Say, Lolita – Talk about literature and feminism
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The active volcano of feminism
When a feminist is old, is she still a feminist? Will she join conservative groups and become what she hated when she was younger? Will she be ashamed to mention the bravery and naivety of the past, find that the theory of equal rights for men and women cannot help but be polished by hard reality, ideals cannot escape vanity, and will eventually show ridiculousness and frivolity in stubborn customs and human inertia?
Frankly speaking, before Chizuko Ueno, I thought yes, and even thought that all the vanguards of social thought would eventually be reduced to the appearance of their own opposition when they were young. Surprisingly, Chizuko Ueno is not. She is now in her seventies, but what she talks about is the edge of a young man in her twenties, while the people in her twenties who have spoken to her are all conservative and "old" in front of her. Her edge includes the wisdom of the years, academic precipitation and countless insights, as well as the "lightness of life" of being unmarried and childless (in order to provide end-of-life care for friends and handle various matters at the end of life, Chizuko Ueno had a 15-hour marriage), which is naturally irresistible.
Indeed, in recent years, hardly a single scholar has gained more popularity than Chizuko Ueno. Feminist books represented by "Misogyny" and "Starting at the Limit" have made her a best-selling author. She has a bit of a "speechless and dead" speaking style, which has also made her gain many fans. According to the copyright agent, more than 40 books in her life, whether involving women's topics or the topic of aging, have become the object of competition for publishers for a while.
In this heat, few people notice that her research is still within the scope of Simon de Beauvoir's revolutionary book The Second Sex. And the so-called "misogyny", whether men out of biology or authoritarian, disgust for women; Whether it is women's shame out of gender itself or self-loathing of social frustration, the core of the problem is the natural difference between men and women and the division of labor that began at the beginning of human beings. This discrepancy can only be resolved if a man can one day have children – theoretically, these are only part of the level of the "second sex". Of course, Rao is so, and her statement is also full of inspiration and incitement.
Speaking of which, feminism is like an active volcano, even if it is silent, the flames of resistance are endless, and when it erupts irregularly, the power is even more amazing, although most of them start from regional and specific cultural attributes, but in the end, the whole world is inevitably affected. It seems that new phenomena stimulate new problems, and upon closer inspection, it turns out that the core of the problem has rarely changed.
According to records, from the beginning of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, the telling with feminist tendencies began. The core issue began with the fact that women should be educated and should enjoy equal rights to work with men, and soon developed further, to the point that women's physical and psychological characteristics should be valued, and then their desires and overkill demands should be respected. In short, from biological attributes to family attributes, social attributes and cultural attributes, the theoretical tentacles of feminism have explored all aspects of gender relations, social development, cultural traditions and public order and good customs. However, when it comes to practice, the situation becomes complicated. Some problems, such as women's equal right to education, are naturally solved with the development of society; Some questions will reappear in a different way after many years, such as whether women should stay in the workplace or at home.
So there is an interesting feminist active volcano phenomenon, which can also be called the phenomenon of new bottles of old wine. After taking stock, the only gain seems to be that a new generation of flag bearers has been produced, and a group of new people have gathered behind the flag bearers. Fortunately, scholars who can become standard-bearers are generally relatively calm, and behind the shocking and unconventional way of discourse, there are also brains that are good at looking at problems from a macro-historical perspective. When they called for women's awakening, they did not blindly "destroy" it, and while breaking the solidified mode and lazy mode of cognition of gender relations, they also realized that the ideal journey is a long way off.
For example, Chizuko Ueno is pessimistic about the future world beyond misogyny, saying, "Since I was born and raised in a world where misogyny is too deeply rooted, I can't imagine a world without misogyny." In this way, extreme expression, governed by rational sobriety, becomes an important discursive strategy to stimulate the volcanic eruption of gender topics, or a communication skill that any writing needs.
The dividing line between "misogynistic" and "male gaze"
- "Lolita"
"Misogyny" says that all people suffer from "misogyny" to one degree or another, and tries to list various situations to illustrate the existence of "misogyny". Not surprisingly, in the chapter "The Misogyny of a Father's Daughter", Chizuko Ueno mentions Nabokov's Lolita, a strange book in the history of world literature. The book is about a 12-year-old girl Lolita who is extremely longed for and adored by the pedophile hero Heng Humbert.
From Nabokov's writing, Heng Humbert was erudite, romantic, and amorous, with all the resources that a man could possess according to Chizuko Ueno: money, appearance, status, physical strength, charm - "charm" is also a male resource. However, Lolita, who has reached the age of sexual awakening, the experience of being lovingly adored by such a "perfect" man is not wonderful, and fate has not given her a gift because of this; On the contrary, it gave her countless trials prematurely, and under romantic praise and free road trips, she faced the fate of losing her mother, wandering, being controlled, coerced, escaping from the clutches of the devil, and finally dying in childbirth.
