Men Explain Lolita to Me
(2015)
It is a fact universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of an opinion must be in want of a correction. Well, actually, no it isn’t, but who doesn’t love riffing on Jane Austen and her famous opening sentence? The answer is: lots of people, because we’re all different and some of us haven’t even read Pride and Prejudice dozens of times, but the main point is that I’ve been performing interesting experiments in proffering my opinions and finding that some of the people out there, particularly men, respond on the grounds that my opinion is wrong, while theirs is right because they are convinced that their opinion is a fact, while mine is a delusion. Sometimes they also seem to think that they are in charge, of me as well of facts.
It isn’t a fact universally acknowledged that a person who mistakes his opinions for facts may also mistake himself for God. This can happen if he’s been insufficiently exposed to the fact that there are also other people who have other experiences, and they too were created equal, with certain inalienable rights, and that consciousness thing that is so interesting and troubling is also going on inside these other people’s heads. This is a problem straight white men suffer from especially, because the Western world has held up a mirror to them for so long—and turns compliant women into mirrors reflecting them back twice life size, Virginia Woolf noted. The rest of us get used to the transgendering and cross-racializing of our identities as we invest in protagonists from Ishmael and David Copperfield to Dirty Harry and Holden Caulfield. But straight white men don’t so much. I coined a term a while ago, privelobliviousness, to try to describe the way that being the advantaged one, the represented one, often means being the one who doesn’t need to be aware and, often, isn’t. Which is a form of loss in its own way.
So much of feminism has been women speaking up about hitherto unacknowledged experiences, and so much of antifeminism has been men telling them these things don’t happen. “You were not just raped,” your rapist may say, and then if you persist there may be death threats, because killing people is the easy way to be the only voice in the room. Nonwhite people get much the same rubbish about how there isn’t racism and they don’t get treated differently and race doesn’t affect any of us, because who knows better than white people who are trying to silence people of color? And queer people too, but we all know all of that already, or should if we are paying attention.
This paying attention is the foundational act of empathy, of listening, of seeing, of imagining experiences other than one’s own, of getting out of the boundaries of one’s own experience. There’s a currently popular argument that books help us feel empathy, but if they do so they do it by helping us imagine that we are people we are not. Or to go deeper within ourselves, to be more aware of what it means to be heartbroken, or ill, or six, or ninety-six, or completely lost. Not just versions of our self rendered awesome and eternally justified and always right, living in a world in which other people only exist to help reinforce our magnificence, though those kinds of books and comic books and movies exist in abundance to cater to the male imagination. Which is a reminder that literature and art can also help us fail at empathy if it sequesters us in the Boring Old Fortress of Magnificent Me.
This is why I had a nice time recently picking on a very male literary canon lined up by Esquire as “80 Books Every Man Should Read,” seventy-nine of them by men. It seemed to encourage this narrowness of experience. In responding, I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others. Saying this upset some men. Many among that curious gender are easy to upset, and when they are upset they don’t know it. They just think you’re wrong and sometimes also evil.
There has been a lot said this year about college students—meaning female college students, Black students, trans students—and how they’re hypersensitive and demanding that others be censored. That’s why the Atlantic, a strange publication that veers from progressive to regressive and back again like a weighty pendulum, recently did a piece on “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It tells us that, “Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher have publicly condemned the oversensitivity of college students, saying too many of them can’t take a joke,” with the invocation of these two old white guys as definitive authorities.
But seriously, you know who can’t take a joke? White guys. Not if it implicates them and their universe, and when you see the rage or get the threats, you’re seeing people who really expected to get their own way and be told they’re wonderful all through the days. And here, just for the record, let me clarify that I’m not saying all of them can’t take it. Many white men—among whom I count many friends (and, naturally, family members nearly as pale as I)—have a sense of humor, that talent for seeing the gap between what things are supposed to be and what they are and for seeing beyond the limits of their own position. Some have deep empathy and insight and write as well as the rest of us. Some are champions of human rights.
But there are also those other ones, and they do pop up and demand coddling. A group of Black college students doesn’t like something; they ask for something different in a fairly civil way, and they’re accused of needing coddling as though it’s needing nuclear arms or needing your wallet at gunpoint. A group of white male gamers doesn’t like what a woman cultural critic says about misogyny in gaming, and they spend a year or so persecuting her with an unending torrent of rape threats, death threats, bomb threats, doxxing, and eventually a threat of a massacre that cites Marc Lépine, the Montreal misogynist who murdered fourteen women in 1989, as a role model. I’m speaking, of course, about the case of Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate. You could call those guys coddled. We should. And seriously, did they feel they were owed a world in which everyone thought everything they did and liked and made was awesome—or just remained silent? Maybe, because they had it for a long time.
