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with our eyes closed, we fall ☆

@nerice / nerice.tumblr.com

☆ elia, info ☆ the city is not eternal, it's royally fucked.
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Entrapment in stories: How Lolita’s narrator “charms” the reader.

One of the most prominent features of Lolita is its unreliable narrator, Humbert Humbert. Described in the novel (by himself) as an attractive, educated, and well-off middle-aged man. Often times, in explanations and interpretations of the novel, it is presupposed that H.H. charms the reader, entraps them. He carefully constructs the story so as they have no choice in the matter, to view a horrific kidnapping and sexual abuse as a twisted love story, instead. Multiple excuses are given in support of this interpretation. Firstly; Dolores is described only as “Lolita”, a vacuous and deceptive “nymphet”, a modern day siren whose call H.H. can understandably never resist. Secondly; we never hear her story. Who is Dolores? We learn nothing of her inner world or thoughts, all we learn is warped by the words of a man who only wishes to protect his reputation. Lastly, our not-so-humble narrator appears to be a master of wordplay, never passing on using a foreign word, a clever turn of phrase. As he so cruelly states: “Oh, my Lolita! I have only words to play with!”.

Yet for those of us who understand deception and recognize suffering, the cracks of H.H.’s narration are easy to discern and slip through. There is obvious discord amongst his sentences, chaos in his paragraphs, and we see through the deception. Imagine then, to see the crude titles such as “ Dolores Haze- seductress or victim?” or the vapid description of H.H. as a “sympathetic protagonist”. Have we all missed the point?

Looking at Lolita means looking at what society values most. Any woman or girl, of any age, will in the context of a sexual act, always be the sinner. Lolita, or Dolores, as we should call her, has no choice over her own life from the moment her abuser meets her and creates from what was before a limitless life of youth and opportunity, a prison of despair and ugliness. How could she know what seduction means? Did she see it in the movies? Read it in a magazine? Of course, we forget. H.H. is an intelligent and European man, a symbol of authority for the masculine and hierarchical world we have built for ourselves. His voice, although obviously fraudulent, is one of power and truth. It is not because he is convincing that we listen to him; it is because we want his story to be true.  

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The last sentence here is especially relevant and grim. Why have the people driving the misreading of the novel always been literature critics, professors, successful artists and similar people who are absolutely capable of understanding the book. Sure, some might have been misogynists and genuine freaks who think CSA is fine actually but some were nominally progressive or would at the very least have positioned themselves as against CSA. So why?

Because buying into Humbert's perspective is easy when you don't want to face what deconstructing it means. Ironically, considering Nabokov's deep hatred of Freud, it reminds me of how his theories spread. What's easier to believe, that CSA is rampant and committed by all levels of society (even respected, important people with perfect social standing) or that all little girls secretly want to have sex with their fathers and all little boys want to have sex with their mothers so if any child ever says something was done to them they're either fantasizing or sought it out because of their parental sexual hangups which are a natural part of child development? It's so much easier to blame the child and reassert that our society is functioning as it should and not in need of fundamental changes to protect children from sexual abuse.

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There is a very interesting paper specifically on talking about incestuous abuse and storytelling in Lolita. It might be a little hard to wrap your head around if you don't read a lot of academic texts but it's really worth it: ‘The word is incest’: Sexual and linguistic coercion in Lolita by Jen Shelton. It's a brilliant text that goes further than just this point but this part stuck with me.

Sexual contact between adults and children can occur in part because our culture prohibits certain namings of incest, allowing only speech that confirms the judgement that the crime is so rare and horrible as to be unthinkable or that locates incest safely within populations labelled 'other' - the poor, the dark-skinned, the homosexual. [...] The father may, in fact, want to narrate the incestuous contact, but the taboo on incest speech dictates diat he cannot do so except insofar as he displaces blame. Society's willing blindness to incest, a blindness that seeks to reassure parents and children alike, thus empowers fathers in erotic violation but denies them certain narratives of that violation.) In patriarchal societies, male privilege can convince fathers that their stories will be accorded more weight than their daughters' stories. Freud's suggestion, in his rejection of the seduction theory in favour of the Oedipal theory, that incestuous desire arises on the child's initiative and not the parent's, has provided further support for fathers' authority. The storytelling component of incest thus acquires profound implications, for through it transgressing men can refigure the permeable boundaries that prohibit sexual contact with their children, re-establishing themselves as gatekeepers attempting to quell the rampant sexuality of children even as they violate the boundaries they are charged to uphold. [...]
None of this personal and cultural story-telling would be necessary were not daughters' stories so threatening. [... In practical effect, this means that incest that is not publicly narrated is acceptable, while incest that creates an open narrative of any kind must lead to disciplinary actions against someone — whether the aggressor or the victim depends on the particular circumstances of the case and the impact of those circumstances on each party's ability to tell a coherent story. Fathers' incest narrations tell the comforting story: that incest didn't happen, or, if it did, it was the daughter's fault. Daughters' stories discomfit androcentric culture, naming incest and rape in the face of their fathers' contradiction.
#lolita novel#csa /#incest /#fuck freud all my homies hate freud etc
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