential, relentlessly ornate Nabokovian manner, know who Lolita was, or is; or imagine that they do. Humbert Humbert, the narrator of
Lolita, or The Confession of a White Widowed Male
, the hapless lover of the twelve-year-old American schoolgirl, provides a definition of the “Lolita” prototype:
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many
times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”
(Is Humbert Humbert a pedophile? In fact, he gives little evidence of being attracted to girls as young as nine, fortunately; his erotic attractions are for older girls, who arouse his ardor as “little nymphs” or “nymphets,” who seem to mimic adult sexuality while retaining a childlike innocence.) Nabokov makes clear by way of Humbert's background that the nymphet-prototype precedes the actual girl: as Humbert had been in love as a prepubescent boy with a girl named Annabel, whom the slangy, vulgar, so very American Lolita later embodies. We are meant to think that Humbert's (perverse, criminal) predilection for prepubescent girls is his fate, and not his choice.
Famously, Humbert confides in the reader, as to a panel of jurors, his most shocking revelation:
Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.
And, later, in trying to describe “that strange, awful, maddening worldânymphet love,” Humbert confides:
I have but followed nature. I am nature's faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive
her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.
Like Oscar Wilde, similarly torn between the “demonic” attractions of the flesh, in Wilde's case for young boys, and the propriety of a sternly judging society, Humbert Humbert experiences his predicament as so hopeless, the conflicts of his appetites so beyond remedy, he has no recourse but to turn to comedy for solace.
Lolita
is richly stocked with “realistic” details, for Nabokov had a sharp, shrewd eye, especially for human failings, but in essence
Lolita
is a blackly surreal comedy. Humbert Humbert is a comic character, forever trying to explain himself, excuse himself, and yet, in the next breath, incriminating himself further; after he has become Lolita's lover, and is legally her stepfather, he tries to seduce her into being a kind of accomplice of his in incorrigible sex-deviant fashion:
In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way, anent the whereabouts ofâ¦local schools. I would park at a strategic point, with my vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave schoolâalways a pretty sight. This sort of thing began to bore my so easily bored Lolitaâ¦she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while [schoolgirls] passed by in the sun.
Even in this outrageous confession, Humbert Humbert tries to seduce the reader into sympathizing with him: deviancy isn't a choice but a fate. Isn't it cruel of Lolita to insult
him
.
Lolita
is a brilliantly nuanced portrait of a sex addict in
thrall to his addiction even when the addiction has been and can be satisfied by someone close at hand; for always there is a yearning for the new, the not-yet-attained, the anonymous schoolgirls passing Humbert's carâbodies of “immortal daemons” disguised as female children that seem, for the moment, to have eclipsed Humbert's lust for Lolita. Humbert is a comic portrait of the very type for whom pornography has been invented and by whom, in the United States alone, it has become a billion-dollar industry for its addicts are continually yearning, continually sated and continually ravenous for more.
In his archly self-defensive afterword to the 1956 edition, Vladimir Nabokov speaks scornfully of those who attempt to read
Lolita
for its pornographic potential. One can argue that there is, at
Lolita
's core, a soft-core/sentimental pornographic romance, but few readers intent upon pornography will have the patience to make their way through the author's Byzantine prose. (Reading
Lolita
for its erotic content is akin to reading Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
for its horror content.) Especially, such readers will be deterred by the lengthy, increasingly improbable and forced melodrama-farce of Part II, in which a sinister double of Humbert Humbert named Clare Quilty appears to seduce Lolita away from her deranged stepfather. (In the impressively executed but not very sensuous 1962 film of
Lolita
directed by Stanley Kubrick, Clare Quilty is given a campy/clownish portrayal by Peter Sellers while James Mason is a sensitive but not very “demonic” Humbert Humbert.)
Lolita
is much-read and admired by undergraduate English majors with whom Nabokov's cutting, somewhat adolescent sarcasm strikes a chord: his Humbert Humbert is an adult, skewed ver
sion of J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield who, as we may recall, has a powerful emotional attachment to his younger sister, and feels a general revulsion for most grown-ups.
Scandalous in its time,
Lolita
has transcended the circumstances of its early controversy as it has transcended the circumstances of its time and place: late 1940s, early 1950s “repressed” America. Along with
Pale Fire
, Nabokov's yet more ambitious novel of 1962,
Lolita
is a feat of literary legerdemain, a shimmering cascade of brilliant passages set like jewels in an elegant tapestry. It is surely one of the most convincing portrayals in literature of, if not the human condition per se, the (fated) condition of the obsessive.