I sort of kicked the hornets’ nest the other day by expressing feminist opinions about books. It all came down to Lolita. The popular argument that novels are good because they inculcate empathy assumes that we identify with characters, and no one gets told they’re wrong for identifying with Gilgamesh or even Elizabeth Bennett. It’s just that when you identify with Lolita, you’re clarifying that this is a book about a white man serially raping a child over a period of years. Should you read Lolita and strenuously avoid noticing that this is the plot and these are the characters? Should the narrative have no relationship to your own experience?
All I had actually said was that, just as I had identified with a character who’s dismissively treated in On the Road, so I’d identified with Lolita. I read many Nabokov novels back in the day, but a novel centered around the serial rape of a child held hostage, back when I was near that child’s age, was a little reminder of how hostile the world, or rather the men in it, could be. Which is not a pleasure.
The omnipresence of men raping female children as a literary subject, from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles to Brett Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, along with real-life accounts like that of Jaycee Dugard (kidnapped at age eleven in 1991 and used as a sex slave for eighteen years by a Bay Area man) or Elizabeth Smart (kidnapped in 2002 and used the same way, for nine months), can have the cumulative effect of reminding women that we spend a lot of our lives quietly, strategically trying not to get raped, which takes a huge toll on our lives and affects our sense of self. Sometimes art reminds us of life.
Hardy’s novel is, in fact, a tragedy of what happens when a poor young woman’s lack of agency, beginning with her lack of the right to say no to the sex forced on her by a rich man, spirals out to destroy her life in a grand manner. It could be regarded as a great feminist novel. There are a lot of male writers, even a long way back, whom I think of as humane and empathic towar
d female as well as male characters: Wordsworth, Hardy, Tolstoy, Trollope, Dickens come to mind. (That none of them are blemishless human beings we can discuss another time, possibly after hell freezes over.)
There is a common attack on art that thinks it is a defense. It is the argument that art has no impact on our lives; that art is not dangerous, and therefore all art is beyond reproach; that we have no grounds to object to any of it, and any objection is censorship. No one has ever argued against this view more elegantly than the great, now-gone critic Arthur C. Danto, whose 1988 essay on the subject was formative for my own thinking. That was in the era when right-wing senators wanted to censor art or eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) altogether. They opposed art the NEA had supported, including included Robert Mapplethorpe’s elegantly formalist pictures of men engaged in sadomasochistic play. Their grounds were that it was dangerous, that it might change individual minds and lives and then our culture. Some of the defenders took the unfortunate position that art is not dangerous because, ultimately, it has no impact.
Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous. Art shapes the world. I know many people who found a book that determined what they would do with their life or saved their life; if there is no one book that saved me, it’s because hundreds or thousands did. There are more complex, less urgent reasons to read books, including pleasure, and pleasure matters. Danto describes the worldview of those who assert there is an apartheid system between art and life: “But the concept of art interposes between life and literature a very tough membrane, which insures the incapacity of the artist to inflict moral harm so long as it is recognized that what he is doing is art.” His point is that art can inflict moral harm and often does, just as other books do good. Danto references the totalitarian regimes whose officials recognized very clearly that art can change the world and repressed the stuff that might.
You can read Nabokov’s relationship to his character in many ways. Vera Nabokov, the author’s wife, wrote, “I wish, though, somebody would notice the tender description of the child, her pathetic dependence on monstrous HH, and her heartrending courage all along. . .” And the women who read Nabokov’s novel in repressive Iran, says Azar Nafisi in her widely read book Reading Lolita in Tehran, identified, too: “Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such she becomes a double victim—not only her life but also her life story is taken from her. We told ourselves we were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim to this second crime.”
When I wrote the essay that provoked such splenetic responses, I was trying to articulate that there is a canonical body of literature in which women’s stories are taken away from them, in which all we get are men’s stories. And that these are sometimes books that not only don’t describe the world from a woman’s point of view but inculcate denigration and degradation of women as cool things to do.
Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams wrote recently that we live in a matriarchy because “access to sex is strictly controlled by the woman.” Meaning that you don’t get to have sex with someone unless they want to have sex with you, which, if we say it without any gender pronouns, sounds completely reasonable. You don’t get to share someone’s sandwich unless they want to share their sandwich with you, and that’s not a form of oppression either. You probably learned that in kindergarten.
But if you assume that sex with a female body is a right that heterosexual men have, then women are just these crazy illegitimate gatekeepers always trying to get in between you and your rights. Which means you have failed to recognize that women are people, and perhaps that comes from the books and movies you have—and haven’t—been exposed to, as well as the direct inculcation of the people and systems around you. Art matters, and there’s a fair bit of art in which rape is celebrated as a triumph of the will (see Kate Millet’s 1970 book Sexual Politics, which covers some of the same male writers as the Esquire list). It’s always ideological, and it makes the world we live in.
