Condemned to Freedom.

No Excuses.

As we will see the Sartrean conception of freedom is quite distinct, even from the rest of the existentialist line of thinkers, from its psychological starting-point to its moral outgrowth. The starting-point Sartre takes with consciousness marks him out from his precursors, Nietzsche saw consciousness as quite overrated.¹ There is an interesting convergence between the particular route Sartre would eventually take on moral questions and the critique of traditional morality Nietzsche had put forth in the late 19^th Century. Not to mention the highly different ideas of selfhood which emerge from Sartre's framework and from Nietzsche's thought-processes. To both the authentic self is something that has to be created through a rejection of the inauthentic, which may be constituted as a set of social norms or moral values.² We will explore Sartre's view of human freedom with critical reference to Nietzsche where the conception seems to fall short of its aims.

The notion of consciousness as freedom is the vital element of Sartre’s existential phenomenology.³ It fits in with his general project that places freedom as the central dimension of human existence. This is where the existential themes of responsibility, commitment and notions such as bad faith and authenticity fit into the picture as well. The modes whereby we may relate our being to Being can be authentic and inauthentic. For Heidegger there was more truth in authenticity as it was a self-directed rather than a moral ideal. This is where freedom enters with the existentialist focus on the actions we undertake and, by extension, the way we choose to undertake them. Sartre went as far as to claim that the actions which we undertake can have consequences that we did not foresee and which we are responsible for insofar as we are solely responsible for own actions. The motivations we may hold are irrelevant insofar as they may provide ‘excuses’ which allow us to avoid our own responsibility. This is the reason that we fear and often shirk from the acceptance of our condition as radically free.⁴

When we look at Sartre’s conception of freedom we have to keep in mind that his body of work was a reaction to Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. As part of Sartre’s reaction to Heidegger he reverts to some extent back to Husserl – in that the focus of phenomenology should be consciousness – and brings with him modified vestments of Cartesianism which Heidegger wanted to ‘throw out’. This conception of freedom is predicated on consciousness as nothingness because freedom is consciousness it is detached from the causal forces of the external world. At the same time, there is literally nothing which traps the self ‘inside’ consciousness because there is nothing there.⁵ Nietzsche had noted that this particular kind of selfhood is detached from the world of causes and that it meshes well with the purposes of morality for this reason. Sartre may not have disagreed, his notion of consciousness precluded it being determined.

The Ethics of Ambiguity.

It may even be that this version of selfhood was put forward to generate a particular kind of moral conduct. It certainly led Sartre in a particular direction. In an attempt to craft an evaluative moral code Sartre reached out to Kantianism with which he was very familiar. The aim was to get away from the instability inherent in the radical subjectivism that seemed to be built into existentialism. Even as Heidegger preferred authentic modes of being over inauthentic modes. It's all too clear that authentic behaviour can have consequences of the moral and immoral kind. The amorality of authenticity in Heidegger’s work meant that there was nothing about it which ruled out Heidegger dabbling in the politics of the Third Reich at a moral level. This was something that had to be rectified for the philosophers who emerged on the other side of WW2. Especially for the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who had been embedded in the French resistance.

Sartrean thought seems far removed from Kant at the outset. It may testify to the need for a kind of moral realism, even as Sartre rejected Christianity and traditional modes of morality he found that he had to go back to Kant in the end. It was the categorical imperative which interested Sartre, it stipulated that there are objective demands on us. It is an impersonal moral duty which takes two forms and we have access to it through reason. Firstly, that we should "act only on a maxim or rule that you can will to be a universal law". And secondly that, we should "treat others as an end in themselves, as opposed to a means to an end".⁶ The imperative is relentless in its universalism, cutting through all wants, desires and circumstances. This may seem completely at odds with Sartre's framework. But the emphasis in his conception of freedom on responsibility is compatible with Kant's insistence on universality.

