Before dubbing Del Rey a gleaming member of the literati, however, we must admit one three-word phrase is hardly proof of her intent or even understanding. But having now taken note of a possible intent, I propose we also must entertain the idea that beneath Del Rey’s mask of flippancy and pouty glam, there may just be a hypnotist’s eyes. And of course, when we examine her more closely, some evidence does glare back. Let us take a brief look.
First, there is another more obvious example: the track “Off to the Races” plainly quotes in its refrain Lolita’s much celebrated first sentence, “light of my life, fire of my loins.” If nothing else, this proves beyond reasonable doubt that Del Rey seeks to engage Lolita as a text and not just as a misshapen cultural idea. Unfortunately, this really does prove nothing else. We can hardly give Del Rey credit for lifting a book’s already over-cited first lines for a song that doesn’t engage with them meaningfully. Further, this particular citation suffers from the same shortcomings of Del Rey’s quip about Dolores Haze in the ghetto — specifically, in this context it doesn’t actually mean anything. Once again, it reveals the confusion between Lolita and Humbert Humbert, the confusion between victim and victimizer. Let us remember, students of Nabokov and scholars of Spotify, anything seductive in this book has its source in the thrashing pen of a pervert, not the thighs of a poor vixen. It is simply incorrect for Del Rey to belt out this quote and pretend Lolita was the one who originally moaned it. Del Rey’s mistake is baldly revealed in the juvenile pitch she affects when the line squeaks out. To achieve verisimilitude, her voice must plummet three octaves, at least.
The Caretaker’s album does not choke itself on the objective of embodying an entire book. Instead, it sounds as if it has read that book and can now move forward with that greater knowledge in its noise.
But, ultimately, this sort of criticism is redundant and hollow. Worst of all, it discourages us from gleaning what is most interesting, which is, again, what Del Rey got right. Namely, I submit, the song “Carmen.” It seems indisputable to me that of Born to Die’s offerings, the finest songs are the ones Del Rey released as singles prior to the album’s actual debut (“Video Games,” “Blue Jeans,” and the title track). Of the remaining songs, two stand out as approaching the quality of these earlier offerings: the first is “Radio.” But it is in the second song, “Carmen,” where Del Rey makes an argument for herself not only as a compelling pop musician, but as a perceptive reader.
Scour the song’s lyrics all you like. You’ll see they hold no overt reference to Lolita. The connection is more interesting than that, as it is an achievement of metafiction. The song, you see, is Del Rey’s own version of a tune that Humbert Humbert and Lolita sing together early on in the novel, while the girl sits in the pedo’s lap as he secretly (and fully) pleasures himself by indulging through layers of cotton against her lower limbs. The ballad that H.H. employs as distraction, is, of course, about a “little Carmen” and “the stars, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen.” Having firmly established Del Rey’s interest in Nabokov, there is no doubt her song titled “Carmen” is no coincidence. Although she quite smartly generates her own lyrics (she does, however, mimic Nabokov by rhyming “Carmen” with “charmin’”), the reference is undeniable. Of her various attempts to embody Lolita’s character, this song, in its entirety, is the most successful, but not because its content is about some poor girl and her sad, spoiled life. It’s successful because it intentionally refers to a moment in the book when Lolita is oblivious and exploited. Of all the tracks on Born to Die, this is the only one that convincingly portReys Lolita’s pairing of deception with naïveté — of all the tracks, it’s the only one I can imagine Lolita herself singing, but only because I believe it’s been proven through illustration and allusion that, despite the song’s content, she would willfully overlook its darkness and would not notice the man plucking the apple from between her knees. Del Rey, for a sad single song, doesn’t call herself Lolita, but actually sounds like her, and it’s because of the cited scene, through a rare affectation of innocence.
But the strongest case in Del Rey’s favor is the least precise and requires the most generosity from us. It’s simple and, once you notice it, obvious. It’s a matter of aesthetic, and it utterly penetrates the majority of the album’s songs.
Integrated into many of Del Rey’s beats is one of two sound effects: the first is the sound of a man screaming with varying degrees of choler and clarity. Regardless of a song’s subject, this sound gives the often chilling effect of a masculine force attempting to break into the defensive shell projected by the music. The most obvious example is on “Blue Jeans;” the most subtle and harrowing is in “National Anthem” (use those hi-fi phones!). Because these sounds are ingredients of the beat, their suggested violence seems relentless and inevitable, even while the girl sings about girlish things. By now, I believe the relevance in connection with Lolita should be self-apparent.
The second sound is one of children playing. In the final pages of Lolita, a stricken Humbert Humbert, now having reached a sort of moral certitude and doom, tells how one day a bout of nausea compelled him to stop his car at the crest of a valley. Walking to the edge, looking out, he hears coming from the town below the sound of children at play, invisible in the distance. In these last pages, he mourns, hopelessly, “the absence of [Lolita’s] voice from that concord.” Impossible to believe, but also with the effect of impossible sincerity, Humbert Humbert actually intimates the will to repent, accompanied by the tantalizing knowledge that he never can. Appropriately, to hear Del Rey’s take on invisible children at play, see “Off to the Races,” “Summertime Sadness,” and “This is What Makes us Girls.”
No doubt, these details and their effects could be mere coincidence. Even so, there is something to be said and considered about even an accidental resonance of imagery and aesthetic between Born to Die and Lolita. No matter the banality of Del Rey’s statements on literature or the platitudes of her references, there are moments when she incises and strikes right to the quick of something. This is why she remains under examination and why you’ve read this far.
