Whose behavior have you excused?
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
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I was once charmed by a pedophile.
His name was Humbert Humbert, and thankfully, he was safely contained in the pages of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. I was in my early twenties, working 14 hour days at a big law firm in New York City and desperate to inject some art, some beauty, some literature into my life, when I plucked Lolita from a bookstore shelf without foreknowledge of the taboo subject matter. The back cover called it “a meditation on love—love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.” That description beguiled me, and I found myself in the clutches of Humbert, who recounts his plot to sexually abuse twelve-year-old Dolores Haze (the eponymous Lolita) by marrying her mother. And while I’m loath to admit it even today, I found myself sympathizing with one of the most detestable narrators in modern English literature. I wasn’t rooting for Humbert’s machinations to succeed, nor did I buy his flimsy alibis (Lolita is in love with me! I wouldn’t be like this if my childhood crush hadn’t died! Dante and Petrarch had affairs with prepubescent girls!), but I found him more likable than one logically should.
I’ve asked myself why many times since. At the time, I attributed my generosity toward Humbert to his extraordinary use of language; I craved something lyrical and visceral to make me feel alive under the cold lights of a glassy, silvery corporate office, and Humbert delivered. He wove words so silkily that surely he couldn’t be all bad. Just read his opening paragraph and try to tell me you aren’t a little bit entranced:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
Did you not slow to focus on the feel of your tongue tapping three times on the roof of your mouth as you repeated Lo. Lee. Ta. under your breath? I still do each time I read that passage. Yet I no longer believe that Humbert Humbert couldn’t possibly be all bad because of his pretty words. As he says himself, “you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style,” and as I revisit the book now, I find I have no sympathy left for him. The language on the page hasn’t changed, but I have.
When I think back to the time when I first read Lolita, I recall an ambient heaviness on the streets of New York—not from the oppressive humidity of the summers, but from the weight of eyes watching me. Heads seemed to rotate 180 degrees to track me as I passed, as though the men they belonged to were in need of an exorcism. There was a construction worker who called hello every morning and asked me, in the middle of July, about my plans for Valentine’s Day. There was the time I vowed never again to expose my knees while walking down Broadway after a gray-haired suit said “smile, sweetheart” (what a cliché!), making me suddenly aware of how short my skirt was. I’m not flattering myself; the attention had nothing to do with how attractive or unattractive I might have been. It had everything to do with how young and vulnerable I was. They could sense I wasn’t yet world-hardened enough to call them out—that I’d rather keep walking—and they were right.
The majority of these men looked entirely harmless. I took that at face value. It was easier to explain it all away, to say, they’re just joking, they’re not so bad than it was to accept that, perhaps, the fight-or-flight response their comments awoke in me had some validity to it, and that potential danger therefore lurked on every corner.
Humbert Humbert also looks harmless (even handsome, if his unreliable narration is to be believed). If I accepted Humbert really was that bad, I’d have to accept that maybe other people who looked innocent could really be that bad, too. I’m not trying to equate catcallers with pedophiles, nor am I insinuating that every man who yelled at me on the street intended to hurt me. I mean only that because I was willing to make excuses for those who victimized me, I was willing to make excuses for those who victimized other young girls. I did this to maintain my view of the world as a safe place for us, and I brought that equivocation to my first reading of Lolita.
I was closer in age to Lolita, then, but now I’m closer in age to her mother, Charlotte. As the male gaze shifts off of me, I’ve begun to see these incidents for what they were: cold-hearted attempts to intimidate and manipulate vulnerable people. I see my own past more clearly, so I see Humbert clearly, too, and when I re-read Lolita, I find he is unworthy of my sympathy, a demented abuser who cares only for himself. In the words of Charlotte, a woman who eventually did see Humbert for who he was when so many others failed to do so: “You’re a monster. You’re a detestable, abominable, criminal fraud.” I believe this to be the point of the book — to turn a mirror on each of us and show us how often we’ve turned a blind eye to something amiss.
To force us to confront the question: whose behavior have you excused?
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Wonderful way to inaugurate this series! The catcalling story reminded me of the great Laurie Anderson’s brilliant 1970s photography project, “Fully Automated Nikon,” where she turned her camera on men who’d catcalled her. The photos, on display, included brief captions of what the men said and how they reacted to her attention (usually not well, rarely with humor). In her case and in the case of this artful essay, art for the win!
Unbelievably high bar to set with the first in a series ... whoa, mighty analysis and writing by @samantha childress An excellent first choice, Mikey, and one that truly sets the pulse racing for what comes next. But, first, this ... brilliant. Fiction needs extremes ... part of the point is to explore the edges through loathsome creations like Humbert. Good writing should twist and turn our emotions. It is not writing by numbers ... the reason Lolita makes it onto so many 'must read' or 'Top Books' lists is because it is a beautifully written text about the most jarring of intentions. It is so important to read how the timing of a read coincided with experiences that shape us as humans. These miles walked in another's shoes are part of the journey of understanding we need to go through. Bravo, Samantha. The quality here augurs well for what follows.