To put it simply, when we act as individuals we act as we would expect others to act and this is the key to morality for Sartre.⁷ This is consistent with the Sartrean notion of freedom insofar as it can be seen as an extension of the claim that we are responsible for the extent that we act in accordance with our evaluative capacities. It could be seen as built on Sartre's idea of radical choice, which comes out of Nietzschean influences on his thinking. It was Nietzsche who put forward the suggestion that we create values. There aren't actually any out there for us to latch onto as the myths which supported our values are destroyed in nihilism. The only way out is to put man where God once was.⁸ For Sartre we have to choose rather than create our values and this begins with a radical choice, the act which opens up a new space of moral conduct. But it seems that the universality Sartre wants to go for would have the effect of instituting conformity at a self-directed level.⁹ This would seem to be too tight a constraint on Sartre's radical notion of freedom. Then again it has always been the case that this tradition has given preference to certain behaviour and attitudes, we can see this in Nietzsche's own favouritism for master-morality.

The Radical Self.

Perhaps then the emphasis on universality is what's wrong here and not the framework itself. Instead morality may be about particularity, it always boils down to a matter of interest.¹⁰ But it's unclear where this takes us, if anywhere else other than a return to the instability of moral subjectivism. It may be more in accordance with the creation of values rather than the simple choosing of them. Nietzsche would prefer to confront us with the idea of the Eternal Return of the Same than a set of duties.¹¹ The Eternal Return functions as a test for one's attitude towards life and our ability to live as ourselves without any evasive behaviour. The test is to imagine that you would have to live your life as it has gone so far and as it will go on over and over again indefinitely. So any moment of life is one which we could dwell on for all eternity. To meet this test is to affirm life and to failure is something quite pathetic. In part this functions to push us. Eternal Recurrence can force us in part to accept life as imperfect it is, so that we can 'become' who we are.

Although the alternative to moral universality seems flawed and impractical, much more in line with being-toward-death than any code of conduct, it seems clear that the venture into Kantian ethics may have been a poor manoeuvre on Sartre's part.¹² Freedom may be the primary dimension of human existence for Sartre, but its symptoms include abandonment and responsibility. Existence itself is factical because we are transcending beings, the way we exercise our freedom can transform the circumstances under which we live. We can remake the world and ourselves in accordance with our ideas, in doing so our facticity is recreated. And yet we are condemned to restlessness where we are never satisfied with our accomplishments. Each instance of facticity cannot be taken on its own to represent who we are, for we still have the capacity to act once again and redefine ourselves. The real problem may lie with the elements of Cartesianism that Sartre brings into his framework.

As it's not clear that the certainty which Descartes attributed to consciousness characterises it at all. For Nietzsche knowledge involves a finite entity with finite abilities engaged with a world of infinite becoming. The extent to which 'I' can refer to something autonomous and total is highly suspect, as Cartesian selfhood relies on an unsustainable dualism which cuts mind from body. Similarly Sartre cuts the world from consciousness. Descartes would have placed consciousness at the centre of his notion of selfhood and we can pick up an element of this in Sartre too. But Nietzsche did not reject the notion of a self. For Nietzsche the self is indistinguishable from the person and the body, which are in turn embedded in a socio-cultural context and inseparable from all sorts of contingent natural forces.¹³ Thus the importance of culture in Nietzschean thought. The self is always contextualised and cannot be broken-off from the world, to pretend it can be completely detached is illusory.¹⁴ The self is not 'I' rather 'I' is just the development of the self.

1 Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 2/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GaO7wvRLsU

2 Wartenberg, Thomas: Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.125-145

3 Solomon, RC; Sartre’s Phenomenology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGzpEqKK-Y

4 Wartenberg, Thomas: Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.37-46

5 Solomon, RC; Sartre’s Phenomenology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vGzpEqKK-Y

6 Kant offered four examples of the categorical imperative in play: we should not commit suicide, we should not break our promises, we should be lazy but develop our talents and we should not ignore the happiness of others but help them.

7 Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.140-143

8 Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.324-325

9 It could be argued that Sartre never really found an easy way to adapt existentialism for the moral and the political. Simone de Beauvoir may have come closer to a practical ethics, the ambiguous condition of the human being as a part of a world that their consciousness is not. It is this ambiguity which makes ethics difficult for existentialists, de Beauvoir's answer was to insist that 'every man needs the freedom of other men and, in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant'. Human freedom presupposes the possibility of inter-subjectivity, taking the individual to the social realm.

Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.143-145

10 Sedgwick, PR: Nietzsche, The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2009) pg.69-72

11 Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 3/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7skKQHGTdFE&feature=related

12 Wartenberg, T; Existentialism (Oneworld Publications, 2008) pg.40-46

13 The limits of knowledge are what give it meaning and concreteness to knowledge. It is absurd to claim that ‘I think’ has any immediate identification with thought. The neglect of human capacities for creativity by this conception is intolerable, such capacities are not extensions of a ‘pure intellect’ above the body. Rather the self and the intellect can be best grasped in the drives of the body. The individual as a nexus of drives, instincts and passions is central to Nietzsche’s vision, with the self as the realm where such drives can be refined.

Sedgwick, PR: Nietzsche, The Key Concepts (Routledge, 2009) pg.137-142

14 The talk about free-will confuses causes and effects, we shouldn't talk about our behaviour as though there is first an act of will (cause) and then comes an action (effect). As every effect must have a cause we might say that the preceding cause is a mental one to action, but for Nietzsche there is just action. We just do things most of the time, it is only every so often that we have to push ourselves and will something. Most of our lives are not so reflective and deliberative, we just do things because of the kind of creatures we are. It is a matter of necessity. This is consistent with Nietzsche's attitude towards consciousness, which Sartre seems to elevate by contrast. Nietzsche puts aside the focus on justifying actions in favour of explaining actions in terms of motivation and who we are. Character is constituted by a set of automatic actions which we cultivate.

Solomon, RC; Nietzsche on Freedom, Fate & Responsibility 2/3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GaO7wvRLsU

Too Rare to Die, Too Weird to Live.

“We were two miles outside of Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.” Thus begins the first line of the book which serves as the handshake, for most, with Hunter S Thompson, the masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972). It is 40 years after that book was written and 6 years after he decided to call it a day with a bullet to the head. The suicide in 2005 was inevitable.  Thompson had made no secret of his decision to commit suicide for years before he actually did.  The reasons were many and varied, but the main reasons were due to his failing health, his idealisation of youth and his resolute refusal to grow old gracefully. The funeral had been planned years before and Thompson’s old friend Johnny Depp was responsible for the funding of the ceremony – the good doctor’s remains were fired out of a cannon at his compound in Colorado.

The stereotypical image of Hunter S. Thompson is not actually one of Thompson himself; most think of his alter ego, the drug crazed, babbling lunatic Raoul Duke. This is the persona in which Thompson was able to write such insane tales of unbelievable excess such as the aforementioned Fear and Loathing. But Thompson himself was less of a caricature, and more of a thoughtful, darkly angry crusader against all that he saw was wrong with America. His targets included the decadence of the 70’s, pro football, and his arch nemesis Richard Milhous Nixon.  Nixon personified everything that Thompson thought had gone awry with the United States, for he was the gutless war-monger who bombed Indochina into the stone-age for nothing more than political capital and when the students at Kent State came out in protest Thompson connived to have them slain by the National Guard. Years before Woodward and Bernstein blow open the Watergate scandal, Thompson was already decrying Nixon as a crook, a blowhard and the bastard who would plunge America into a decadent, depraved parody of every truth and principle on which it was founded, as indeed he did.

But it is for Gonzo that Thompson is so fondly remembered. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Gonzo journalism, here’s a quick primer to save you the trouble of checking Wikipedia. Gonzo journalism is the antithesis of “fly on the wall” journalism, being more “fly in the ointment” in its style. It approaches any given subject material from a subjective viewpoint, exacerbating details to a ridiculous proportion in an attempt to give a more sympathetic view of the material in question. It was invented and pioneered by Thompson in his article The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent And Depraved, in which he described his own experience of the Derby rather than in the traditional sports-writer style – he covered the crowd and not the derby. He did this purely because of a looming deadline and he had no time to write up his notes. The resulting article is by turns grotesque, informative and utterly hilarious, and gives a far more accurate portrayal of Kentucky horseracing than would have otherwise been shown by a traditional writer. Gonzo grew from there, and is now aped by innumerable writers across the world (one of these writers being a particularly persistent perpetrator of this style). 