So what is Del Rey’s ultimate fate in terms of Lolita? The conclusion is simple and thankfully shocking. Of the many multi-layered tragedies folded into Nabokov’s book, there is one in particular that sits squarely at the bottom, at the root. It is the tragedy of Humbert Humbert’s art. While not the saddest of the book’s tragedies, nor involving the most egregious crimes, in Lolita’s Afterward, Nabokov himself suggests this tragedy was the seed of his book. The writer describes the “first little throb of Lolita” entering his nervous system when he read an article about an ape who was taught how to draw. The first picture it produced depicted the bars of its cage.
The shocking verdict for Del Rey is she has cast herself more as Humbert Humbert than Lolita.
H.H.’s tragedy is this: the man clearly possesses a sort of genius; he is some breed of literary titan. But, alas, Humbert Humbert’s own fetish has driven him to squander a supremely rare gift to a life of crime and impulse. It is not hard to imagine the character, freed from the compulsion of his fetish, as a writer spewing masterworks with ease and devouring dozens of ingenues of a more appropriate age. But, of course, his prison and its bars — his love for nymphets — has contained and consumed his art.
The shocking verdict for Del Rey is she has cast herself more as Humbert Humbert than Lolita. Of course, I do not mean this in terms of perversion, or of exploiting anybody, or of being a villain. I make the comparison thinking of H.H.’s tragedy, which Del Rey, in a way, shares. Born to Die offers moments of clear potential, such as the evidence that Del Rey is capable of injecting literature into her music in a profound way. But her misreadings overwhelm. All her successes are couched within an album that’s too often either puerile or sterile. We get the impression that something threw her off course, distracted her from making the kind of art that was in her potential. Maybe Del Rey truly had only a handful of great songs inside her, but it seems to me she more likely fell victim to an imprisoning seduction of her own. Exactly what this would be, we can only speculate, but it seems just as Humbert Humbert’s art was deluged, doomed by an obsession he could not shake, Born to Die was crippled by the allure of swollen fame and success, which came too soon.
Afterword. The fate of the writer W.G. Sebald was a tragedy — a tragedy of the real world, not the melodramatic “tragedy” I’ve just used to discuss Lana Del Rey. In 2001, a car crash ended Sebald in an instant, as a New York Times obituary from that year reports. Sebald, 57 years old, had been on track to become one of the 21st century’s indispensable pillars of literature. In the decade since his death, it has become clear that, though robbed of half his life, he stands as a monolith anyhow.
Obviously, W.G. Sebald never achieved a Nabokov-esque level of fame in his lifetime. Although brilliant, his books likely will never seduce the masses with the same naughty tenacity as Lolita. But Sebald himself said on occasion how personally important he considered Nabokov, and the two share common ground. Their propensity for mazes is a start, along with their identities as snowy-haired European gents with supreme gravitas, immortalized in their most famous photographs. They both made great use of English, though it was not their native language (Nabokov wrote his best works directly in English; Sebald, a German living in England, wrote first in his mother tongue, then meticulously and expertly oversaw his translations). Sebald’s perennial subject was the Holocaust, though he most often described it through terms of outline or by examining it in the periphery or reflection of something else. Nabokov’s own brother died at the hands of the Nazis, though this is a subject he attends to in his writing at its periphery. Sebald himself noted in interviews that one of his great talents was to trace unlikely, seemingly roving, associations, like a dog zigging then zagging through a field.
However, not all associations need be far fetched or meandering: it is a great and all-too-tempting coincidence that the same month Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die hit shelves — January 2012 — there also debuted an album focused on one of Sebald’s finest books. The Caretaker’s Patience (After Sebald) is the soundtrack for a documentary about The Rings of Saturn, one of Sebald’s “novels” (the documentary, also called Patience, begins by describing how Sebald’s books effectively deny and decimate conceptions of genre). Appropriately, the film has recently seen a wider US release. It’s very, very good — you can read an aptly glowing review on this very website.
While there seems to be almost no aesthetic similarity between The Caretaker and Del Rey, based on wherein reviews for each artist appear, their audiences do share some overlap. In terms of music alone, it would be a fool’s errand to flatly compare the artists’ 2012 albums because they’re so different. In terms of how each integrates their respective book, however, there is no more enlightening contrast. A pairing is recommended.
An analysis of The Caretaker’s effort can be thankfully swift, because his album is so successful in its mission. There is a quote in the film Patience by Robert Macfarlane describing how Sebald concerns himself with substances of dust, materials on the border between something and nothingness. A fan of The Caretaker will find assured harmony in these ideas, as his method of music-making — filtering vintage-sounding tracks through layers of deteriorating effects — embraces dissolution as a key component. Sebald is a writer fixated on memory and all its holy perforations and errors. The Caretaker’s music is reverent in the way it celebrates the aesthetic of decline. Grant Gee, the documentary’s director, did not find a musician who could rise to the aesthetic of W.G. Sebald — he found a musician who was already living within it. The Caretaker’s album does not choke itself on the objective of embodying an entire book. Instead, it sounds as if it has read that book and can now move forward with that greater knowledge in its noise.
In an interview in 2001, Sebald discussed technology of the modern world. Technology, of course, makes The Caretaker’s music possible, as it makes possible your consumption of these words. Responding to a question about his book After Nature, Sebald said, “In terms of evolution, [machines] are of the higher order, there’s no doubt about it. Whether they are intelligent or not is neither here nor there, but they are of the higher order. They come after us. It is encapsulated in that wonderful image of the dog listening to the gramophone.” As I write this, records emblazoned with the RCA terrier line my wall, bend against books, and gather dust. W.G. Sebald died in tragedy later that year, shuttled darkly by the luxurious technology of a car. Whether or not his radio was turned on, I don’t know, and whether that fact should have significance, I can’t say.
