as small as a world and as large as alone

11:04pm August 18, 2013

josiahd:

warlocksexalways:

sharpestrose:

warlocksexalways:

josiahd:

deducecanoe:

todayinhistory:

August 18th 1958: Lolita published

On this day in 1958 the novel ‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov was published in the United States. The novel was very controversial at the time due to its subject matter. The protagonist is a middle aged man called Humbert Humbert who has a sexual relationship with a 12 year old girl whom he nicknames ‘Lolita’. However, it is considered one of the greatest novels of all time.

WHY is it considered one of the greatest novels of all time? I have never understood this. Can someone actually explain this to me?? I mean for real??? Make an actual case for this book? I was freaked out and disturbed when I read this book in my early 20s. 

It’s also not even written well or interesting. The disturbing stuff is literally the only thing about it.

I know some feminist women who like it because it’s supposed to be a study in unreliable narrators and how rapists’ minds work, I think… but… I think for the most part we already know how rapists’ minds work, because we’re constantly being told stories from the perspective of men who hurt women, and having that hurt disguised as romance or love. What about a story from the girl’s perspective?

One of the things I love about the book is that it’s Nabokov’s love affair with the English language. He makes words and names and phrases and metaphors do things far above and beyond what most writers throughout history have been capable of. It’s incredibly well-written.

It’s not just a study in an unreliable narrators — though it is one of the absolute best examples of that. The fact that it *isn’t* from Dolores’s perspective — that everyone makes up versions of her that suit themselves, from Lolita to Mrs Richard Schiller, throughout the novel, without ever seeing her — is the core tragedy of the entire story. The book is called Lolita and she’s never given the opportunity to take the narrative as her own, and the times when she *is* acting under her own agency — at camp, after she runs away — are off-screen.

*That* is the ‘unreliability’ of the narrative — that nobody sees this little girl, not properly, not her mother and not her abusers. They all construct their own versions of her. To read a book about people doing that, and seeing it for the tragedy it is, is an incredibly important feminist thing and, I think, absolutely in Dolores’s corner.

I understand why a lot of people are made incredibly uncomfortable by this book, but please don’t confuse disliking it for legitimate grounds to dismiss it.

I’ve never read it, so I can’t speak much more, only repeat the other perspectives I’ve heard about it.

I don’t think the book completely ignoring her agency is a good thing. There’s nothing in the story that shows that as bad. She’s just kind of — not real.

And I don’t like the language much, either. Something actually about the language itself sets off all kinds of alarms for me.

The language actually made it very very realistic to me.

That’s the language I’ve heard the worst kind of disability fetishists describe disabled people in, fat fetishists describe fat people in, pedophiles describe children in. The worst kind of het cis men describe women in.

Dangerous language. Dangerous flowery language in which you are no longer a person, you are tiny little attributes that he is aiming the purple prose section of his erotic brain towards. Almost as is you are the most beautiful specimen the person has ever seen, but only a specimen, only a thing, not a person.

It sends the same chills up my spine that I got when I listened to one of my stalkers describing his women of the week. When I listened to a man describe how exquisitely perfectly and truly autistic his ex was. I just… It sounded exactly like the scariest people I’ve ever had pay sexual attention to me. Or to others I knew, and feared for, as they confided in me by describing them in language so identical it’s scary.

And the language isn’t the language of romance and true love. It’s the language of making a person into a thing. Viewing them as a work of art, to be put on a pedestal in their minds, but treated with the least possible respect in reality. Because they are sculptures not human beings.

It scared the shit out of me but it scared the shit out of me in ways so identical to real people I’ve known that I would be hard pressed to tell the difference. People who have raped, taken advantage, or scared people off before they could become victims. But who for some reason had no problem confessing their feelings to me in more detail than I’d have ever put up with if I’d had a choice.

It may have a lot of problems but I learned things from it nonetheless. Maybe I could have learned them somewhere else but I’ve never seen them anywhere else except my actual life.

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