The aforementioned Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is undoubtedly his most famous work,  a monolith of excess and depravity seared across America's most grotesque altar to consumption and vice. It is the starting point for most into the world of Hunter S. Thompson, and is also his funeral eulogy for the spirit of the 60's. The nihilistic search for a thrill that Thompson (masquerading as Raoul Duke) and his unnamed Samoan attorney (a comic exaggeration of Thompson's real life friend and confidant Oscar Acosta) undertake in Nevada is born out of a sadness that the hippy spirit of the decade before did not bring about universal peace and love, but instead opened up America to the "grim meathook realities" of what absolute freedom really meant. The famously Herculean consumption of narcotics undertaken in the book is also inspired by the death of the  60's, a sly comment on how the spiritualistic nature of drugs as preached by Timothy Leary descended into the hedonistic need for a chemical buzz that fuelled the 70's, and as it remains to this day. The book came as a howled requiem for the Beat Movement, the generosity and revolutionary zeal of writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg replaced with a scowling, dark commentary on how the world failed to live up to the promise of the Hippy Dream, and wistfully looking back on how pathetic and futile the whole movement had been.

We must remember him as a man with one face looking back at John F Kennedy, the closest a politician could get to an everyman, and looking towards George McGovern with his other face as he asks for three margaritas and six beers for lunch. There are few ways to summarise the man's viewpoint without giving way to his own words, as he was more eloquent than we can ever be: "There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die."

Written by JT White and Josh Ferguson, December 6th 2011, for the Heythrop student newspaper the Lion originally.

A voyage into Gonzo.

"I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger: A man on the move, and just sick enough to be totally confident." - Hunter S Thompson

The Rum Diary is not a piece of Gonzo journalism, for it was written in the late 50s when Hunter S Thompson was in his early 20s. But what is Gonzo? The particular brand which Dr Thompson dabbled in was as strenuously subjective and participatory as it is wild, this is where flat-out fantasy meets accurate reportage. The good Doctor filtered reality through a freakish mania sustained or possibly endured with the help of copious amounts of (both legal and illegal) substances. For Gonzo the claims of 'objectivity' which permeate American journalism are false and absurd, the blind-spots of which provide room for people such as Richard Nixon to slither into public office. Instead Gonzo wallows in its own subjectivity, it oozes provocative opinion as well as hard fact and comment meshed together with just the kind of sordid thoughts that will shock the squares. For Thompson journalism is nothing more than "a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits — a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

Going by the trailer of the film adaptation it would seem that the director Bruce Robinson (another seasoned drinker) had sought to extrapolate the Gonzo style throughout the story from the early hints of Gonzo lurking in the work. Undeniably there are the early signs of Gonzo in the piece, the drunken adventures of Paul Kemp in Puerto Rico carry the same filthy and sinister tones to them as in Thompson's later works. The language is simple, as well as wild and precise on the important details. Just as in The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved the reader is left waiting for the major event which never actually comes. Instead the almost masturbatory run-up to the event becomes the central focus of the piece. The derby is never covered in the sports article Thompson wrote. The Gonzo style of the narrative is complimented with the ultra-surreal and grotesque illustrations of English artist Ralph Steadman, who was out of his face on psilocybin at the time. The assignment was botched and Thompson saw it as a brutal failure, until he received wave-after-wave of positive feedback.

