Dear List Nablers,

When I first read “Lolita” I was already in my early thirties and only vague rumors about its “pedophilic content” had reached me. They exercised no influence over my first reaction to my reception of it: simple hair-raising enchantment. It was my first Nabokov novel but I had ordered it from England in an edition that held four other works: “The Gift”, “Invitation to a Beheading”, “King Queen Knave” and “Glory,” which I enjoyed but not as passionately as it was the case with “Lolita.” After “Pale Fire”, “Speak Memory” and subsequent re-readings I became addicted to V.N.

Yes, “It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.”  Nabokov altered completely my relationship to the English language, to the power of words and to art, particularly because he forced me into thinking about the conjunction of “objective” humanity and fiction in unsuspected ways, VN demands of me a permanent revision of established ideas in a strangely “universal” ethical way. Besides, surprises never stop coming in to upset any cozy accommodation to VN’s writings, no berth of certainties and closures.    

While I was googling for Dorothy Parker’s “Lolita” which, as I remembered it correctly, was published at “The New Yorker,” I came to a more recent article in which “Lolita” impelled the writer’s considerations towards “trigger warnings”. Judging from what happened with me (fortunately let loose in the wild), I can only say that the only “TW” that might be acceptable in relation to great works of art would be “Keep in mind that Literature and Beauty are extremely dangerous testimonies and expressions of the human soul and the world of fantasy.”

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/trigger-warnings-and-the-novelists-mind

PAGE-TURNER, MAY 21, 2014   Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind BY JAY CASPIAN KANG

(longuish excerpts): “During a graduate-school lecture on “Lolita,” my professor stood up in front of a crowded classroom and said something I have never been able to shake: “When you read ‘Lolita,’ keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl.”
I had read “Lolita” in high school and then again in college, when it became my personal literary liquor store—whenever I got stuck in a scene, or whenever my prose felt flat or typical, I’d open “Lolita” to a random page and steal something. My professor’s pronouncement felt too didactic, too political, and, although I tried to put it out of my mind and enjoy “Lolita” ’s cunning, surprising games with language, I could no longer pick up the book without feeling the weight of his judgment. The professor wasn’t wrong to point out the obvious about Humbert and Dolores Haze, and I don’t believe—at least not completely—that literature should only be examined as an object unto itself, detached from time and history, but I haven’t read “Lolita” since.

I thought of that professor and his unwelcome intrusion when I read a page-one story in last week’s Times about how several colleges across the country have considered placing “trigger warnings” in front of works of art and literature that may cause a student to relive a traumatic experience. For example, a student might be forewarned that J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” details colonial violence, racism, and rape with a note on the class syllabus that would read something like “Trigger Warning: This book contains scenes of colonialism, racism, and rape, which may be upsetting to students who have experienced colonialism, racism, or rape.”

The story’s headline, “WARNING: THE LITERARY CANON COULD MAKE STUDENTS SQUIRM,” and the inclusion of some seemingly innocuous titles, like “The Great Gatsby,” as candidates for such warnings, dredged up all my distaste for my professor’s prescriptive reading of “Lolita.” If he could produce such a chilling effect, what harm could a swarm of trigger warnings—each one reducing a work of literature to its ugliest plot points—inflict on the literary canon? What would “Trigger Warning: This novel contains racism” do to a reading of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”? What would “Trigger Warning: Rape, racism, and sexual assault” do to a reading of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”? [  ]

“Censorship was never the point,” Alexandra Brodsky, an editor at the Web site Feministing, told me. “We knew that violent and traumatic narratives could have a grave effect on the reader, so we, working together as a community, created guideposts for people to navigate what has always been a tricky terrain.” Those guideposts helped. Trigger warnings “made people feel like they could write explicitly and honestly about things that they may have not written about under different circumstances,” Brodsky said. “They let people know that this was going to be a different type of conversation.”

That logic eventually found its way into the academy. Last year, Bailey Shoemaker-Richards, a master’s student at the University of Findlay, in Ohio, started using trigger warnings in her academic presentations on cyber sexism and online abuse. The warning, she said, takes up roughly fifteen seconds at the start of a talk, and serves only as a reminder that those who are uncomfortable discussing online abuse are free to leave the room. “I don’t think a trigger warning will prevent conversations that may be upsetting,” Shoemaker-Richards told me. “But they might force people in the class to think through their reactions a little more.” [  ] Brodsky feels conflicted about university-mandated trigger warnings for potentially troubling works of art and literature, as do other feminist thinkers I spoke to, but she still thinks that they should be used in the classroom. “You can’t copy the language from a Jezebel post and paste it onto a syllabus,” Brodsky explained. “With that being said, literature is important, and has effects beyond momentary pleasure and discomfort. ‘ [   ] Many of the op-eds and articles on trigger warnings published this week have argued on behalf of the sanctity of the relationship between the reader and the text. For the most part, I have agreed with them. A trigger warning reduces a work of art down to what amounts to plot points. If a novel like José Saramago’s “Blindness” succeeds because it sews up small yet essential pockets of human normalcy against a horrific backdrop, a preëmptive label like “Trigger Warning: Violence and internment” strips it down to one idea.[   ] “Why is the depersonalized, apolitical reading the one we should fight for?” I admit, this was an angle I had not yet considered [   ]A good reader may very well finish “Lolita” and conclude that the book is about the systematic rape of a young girl, or that such a troubling text should require a trigger warning, but a writer should have the freedom to look at “Lolita” as nothing more than a series of sentences that exist only for their own sake. If reading, as Joyce Carol Oates wrote, is the “sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul,” a trigger warning, even through gentle suggestion, guides us into that skin. For writers, who cull everything from what they read, any amount of guidance will lead to dull conformity.[   ] Any excess language—in the form of a trigger warning—amounts to a preëmptive defacement…”