I've started reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. The book is, to quote The Guardian, 'an endlessly controversial high-wire act' about how a twelve-year-old girl is lusted after by Humbert Humbert, an adult man.
People agree that the book is controversial, to which I agree, but not on the point of why the book is controversial. Some believe it's a pedophile's excuse. Some think the book is sarcasm, an illusory story based on sarcasm and irony. Some see the book as an erotic novel from a pedophile's perspective. Some don't see it as erotic in any sense.
Actor Brian Cox, who played Humbert in a 2009 one-man stage monologue based on the novel, stated that the novel is "not about Lolita as a flesh and blood entity. It's Lolita as a memory."
The book received very little attention when it was first published in 1955. However, when Graham Greene (perhaps my all-time favourite author) said Lolita was one of his three favourite books that were published in 1955, sales increased notably. When the book was released in the USA, a few years later, it sold 100,000 copies in the first three weeks of its release.
The book somehow reminds me of two films: Happiness and Little Children, in very different ways.
Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Lara Flynn Boyle in 'Happiness'.
Happiness follows a gaggle of people and a pedophile who is played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. From an interview article about the film:
We had a packed screening at the New York film festival. The moment in the movie where the cops come to talk to Bill about Johnny [his son’s classmate], and he slips up and mentions the other boy, the entire audience seemed to draw in a collective breath – like: “Oh no, he’s gonna get caught!” That’s what Todd was going after, that sense of horrible empathy that people felt for this guy that stunned and challenged them. They’d think: “What’s wrong with me? I want him to get caught. He is a monster!” There were almost fights breaking out, with some people laughing and others going: “This isn’t funny. Why are you laughing?” It was fascinating.
Jackie Earle Haley in 'Little Children'.
Little Children has haunted me for over twenty years. It's mainly about two parents with young kids who meet. It's also about a pedophile who lives in the same community as they do. The pedophile is newly out from jail; everyone in the suburb idyll knows who he is and for what he's served time in jail. He lives with his mother. Her house is constantly defaced.
There's a scene in the film that takes place on a summer day. Parents and kids swarm around a swimming pool. Everybody's happy. Enter the pedophile, brilliantly played by the great actor Jackie Earle Haley:
Now, that scene reminds me of a fine documentary named Pedofilernas natt ('Night of the Pedophiles', my translation of the title). From the Letterboxd synopsis:
In the US name, photo and home address of convicted sex offenders is published. But the open sex crime registry has had unexpected consequences. The intention was to create security. Instead fear has increased drastically. In the small community of Anderson in South Carolina the “trick-or-treat” tradition is threatened. Since the registry was introduced in 1996, over 800,000 sex offenders are published. Kathryn Barriou who has two daughters and lives in Anderson keeps track of where sex offenders live in the city. - They’re everywhere. That’s why we do not go out and celebrate Halloween or “trick-or- treat” anymore. To reassure parents, the city’s 450 convicted sex offenders are subject to a curfew over the weekend. Extraordinary patrols to check that the sex offenders stays indoors with entrance lights off. 65 people from the sex crimes registry also becomes locked up in the town hall at 17-21 during Halloween night
So, the pedophiles all sit in a town hall while kids go trick-or-treating. In safety, the parents have told themselves and each other, like a brainwashing mantra. If I don't remember incorrectly, the documentary-makers ask parents if they're no longer afraid of their kids getting abused. No, why would I? Then, the documentary-makers say most sexual abuse of children is committed in their home, not by strangers.
It seems the entire documentary is available here:
The book is beautifully written. It's entirely from the perspective of Humbert. The rhythm is excellent: Nabokov has said he didn't moralise at all, but adds that Humbert does.