In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas the reader only sees the beginning of the motorcycle race that Thompson was sent to cover in Nevada. Instead the depraved duo of Hunter S Thompson and Oscar Acosta became Raoul Duke and Dr Gonzo, the mad trip through Las Vegas which followed was likened to a "savage journey to the heart of the American dream". The American Dream does not seem to be covered in any way other than some abstract analogy between all-American ideas and the cultural revolution of the 60s which had died by the early 70s. Perhaps it is the journey itself which falls short of finding the Dream. In The Rum Diary there is no sidekick for Paul Kemp, at least not to rival Oscar Acosta and Ralph Steadman. The role of the foreign compatriot in these instances is not to provide a domesticated semi-by-standing assistant to the character arc of a white man, rather Acosta became a full participant in the story just as Thompson did. Oscar Acosta was a radical lawyer who went on the road with Hunter S Thompson to Las Vegas where their antics were immortalised in Fear and Loathing.

The hints of a politically conscious youth can also be found in The Rum Diary, there are references to the "rise of communism", discouraging events in Cuba and the brutality of capitalism. The McCarthyite atmosphere of the day is captured as the newspaper is owned by a man named Lotterman, an ex-communist who attacks anything remotely left-ish to prove himself as a reformed character. Power is consistently portrayed as sleazy, amoral and self-interested. The politics of Thompson were one part ultra-leftist sentiment, one part Democrat and three parts Freak Power. As a man of contradictions Thompson was at once facing the liberal establishment and the radical strand of American populism. So he can support JFK and Jimmy Carter at the same time as he launches into vociferous attacks on Richard Nixon. In his dedication to George McGovern he set out to destroy all Democratic opposition with his typewriter, before moving on to do the same to the Republican candidates. In the end it was all or nothing for the good Doctor, he gave up the ghost before he got to see the first African-American walk into the White House as President. In the end it was all fear and loathing...

"The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who see it coming and jump aside." - Hunter S Thompson

The Zeitgeist of '68.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Interlude: The above excerpt is the 'Wave Speech' from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas written by Hunter S Thompson in 1971 just as the zeitgeist of the 60s came crashing down to earth. The cultural revolution of '68 was assimilated into the dominant ideology where sexual liberation, free-speech, equal rights for black people and women became secondary parts in the system as a whole. The individualism of the 60s burst through the old hierarchies of power and prissy conventions to establish itself as the status quo. The rise of a ferocious turbo-charged capitalism came a decade later after the stagnancy and disappointment of the 1970s. Fear and Loathing is about the collapse of the zeitgeist in the early 70s as Hippie spiritualism is subsumed in hedonist despair. The 60s left to us a lesson about power which was summed up by Thompson as "the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel."

Crashing and Burning in Montreux.

The controversial book Lolita was written by Vladimir Nabokov and published in 1955, known for the innovative and lyrical style in which the narrative unfolds page-by-page, the infamy that has enveloped the novel is down to its content which focuses on the most sordid sexual deviancy - paedophilia. It is a dark tale of a middle-aged man and his obsession with a 12 year-old girl, the nature of this "love affair" is disposed towards rape and physical abuse. Nabokov insisted that his book did not convey any message, and it was not a work of "big ideas", stressing that he didn't want to "touch hearts" or "effect minds". I can't help but suspect that this element of Nabokov's work is partly due to his outlook and political views. Nabokov was a strident individualist and considered himself an old-fashioned liberal, which is likely given that his father was a prominent liberal politician, although Nabokov was also a close friend of William F Buckley and a fan of Richard Nixon.


It's important that we consider Nabokov's life. Vladimir Nabokov was born into one of the most powerful families in St Petersberg and inherited great wealth at a young age, he lived in a large house of 50 servants. Though this life of luxury as a Russian aristocrat was cut short by the Bolshevik Revolution, foring Nabokov to go into exile just as he was reaching maturity. This separated him from his first love Tamara, Lolita could have been Nabokov's way of mocking the way he still reminisced on his relationship with Tamara even in old age. Particularly as he aged she would have no doubt remained the same age in his mind as he had known her. Nabokov's father was shot dead by a fascist in Berlin, his gay brother was murdered in a concentration camp. These events not only displaced Nabokov and changed his life forever, but it may be the reason for his individualism. From the trampled ground of Bolshevism and fascism Nabokov emerged, like Ayn Rand although less extreme, in opposition to "big ideas" and "utopian goals" like communism.

