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Posts Tagged ‘Lolita’

The Lolita Issue

September 4th, 2008 by AV Flox in Uncategorized

I had hardly been up an hour when a frantic e-mail tumbled into my inbox. I say frantic because Gmail allows you to read the first line right from the inbox and this one, from my Black Heart Magazine editor Laura Roberts, very clearly displayed the words “HOLY SHIT!”

———- Original message ———-
From: Laura Roberts
To: AV Flox
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008
Subject: Fwd: Lolita issues …

HOLY SHIT! We’re creating controversy with the Lolita issue already and it’s not even officially launched! I just got an e-mail, apparently, from Nabokov’s son, Dmitri.

Roberts had just introduced the Black Heart Lolita issue in “V for Vixen” a column she writes for hour.ca. Before I could continue to the alleged Nabokov response, I clicked through to her article on my RSS feed and began reading.

The “Lolita issue” of Black Heart Magazine, my online magazine, will be released this Friday at blackheartmagazine.com. It was originally conceived as a celebration of Vladimir Nabokov’s seminal novel, as well as an exploration of many other kinds of forbidden love. So perhaps it should have been anticipated, but I was still surprised when some submissions took the theme as a license to defend pedophiles and to question the condemnation of child molestation.

While I can certainly appreciate the questioning of society’s supposedly logical rules, and applaud writers who are brave enough to probe our most cherished taboos, I absolutely cannot agree with those who seek to do violence to others. Rape is rape, no means no, and Lolitas will always be off-limits.

I stopped, getting a sudden inkling about what Nabokov’s issue was.

———- Original message ———-
From: Dmitri Nabokov
To: Laura Roberts
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008
Subject: Re: Lolita issues …

Laura Roberts,

You are the archetype of hypocrites. How many copies of your backwards arse do you plan to peddle? Read about yourself in the imminent Original of Laura.

The “arse” my editor is peddling to which Nabokov referred is the image on the cover of the issue of Black Heart, which hour.ca ran alongside Roberts’ column. Meanwhile, The Original of Laura, for those of you who have been living under a rock, is the unfinished book Vladimir Nabokov left, which is to be published despite his dying wishes.

Roberts responded to Nabokov’s e-mail:

———- Original message ———-
From: Laura Roberts
To: Dmitri Nabokov
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008
Subject: Re: Lolita issues …

Mr. Nabokov,

To respond to your recent email, that is not “[my] backwards arse” on the cover of Black Heart Magazine, nor have I ever claimed to be a cover model. The buttocks in question belong to a model in Toronto, I believe, but I can ask my photographer for more details and contact information, if you’d like them.

As far as being the “archetype of hypocrites,” I would like to understand your point fully. What, exactly, do you object to as hypocritical in my piece?

As for reading The Original of Laura, I look forward to its publication, as do many other members of the literary community.

Best,
Laura Roberts

“I’m not even sure I understand his concerns beyond being a knee-jerk response to anything with the name Nabokov attached without his consent,” Roberts confided to me. “And I didn’t think that publishing an issue of a magazine with a Lolita theme was cause for controversy. It’s not like I need permission to say the book’s name, to discuss its literary merits or potential controversy, or otherwise bring forward topics that relate, such as pedophilia and the over-sexualization of children.”

Roberts was missing the point. Nabokov’s concern isn’t so much with the issue, which he has not even read, but with the content of her column, which expressed her surprise that a Lolita-themed issue would invite pieces that question the legal age of consent.

“The novel Lolita, in its most literal reading, is the story of a pedophile seeking to defend his crimes,” Roberts writes in her column.

Though one might have expected a public outcry against its shocking subject matter at the time of its publication, Lolita was met with neither an outraged public nor any demands that it be banned. Indeed, it would appear that art excuses everything, as the fictional protagonist Humbert Humbert’s defence “She seduced me!” has been taken at face value by readers ever since the book’s release in 1955.

Should we be shocked by Lolita? It’s just fiction, after all, yet it holds many truths about the workings of the predatory mind. Funny how it’s never described as a penetrating insight into the warped mind of a child molester, potentially raising questions about its author’s inspiration. Instead Nabokov’s masterpiece is always excused on the grounds of its artistic merit, and we cannot censor art. But is Lolita really art, or merely smut in art’s clothing?