Here's a section from the first ten pages of the book:
Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach. The human females I was allowed to wield were but palliative agents. I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. The dimmest of my pollutive dreams was a thousand times more dazzling than all the adultery the most virile writer of genius or the most talented impotent might imagine. My world was split. I was aware of not one but two sexes, neither of which was mine; both would be termed female by the anatomist. But to me, through the prism of my senses, "they were as different as mist and mast. " All this I rationalize now. In my twenties and early thirties, I did not understand my throes quite so clearly. While my body knew what it craved for, my mind rejected my body's every plea. One moment I was ashamed and frightened, another recklessly optimistic. Taboos strangulated me. Psychoanalysts wooed me with pseudoliberations of pseudolibidoes. The fact that to me the only object of amorous tremor were sisters of Annabel's, her handmaids and girl-pages, appeared to me at times as a forerunner of insanity. At other times I would tell myself that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in being moved to distraction by girl-children. Let me remind my reader that in England, with the passage of the Children and Young Person Act in 1933, the term "girl-child" is defined as "a girl who is over eight but under fourteen years" (after that, from fourteen to seventeen, the statutory definition is "young person"). In Massachusetts, U. S., on the other hand, a "wayward child" is, technically, one "between seven and seventeen years of age" (who, moreover, habitually associates with vicious or immoral persons). Hugh Broughton, a writer of controversy in the reign of James the First, has proved that Rahab was a harlot at ten years of age. This is all very interesting, and I daresay you see me already frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup. Here are some more pictures. Here is Virgil who could the nymphet sing in a single tone, but probably preferred a lad's perineum. Here are two of King Akhnaten's and Queen Nefertiti's pre-nubile Nile daughters (that royal couple had a litter of six), wearing nothing but many necklaces of bright beads, relaxed on cushions, intact after three thousand years, with their soft brown puppybodies, cropped hair and long ebony eyes. Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds. After all, Dante fell madly in love with Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely, and bejeweled, in a crimson frock, and this was in 1274, in Florence, at a private feast in the merry month of May. And when Petrarch fell madly in love with his Laureen, she was a fair-haired nymphet of twelve running in the wind, in the pollen and dust, a flower in flight, in the beautiful plain as descried from the hills of Vaucluse.
I'm disgusted by an adult person's lust for children; I'm vehemently opposed to the sexual abuse of anyone. Something in me just wants to protect children from any kind of pain. I viscerally feel sick when reading certain passages in the book, like the one above. The lust for children is not something I've ever felt. The book is masterfully written. It's beautiful and it's disgusting.
The documentary Predators does a great job at showing how so-called pedophile hunters, most notably the TV series To Catch a Predator, commit worse offenses than pedophilia, meaning they ruin lives and lead to suicides; the host seems to think this is fine, that it's just a consequence of living an immoral life. Can the showrunners be immoral? The host of that show doesn't even consider that thought but seems to be above judgment because they hunt pedophiles, and only that; to claim your own killing actions to be the morally superior because you hunt pedophiles must be the equivalent of wearing a bag over your head while shooting a gun into a crowd: you're bound to hit a bad guy at some point, no? The ends justify the means?
When I grew up, I spent a few years in the heels of some boys who were a few years older than I. One of these boys was very lonely and what we jokingly called a 'theoretical pedophile': he was around twenty years old and lusted after one of my sister's friends, who at that point would have been a pre-teen. The lonely boy never dared do anything. We all told him to shut the fuck up if he ever expressed lust for young girls. It sounds insane to think about now, but I was so young, so bulled, that I needed friends regardless of what. I was extremely lonely. Overall, I liked the lads; we were typical teenagers, had a lot of laughs, and spent a lot of time together just doing regular stupid stuff. Joked, watched films, ate candy. After having lusted for the twelve-year-old girl for years, the lonely person finally had the nerve to call her and ask her out. She said no. End of story. My sister said he made no further contact. I fell out of contact with every one of those boys when I hit my late teens. A bunch of years later, the lonely boy killed himself.
I can't wait to read more of Lolita, while being fearful and disgusted by the thought of reading more of the book.