Nabokov's claim to not propagate any message or "big idea" in his work is typical of an "old-fashioned liberal", who would argue that the state should be minimal to protect individual freedom. In the past, and even today, the libertarian right-wing has argued that the Civil Rights act should be repealed on the grounds that it infringes on the freedom of business owners - the freedom to discriminate. Defenders of such a position often claim to be "neutral" and adhere to a minimalist view of the state as "non-interventionist" for the sake of freedom of choice. But in not taking sides and not interfevening in such a way you are taking sides and are interferring. As such "neutrality" is permissive of the racist practices prevalent at the time. In not taking sides in Lolita, neither explicitly condemning nor embracing paedophilia, Nabokov may have taken the side of Humbert Humbert.

Apart from his life as a novelist Nabokov loved football and was an avid chess-player, he was also an entomologist. As an entomologist Nabokov collected over 4,000 butterflies and even discovered a species, which was named in his honour "Nabokovia". The life of a butterfly is particularly interesting in regards to Nabokov's writing. A butterfly begins life as a caterpillar, before entering an immobile stage known as the "nymph stage" before emerging as a butterfly weeks later. During the "nymph stage" the insect is neither caterpillar nor butterfly, in that sense it is in a liminal state. The parallel stage among humans would be the teenage years - which are neither child nor adult - liminal like the "nymph" stage. In the story Lolita is a prepubescent girl of 12, which would place her just prior to entering this liminal stage as a caterpillar. But it is as she is reaching maturity that Lolita dies while giving birth to a stillborn child, she was just 17 at the time - not yet an adult, not yet a butterfly.

However, we must not be rash and conclude from this that Vladimir Nabokov was simply no defender of paedophilia. Humbert Humbert is not the last "nympholept", nor was Lolita the last "nymphet", spawned by the dark-side of Nabokov's imagination. Similar tales of sexual deviancy appear as early as 1939 in Nabokov's work, beginning with The Enchanter and ending with Laura which he never finished and was published posthumously against his wishes. In total there are about six novels in which young girls are lusted after by mature men. As Martin Amis noted, about two or three of these novels are masterpieces but the content is nevertheless unsettling. It would appear that "nympholepsy" is part of the decor of themes and motifs - along with butterflies, chess, Freud-bashing, mirrors; doubles and dopplegangers - that are recurrent in Nabokov's works.

The Enchanter is similar to the first half of Lolita in that the protagonist infiltrates the household of his prey by marrying the girl's mother, after the mother is out of the picture (e.g. killed off), the "enchanter" despoils the prepubescent daughter. Though the differences are more important, and perhaps more revealing, than the similarities between the two books. The "enchanter" has a single voyeuristic "moment" with his nymphet, whereas Humbert Humbert has sex regularly with Lolita for about 2 years. The Enchanter is less subtle and crude than Lolita in terms of writing, in the former Nabokov writes at one point "he began passing his magic wand above her body". And yet it is Lolita in which Nabokov judges Humbert Humbert, tacitly holding him responsible for the trajectory of Lolita's life - from her defiled childhood to her premature death, a life stolen by Humbert.

Interestingly, The Enchanter was published by Dmitri Nabokov in 1987, whereas Lolita was published in 1955 when Nabokov was still alive, even though it was The Enchanter which was written first in 1939. This might lead us to conclude that Vladimir Nabokov was worried about the release of The Enchanter, nothing particularly new there as Nabokov contemplated burning Lolita on several occasions and wanted The Original of Laura to be destroyed upon his death. But it was not until Nabokov's later years that he underwent a literary meltdown, beginning with Ada in 1970. As Amis puts it "When a writer comes off the rails, you expect skidmarks and broken glass; with Nabokov, naturally, the eruption is on the scale of a nuclear accident." It is in Ada that Nabokov creates a world which Humbert would have adored - where nothing matters and everything is permitted.