It’s a loaded gun to play with for the editor of a ‘zine that touts itself as containing the “dirtiest minds in literature.”Black Heart is, after all, a publication that prides itself in running the raunchiest smut that contemporary writers have to offer. This publication is Roberts’ brainchild and to suddenly go from a laissez-faire attitude about exploring all sexual taboos to questioning the fascination of some with school girl uniforms was, at the very least, contradictory.

If anything, the editor of such a publication should be reinforcing the notion that what we create doesn’t necessarily have to reflect who we are. Does Chuck Palahniuk go around killing people? Does Quentin Tarantino? David Lynch? No. There is an immense difference between writing about a crime committed against others and actually committing a crime against others.

The last thing we need is a freak frenzy of censorship across creative writing classrooms and I would like to think that Black Heart would be the champion of this notion instead of sitting, years after the fact, questioning whether Nabokov was a closeted child molester.

It makes me think of all the instances that writing has been brought to the public’s attention as depicting clear intent of harm.

I will never forget, for example, how following the horrors of the Virginia Tech massacre, the media jumped on Cho Seung-hui’s plays. FOX News ran pictures of the killer, with the words, “KILLER WROTE VIOLENT PLAYS,” across them. They weren’t the only ones.

After hearing from multiple news sources how obvious this man’s mental instability was in his disturbing writing, I caved and read “Richard McBeef,” one of his so-called tell-tale plays.

McBeef is about a former football player who gets trapped in a series of odd jobs and never amounts to much anything. Somehow, he gets involved with a woman whose husband dies; they marry a month later. She has a 13-year-old son, who hates his new step-father.

The ten page play occurs over the course of a few hours–the step-father tries to confront the miscreant in an effort to get closer to him and receives only verbal abuse. The teen accuses him of trying to molest him and tells his mother, who becomes angry and violent toward the father. The father escapes the blows and hides in a car outside, where his teen step-son joins him. The teen shoves a cereal bar into his step-father’s mouth. Choking, the frustrated man tries to push him away, he “lifts his large arms and swings a deadly blow at the thirteen-year-old.”

It’s an extremely bad play. In a Newsweek article titled “He Was Just Off,” Pat Wingert, Lynn Waddell and Arian Campo-Flores report a professor saying Cho’s writing was silly and “very adolescent.” That’s exactly what it was. It’s so easy to say in retrospect, “oh! They should have known! He was writing about people being killed!” But give me a break. We can’t jump so easily to those conclusions.

What happened was horrific and gruesome, yes. But there are a million people who write disturbing things and never harm anyone.

So is it fair to question whether Nabokov was a predator? Shouldn’t we be glad his book, which Roberts readily admits has literary merit, was well-received by the public? Shouldn’t that make smut writers like the ones who seek shelter at Black Heart Magazine, often under the guise of pen names for fear of what their creative pursuit could do to their careers, feel like we do have a chance in this world to continue writing what we like, no matter how far we push the boundaries?

Nabokov’s final response to Roberts was far more collected than his initial reply and closed with a clincher that I’m sure my editor is not likely to forget for a long time.

———- Original message ———-
From: Dmitri Nabokov
To: Laura Roberts
Date: Thursday, September 4, 2008
Subject: Re: Lolita issues …

Dear Laura Roberts,

First of all, I regret any possible incomprehension on my part. Secondly, thanks for your kind offer, but I was referring to the context, not the model’s actual assets. As for hypocrisy, I had the distinct impression that you were buttressing your argument with an ambiguous visual plug. I do not object to a glimpse of the female anatomy. I do question trotting out that image in bad faith. It is the nature of some humans to find titillating on the sexual playground anything considered deviant on the sexual battleground. I trust you found better things to do as a teen than the bored adolescents who signed a pact to become pregnant. Enjoy Laura, unless you find its heart too black for your tastes.

DN

Having said all this, one has to give Roberts credit for being open enough to bring to light her own reservations about the topic. It’s true—even the wildest deviants and staunchest supporters of a sex-positive world have their boundaries. This is hers. And if this isn’t the best way to send off an issue on taboos, I don’t know what is.

pass it on!

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