Investigative journalists T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong published, in December 2015, a long piece about how police caught a serial rapist (and how one of his victims was not only disbelieved for years but was bullied into saying she lied and then prosecuted for lying). The rapist told them, “Deviant fantasies had gripped him since he was a kid, way back to when he had seen Jabba the Hutt enslave and chain Princess Leia.” Culture shapes us.
But “to read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov,” said one of my volunteer instructors. I thought that was funny, so I posted it on Facebook, and a nice liberal man came along and explained to me this book was actually an allegory—as though I hadn’t thought of that yet. It is, and it’s also a novel about a big old guy violating a spindly child over and over and over. Then she weeps. And then another nice liberal man came along and said, “You don’t seem to understand the basic truth of art. I wouldn’t care if a novel was about a bunch of women running around castrating men. If it was great writing, I’d want to read it. Probably more than once.” Of course there is no such body of literature, and if the nice liberal man who made that statement had been assigned book after book full of castration scenes, maybe even celebrations of castration, it might have made an impact on him.
I hasten to add that I don’t think I’m injured by these guys at this point in my life, and I don’t feel sorry for myself. I just goggle in amazement at the batshit that comes out of them; it’s like I’m running a laboratory and they keep offering up magnificent specimens. Apparently over the horizon some of them got so upset that no less a literary voice than this year’s Booker Prize winner Marlon James said, “Liberal men. I’m not about to stop your inevitable progress to neoliberal and eventually, neocon, so let’s make this one quick. It seems some of you have a problem with Rebecca Solnit’s new piece. There is censorship, and there is challenging somebody’s access to making money. This is not the same thing.”
And though I was grateful to James for calling them out, I wasn’t even challenging anyone’s access to making money. I just made humorous remarks about some books and some dead writers’ characters in a piece that also praised and celebrated many male writers (it actually praised about the same number of men that it excoriated; you could consider the score even). These guys were apparently upset and convinced that the existence of my opinions and voice menaced others’ rights. Guys: censorship is when the authorities repress a work of art, not when someone dislikes it.
I had never said that we shouldn’t read Lolita. I’ve read it more than once. I joked that there should be a list of books no woman should read, because quite a few lionized books are rather nasty about my gender, but I’d also said, “Of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly exist at all except as accessories or are inherently evil and empty.” And then I’d had fun throwing out some opinions about books and writers. But I was serious about this. You read enough books in which people like you are disposable, or are dirt, or are silent, absent, or worthless, and it makes an impact on you. Because art makes the world, because it matters, because it makes us. Or breaks us.
The Case of the Missing Perpetrator
(2016)
In a detective novel, you begin in a state of ignorance and advance toward knowledge, clue by clue. The little indicators add up at last to a revelation that sets the world to right and sees that justice is done, or at least provides the satisfaction of a world made clear in the end. If detective fiction is the literature of disillusion, then there’s a much more common literature of illusion that aspires to deceive and distract rather than clarify.
A perfect recent example is the Center for Disease Control’s new and widely mocked guidelines to drinking. They are like a detective novel run backward—if you read them with credulity, you’d become muddled about wh
at a woman is and how violence and pregnancy happen and who is involved in those things. If you read more carefully, you might learn why the passive tense is so often a cover-up and that the missing subject in a circumlocutionary sentence is often the guilty party.
What is a woman? According to the CDC, all women are in danger of becoming pregnant. “Drinking too much can have many risks for women,” its chart tells us, and itemizes them for “any woman.” “Injuries/violence” top the list and “unintended pregnancy” brings up the rear. “Drinking too much can have risks for women including . . . any alcohol use for women who are pregnant or might be pregnant.” Medical professionals should “advise a woman to stop drinking if she is trying to get pregnant or not using birth control with sex.” This in a few deft, simple strokes reduces all women to fertile females in their breeding years who have what you might call exposure to fertile men. It denies the existence of many other kinds of women and the equal responsibility of at least one kind of man. Maybe it denies the existence of men, since women seem to get pregnant here as a consequence of consorting with booze, not boys.
Women is a category covering a great variety of us who fall outside the CDC criteria. Quite a lot of us are past the age of knock-up-ability and all the uncertainty that goes along with it. Even if we do laps with handsome sommeliers in the great barrels of pinot noir ripening in the Napa Valley, we will not accidentally become pregnant. Many younger women are not fertile at all for some reason or other, from long-term birth-control implants and tubal ligations to consequences of medical conditions and treatments and genetic lotteries. Not even with fountains of mojitos spouting up from the ground like geysers will they become pregnant, no matter what. Third, a meaningful population of women are lesbians and/or, when they drink, keep company with other women and not with men or not with fertile men who have unprotected sex with women. No river of whiskey will have any impact on whether they get pregnant either. Finally, trans women generally don’t get pregnant even in the presence of a Niagara Falls of prosecco, though some trans men have borne children intentionally, but that’s another story and a kind of nice one, much nicer than the one we have to investigate here.
The Mother of All Questions Page 13