On it goes in Transparent Things (1972) and Look at the Harlequins! (1974), in the latter a Vadim Vadimovich marries a girl 43 years his junior. In Transparent Things an impotent misfit named Hugh Person visiting Switzerland, courting Armande and tending to Mr R an aging eccentric author and a paedophile. Person looks at a picture of Armande when she was 10, arousing and haunting him in dreams from then on, he later strangles Armande in his sleep and dies in a fire at the hotel. The sexual depravity recurrent in some of Nabokov's many novels may place such works further to the transgressive fiction of William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade. Though we might conclude Nabokov's writing on such a rancid transgression is really down to an obsession with the internal chaos of man. But I think that might still be too generous, even for an author of Nabokov's magnitude.

Memento Mori.

A Tabula Rasa.

Christopher Nolan's film Memento (2001) explores the dull archetypal story of revenge combined with aspects of traditional detective stories, which have been recycled and churned out repeatedly by Hollywood over the years, through the cliche of a amnesiac narrator. Perhaps, what is so original, compelling and truly brilliant aspect of Memento is the structure that the story takes and the way in which Nolan combined old ideas in the piece. The protagonist, Leonard Shelby, suffered a head injury whilst trying to save his wife from intruders who had broken into their house. Since then Lenny has suffered from anterograde amnesia, amnesia in which he retains his old memories and knowledge but is incapable of maintaining new memories. The film is structured, to fit the unsettling subjectivity of the protagonist's view of reality, in reverse chronological order. As Nolan explains, Memento does not have a non-linear structure, at least not in the conventional sense, because each scene is directly dependent on the one before just as in a linear structure.


Though the film is enthralling on many levels, it introduces an age-old area of philosophy to popular culture and its audience. In the opening scene, we are confronted with a polaroid photograph of a man who has been shot dead. In reverse of the process taken in photographing the corpse, the polaroid slowly fades as it gradually returns to it's initial blank state before retreating back into the camera. The polaroid itself is passive to the camera and it's owner to determine the image of which it will ultimately convey. This is almost a metaphor for the blank slate, or tabula rasa, description of the mind, favoured by empiricists like John Locke. Empiricism is a philosophical school of thought focusing on the nature of knowledge, empiricists argued that all our ideas and knowledge are derived from experience via senses. For instance, our ideas of ‘white’ and ‘cold’ come from the first time we encountered snow. Our experiences shape our knowledge of reality and all the ideas we’ll ever have are taken from our experiences. There are parallels to this in Memento. The polaroids, notes and tattoos are the only ways in which Leonard Shelby can collect knowledge - which is derived from his daily experiences in his search for John G.

The way that a camera can serve as a model for the empirical view of the mind. Images are received and after a flash imprinted onto a polaroid, the tabula rasa, as the human mind is blank upon birth and develops an understanding of the world from sense impressions, according to the empiricists. The opening shot of the polaroid is a metaphor for the inner-workings of Leonard's damaged psyche - a truly empirical mind perhaps is one in which memories cannot be made. The distorting effect amnesia has had on Shelby's consciousness is why a priori knowledge is absent in his life after the incident. We do not live like Shelby because we can make new memories, we don't need all those notes and tattoos to get by. The reason: because Lenny is lacking something we are not. We can hold onto knowledge, probably because the mind isn't a blank slate normally. Rationalists would argue that we have a priori knowledge, which is independent of experience and sense impressions (if anything) "unlock" such knowledge. There has to be something in the camera to hold images, it can't just be a void.

Reason and Experience.

Immanuel Kant proposed a synthesis, a compromise in the epistemological argument between philosophers of the rational and empirical traditions. Most animals receive information through sense impressions, a dog can hear us speak but will not understand our language. It takes reason to understand the received information, which is what may separate us from the animals. The reason interacts with the experience and is not passive, if anything, reason dominates experience shaping it into concepts that we can understand. The concepts of ‘white’ and ‘cold’ exist to us, not because they exist objectively. But because we have imposed these concepts onto our subjective experience of reality, snow can appear to us as both ‘white’ and ‘cold’. This is not because the world is inside our minds. This is because our minds only have the capability to perceive the world in such a way. For instance, the unified notions of time and space that we hold are not entirely independent of our minds. We just cannot perceive the world without applying the concepts of time and space, otherwise nothing would be comprehensible.

