It is an extraordinary case of fiction changing reality. in the novel Lolita, who turned 70 in October, the speech of the fictional character Humbert Humbert (HH) manages to convince the authors of the Royal Academy of Language – real people – to include the definition of lolita as “seductive and provocative teenager”.
But this is a definition that would have shocked the book’s author, Vladimir Nabokov. On several occasions, the Russian-American writer tried to clarify that HH was a pedophile under the guise of a writer trying to disguise his heinous crime under the cloak of fou love, and of which Dolores Haze (Lolita) is his silent victim. But it was too late. HH’s gaze on his object of desire was so persuasive that for decades he has deceived millions of readers with his argument that he is a man lost in the hands of a nymphet.
In his first reading of Lolitathe psychoanalyst and writer Lola López Mondéjar “bought” this interpretation. “Many times we read under the spotlight of the cultural imagination. In times of extreme sexual freedom, we believed in the love story, in Humbert’s version,” he reflects over the phone. Decades later, he realized that the novel tells the story of a man who repeatedly rapes a 12-year-old orphan, who “confesses” to a judge that her behavior is motivated by uncontrolled love. This is why López Mondéjar wrote in 2016 Every night, every night (Siruela)—the title refers to the paragraph in Lolita in which it is explained that Dolores “sobbed every night, every night,” when the attacker pretended to sleep—, a novel that gives voice to the girl, a little girl who, making use of her last corners of freedom, denies her love to the omnipresent narrator, her stepfather-perpetrator, one of the most chilling characters in the history of literature.
The secret and the silence
“In the collective imagination she is a lewd angel, but in Nabokov’s novel Lolita she is only 12 years old. Why does the cliché continue to burden the victim with the burden of provocation?” asks Isabel Navarro, writer and journalist in her Lolita Syndrome laboratory. How to break the silence with writing.
It is a question that confronts us with a systemic problem, which encompasses multitudes: one in ten women has suffered sexual abuse – in different degrees and types – by an adult during her childhood.
In Latin, newborn means one who does not speak, and silence and secrecy are key in sexual violence against minors. When you experience a situation like this, speaking is not easy, because trauma, explains López Mondéjar, produces dissociation, fragmentation, to defend oneself from the painful experience, and often leads to silence and oblivion.
But telling what happened is something akin to breaking a curse, according to Navarro, and this change of perspective in the story of abuse is reflected in books like The big family, by Camille Kouchner; Journey east, by Christine Angot; The consensus, by Vanessa Springora; The chronology of water, by Lidia Yuknavitch; Why did you come back every summer? Belén López Peiro, o sad tiger, by Neige Sinno.
For Navarro, this literary explosion is a consequence of Me too, this has changed many things, because it pushes us to share stories. That “me too” takes the problem (of abuse) from private conversations to the public, and from there to literature, he emphasizes.
In this new literary landscape, Nabokov’s novel is the contested cliché. On the one hand, silence Lolita In the novel it is broken, but above all its reifying and blaming reading is questioned. The reifying and blaming reading that society has made, including institutions such as the RAE, denounces Navarro.
In the case of the French writer Neige Sinno, the years lived in Mexico and the Meetings of Women Fighting in Chiapas allowed her to measure the extent to which her experience of violence was part of a collective experience. And he couldn’t help but start writing sad tiger when he found the particular tone of the voice that tells the story, as he explains via email: “In reality there is a multiplicity of voices within each person and the tone, the register, the rhythm of a narrator, even if autobiographical, result from a choice, from a decision. It is a composition, a conscious elaboration”. This voice is not that of the abused girl, it is the voice of a woman contemplating her past from a distance and through various filters, using her experience as a reader as a tool to explore, narrate and think.
Thinking about the taboo
Reading and writing about the crime you suffered can provide relief. You feel that what you have experienced is not exceptional, that it is important and offers a certain consolation, says Navarro: “It has a mobilizing, companionship effect.”
But one book can’t do everything. After publication sad tiger, Sinno does not consider its impact in therapeutic terms, but rather as an artistic and political achievement. Reaching the end of such an ambitious challenge, finding a subtle balance amidst the chaos, is empowering. “I have the feeling that the formal freedom of my last two books is the result of a lifetime of research, like at the end of the samurai films, where the years of training and study suddenly make sense when you fight the real battle (which is never what you expect, of course, but rather something different, something unexpected and more difficult),” he says.
Lolita represents the power of writing, a story of darkness – even frozen laughter – that tells of one of the worst crimes. It is an intellectual and also vital experience. “We women know very well what it’s about”, reflects Silvia Sesé, director of Anagrama, “of those looks, those approaches. It’s also a novel about sexist education, about hypersexualisation, about the abuse of power”.
But it seems that the taboo in our culture is not sexual violence itself, but the thought of it. The studies of the French anthropologist Dorothée Dussy influence the idea that sexual abuse of minors is the maximum form of domination, the exacerbation of androcentrism that still governs our society. “It is the sublimation of men of absolute power, that their desire is not questioned, that otherness does not exist,” according to López Mondéjar.
It’s systemic violence that doesn’t just affect girls. In speech, memorynarrating some episodes from his childhood, Nabokov refers to his uncle Ruka, who when he was little made him sit on his lap and caressed him against his will. As a young man, Nabokov was a chess consultant for newspapers and with Lolita confirms his skills as a chess strategist. After all, the novel is a plot of disguised tactics, almost imperceptible movements and silences. A conspiracy not so far from the dark machinations that take place in the pathology of sexual violence against minors.
