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I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.
It doesn’t matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don’t talk about it, then we can’t protect against it.
If you are seriously against CSA, then you should absolutely read Lolita. Yeah, the book that set the western world on fire with weird sexual conversations.
That book perfectly breaks down what a lot of very real sex abuse looks like. It details how predators look for victims (family members), it details what happens to the child who is enduring abuse (she acts out, she screams randomly, she does very poorly in school, etc, etc), and it shows who the most dangerous perpetrators are (intelligent, well liked, charismatic).
That book will make your skin absolutely crawl! Once you get out of the head of HH long enough to look at the world Dolores was dumped into, you’ll cry your eyes out. But you know what it’ll do? It’ll open your eyes.
That book has a lot of weird reactions. Some people turn on Lolita, some people turn on HH, some people turn on Nabokov, but it came out when Freud was still respected. That book came out in the middle of “little girls want to fuck older men and it’s their fault it happened and they’re crazy”.
It turned the world around. Some of the discussions about the book are nasty!!! Even from Kubrick and Nabokov. Their discussion about Lolita makes my SKIN CRAWL!! They talk about it in a very POSITIVE and WEIRD way. But it opens your fucking eyes and that’s the POINT.
Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality.
Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality.
Emphasizing this last sentence because it’s so well put. We have to engage with things that make us uncomfortable so we can learn to be better.
Yes! I recall reading a quote from Nabokov about why he wrote it. What I remember him saying was “I read in the news about a man who was arrested for molesting girls, and I became curious. Why would a person do that? So I wrote from the perspective of someone who would.”
That’s… that’s not even weird, I don’t think. I wonder why people do horrible things all the time.
I don’t actually think Nabokov had everything about it right. It seems to me that many real molesters are much more aware of what they’re doing and sometimes even perving on the cruelty of what they’re doing. HH seems kind of quaintly Freudian in comparison.
But that’s what Nabokov would have seen around explaining it, so it makes sense.
And Nabokov really does seem aware, on my reading, that HH is doing harm, and that the idyllic love affair he’s dreaming of is in his head. What’s actually going on is just seedy and gross.
It’s hard to read, hard to understand, and messy.
But those things are what make it good, rather than just “hey look I picked a shocking topic have some torture porn.”
(I hate the term torture porn but it’s the best term I can think of rn)
Nabokov gave extensive interviews and talked about Lolita often. He gets such a raw deal. I have compiled a bunch on my main blog here. i just hate nabokov misinformation so here are three for you:
Do you closely follow Lolita’s fate?
I feel obliged to keep up with the destiny of Lolita. After all, people stop me on the street and ask me to comment on opinions. So I have to know what is being said about me.
Lolita is an indictment of all the things it expresses. It is a pathetic book dealing with the plight of a child, a very ordinary little girl, caught up by a disgusting and cruel man….But of all my books, I like it the best. The last bone always tastes best.Nabokov…predicted: “Those who keep looking for spicy bits will not find them. They will not be able to read the book through—they will get bored too soon. The only thing that might be attractive is the diary H.H. keeps. And then, who would be attracted by a 12-year-old girl?“
Vera Nabokov…refilled his glass. “Tell them about the child,” she said.
“Oh, yes. I am rather bitter about this. I am in favor of childhood—in fact the very first book I ever did was a translation of Alice in Wonderland into Russian. Anyway, a few nights ago, on Goblin night, a little girl—she was 8 or 9 I think—came to the door for candy. And she was dressed up as Lolita, with a tennis racquet and a pony tail, and a sign reading l-o-l-i-t-a. I was shocked.”By all accounts and backed up by extensive interviews, Nabokov wrote a psychological thriller and expected people to be shocked and compelled by it in the same way you can’t look away from a train wreck. His worst crime was total naivete. He literally never expected that anyone would take it as a romance.
nabokov wrote "don’t create the torment nexus” and then children showed up at his door dressed as the torment nexus and people forever will be like “you wrote about the torment nexus, which is the same thing as being in support of the torment nexus”.
The first time I asked a person about the book Lolita, they told me “it is a romance, it is about a young woman and an older man falling in love”. Then the second time someone told me about it, they said it was a nauseating accusation of society. And the third person told me it was a terrible story about an adult predating on a kid.
I really wish the first interpretation never existed. I wish the author’s naivete over expecting utter shock and disgust from everyone wasn’t naivete but how society really is.
I don’t believe censorship is the solution, but I do think such books should be restricted to the classroom with a good learning structure so as to give people context, or at least they should be released with additional commentary so a new reader can understand the entire context.
Also, such books need trigger warnings. I was a victim of CSA. When I was a kid I had a veracious need to read every book in existence, and had I accidentally come across that book and started reading it, that horrible book would have completely wrecked me. Perhaps permanently. It certainly did my head in as an adult to find out that people think such a thing was “romance”.
That is censorship. Restricting who can read a book is censorship. That is exactly what it is.
As frustrating as it is that people read things “the wrong way,” and they do, and they always will, making sure people “read the book in the correct and approved way and take away the correct and approved meaning” is… not a thing that should ever be hoped for.
Commentary editions are great! Restricting where and how and by whom things can be read? Not so much.
The solution is never to restrict who reads a book. The solution is to make sure everyone who reads a book discusses that book with lots of other different kinds of people with lots of different kinds of opinions. THAT is how you dispel “wrong” readings. THAT is how you help people who have a reaction to a reading which is potentially “harmful” or “problematic” to be more accepting of diversity, more able to cope with evil in the world, more able to discern evil, and more emboldened to denounce it when discerned.
No. People need to have the opportunity to do so.
Anytime you say “make sure” or “must” about reading, it’s a form of enforcing one way of consuming books, and that’s a bit of backhanded enforcement of correct opinions. If someone wants to read the book and never talk to anyone about it? That is one of many “correct” ways to read the book.
And the thing is… even when we’re talking about something like Lolita, where there is definitely a wrong way to read the book, people are allowed to be wrong about art. Yes, even this art. Yes, even this book. They have to be allowed to be wrong about art, because the minute that you start trying to force people to observe the Correct Way of consuming art or thinking about it, you aren’t just doing a big ol’ censorship, you’re holding the door open and yelling “QUICK, ALL YOU BAD ACTORS! I’VE JUST MADE IT OKAY TO MANDATE CORRECT OPINIONS ABOUT ART! QUICKLY, COME BAN ALL THE ART YOU DON’T LIKE!”
And that always, always lands on marginalized artists first, last, and hardest.
So, yeah, a robust community with the option to join into meaningful discussion about what you’re reading? Super great. Super awesome. Fully agreed.
Any kind of “must only read in classes or talk to people about it so we can be sure you interpret the art ‘correctly’” is a big no.
People have to be allowed to be wrong about books.
Yes, even that one.
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