This is a point enforced by the reverse linear structure of Memento. If we could perceive the world without applying the concept of time, as we understand it, the reversed structure of the film would be insignificant. Though, we can follow the storyline because we put things together as we're watching, the structure has a major impact upon how we interpret the story. When we first come across Natalie we see her as a possible love interest. This is due to the traditional depiction of female main characters as a love interest or play-thing for the leading man. In Memento, this assumption of Natalie is further played on when Leonard awakens after sharing a bed with Natalie. It is only as the story progresses, that it becomes apparent that Natalie is not a love interest at all and appears to be a manipulative character with her own goal of avenging her boyfriend's death. All of this is predicated on the fact that the audience would be caught off guard by the structure of the film. Though it's possible that the film could not even have been made if the concept of time was totally objective and unconnected to the human experience.

During the conclusion of Memento, which is actually the beginning of the story, Leonard acknowledges that there is such a thing as a priori knowledge when he says "Yeah, we don't need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I'm no different." In doing so, he rejects the notion that knowledge is derived only through sense impressions. We do not need to sense ourselves to know ourselves, we simply are ourselves and therefore know ourselves a priori - it is not acquired through experience but known. So this would mean that the metaphor of a camera for Shelby's mind is only partially accurate of his "condition" - a state of near passivity to knowledge, to others etc. Leonard has anterograde amnesia and the way he has been led along by Teddy shows the depth of his passivity. It is in the film that we see the transition Leonard Shelby makes from "bad faith" - acting as if one is a object passive to the forces around them - to authenticity and all the responsibility that comes with it.

The New Man.

Leonard Shelby is a highly original character, standing out against scenery in his cream suit and even standing incongruous to the banal revenge story he is part of. Shelby is remarkably independent, resourceful and determined for an individual suffering from such a "condition" - in contrast with the story of Sammy Jenkis who ends up in a home. But at the same time, because of his "condition", he vulnerable to the power of others. We can only watch as Leonard is manipulated by those around him. Teddy, Natalie and even Burt use his "condition" to further their own ends, whether it be for financial gain or revenge. Though the trust Leonard places in his notes keeps him from being easily manipulated by Teddy. On several occasions Leonard looks at the picture of Teddy and his comment "Never believe his lies" which stops him from following his guidance blindly. Partly this is the way that Leonard continues on his own independent path to find the killer-rapist John G. Of course, John G is already dead and Shelby is already free but trapped in "bad faith", allowing others to determine his actions.


Though it could be that this element of Memento cannot be understood fully without exploring the ideas of existentialism. Existentialism is a radically subjective philosophy that places the individual, autonomy, authenticity and the self, at the centre of importance. Fanon believed that the only way individuals could achieve true freedom, as opposed to the spurious bourgeois freedom of the West, is through violence. The very experience of violence would be cathartic and can awaken individuals from the West's insidious form of control. At the heart of existentialism rests a view of human beings not too dissimilar from empiricism. The way in which empiricists view the mind as a tabula rasa at the beginning of life is similar to the way in which existentialist philosophers viewed the attaining of essence after existence. But for the likes of Sartre, the individual is not a passive and blank slate waiting to experience the world. Sartre would have argued that the individual must not act in "bad faith" in order to attain authenticity and experience true freedom. "Bad faith" being to act as if one is passive and conform to the pressures that surround you.

The story of Memento relates closely to the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. This is also appropriate as Sartre was heavily influenced by Kant and pursued merging the duty-based ethics of Kant with existentialism. The act of killing Teddy may be the emancipation in itself, as it is Shelby's action that destroys the powerful force that he has been passive to for so long. After which Leonard emerges as a "new man" who has taken charge of his life and has purged himself of the "bad faith". The paradox of this relationship being the comfort and security of it, but also the turmoil and horror that is innate to the relationship. However, it could be argued that the emancipation Leonard achieved by killing Teddy was set in motion when he first wrote down Teddy's license plate, in the film's conclusion and the story's beginning, and in that sense it was that action, not killing John G, which was truly authentic.