Because of pedophile as the protagonist, amplifying his secret desires, and writing his passionate "male gaze", the book was rejected by the five major American publishers in a fierce manner, and finally had to be transferred to France and published as a series of books in unpopular publishing houses. Not to mention, after the book was published in 1955, France, Argentina, New Zealand, South Africa and Australia banned the sale of the book. It was not until 1958 that Minton, the publisher of the American Putnam Company, approached Nabokov to allow this strange book to be published in the United States. However, Putnam is still an unpopular publisher of pornography, and the reason they published the book is only "a big seller", not literary value - "Lolita" has proved to be a good seller, and it is reported that its sales speed and popularity are only matched by "Gone with the Wind".
After that, the book quickly became popular amid controversy, and "Lolita" quickly became a pop culture symbol. According to the newly published book "Lolita Reborn", which is about the behind-the-scenes story of the birth and spread of the strange book "Lolita", "Lolita" not only quickly swept the United States and Japan in the 60s of the last century, but also attracted widespread attention around the world with its breakthrough and repressive extreme writing style. Now, more than seventy years later, the most "hilarious novel" of the 20th century has long become a classic, one of Amazon's "100 books to read in a lifetime". The hurricanes it sets off and the topics it raises continue to erupt irregularly. It can be used not only as a literary model that reproduces aesthetics and morality, law and desire, freedom and constraint in appropriate proportions, but also as a research specimen for gender psychology and the psychology of love in special populations. So, Chizuko Ueno's mention of it was expected.
Lolita Reborn: The Adventure of Re-reading the Twentieth Century's Most Shocking Novel Jenny Minton Quigley/ed. Liu Haiping Qin Guibing/ Translated by People's Literature Publishing House, June 2023
Only, this brings up another interesting topic, or perhaps solves a literary historical mystery - why did Nabokov write "Lolita"? Why was "Lady Chatterley's Lover," published in 1960, prosecuted when Lolita, a year earlier, was spared?
For Nabokov fans all over the world, this is a difficult mystery. Because he himself did not have pedophilia, he and his wife Vera had a happy marriage, even a model of happiness - according to his biographers, Nabokov was the longest marriage among the great writers of the 20th century, and the most adept at managing marriage. His hobbies, apart from catching butterflies, are writing letters to his wife, and he is good at expressing romantic affection in every detail of everyday affairs, which is written for decades, and they have little time apart. He described his nearly fifty years of married life as "sunny" — a lifetime without gloom.
At the same time, as a Russian aristocrat, he fully demonstrated his proud origin and cultivation in "Say, Memory", and fully demonstrated his taste and style in works such as "Lectures on Russian Literature". Since then, the revolution, World War I, World War II and almost non-stop exile that he has been forced to experience can serve as rich creative material. As for his genius, his cross-language and cross-cultural reading background, his sharp aesthetic, and the creative strength behind the "poisonous tongue skill" that many famous people, including Freud and Dostoevsky, disdain, are beyond doubt. All this shows that he can fully control the subject matter that is more "bigger", more "positive", less controversial, more historical and aesthetically valuable. So why did he spend six years choosing to write such a work with a theme that transgresses the line and has moral hazard?
Nabokov himself has had several explanations for this: one is that his inspiration was a news, a monkey trained by scientists created a painting painted with the iron bars of the cage that imprisoned it, and Nabokov, who loved metaphors, probably wanted to achieve a rich effect on captivity, control and aesthetics. One is to say that the first draft of Lolita was written in Russian, and after it was destroyed, he began to write in English - the book is "a record of his love affair with English". One is that he believes that the quality of pornography is not necessarily second-rate, and no one stipulates that obscenity must be paired with mediocrity. There is also an explanation of the purely technocratic tsundere - he believes that the ultimate criterion for the evaluation of any fictional work is that no matter what is written and how it is written, it can bring "aesthetic happiness" ...
Today, it seems that this explanation can be added - in the road of writing, even talented writers, writers with high self-esteem, if they want to get ahead and be noticed in a short period of time, they need a spirit of adventure and a subject matter strategy. Apparently, Nabokov wanted to explore the darkness and esoteric of the world of desire with the special proclivities of special characters, and to challenge himself to see if he could walk a tightrope between moral offense and aesthetic control—he succeeded, and the beauty of literature and the ugliness of subject matter were harmonized in his magical pen.
According to Minton, the editor of Lolita Reborn and the daughter of Minton, the first American publisher of Lolita, Nabokov knew the risks of the book from the beginning of its writing—he was most likely accused of pedophile tendencies and could lose his chair at Cornell University. Although the writer himself is by no means equivalent to the "unreliable narrator" Humbert in Lolita, and has repeatedly reiterated in interviews that he is not a pedophile, people have always confused the writer with his demonic characters. Nabokov knew all too well that he risked being denounced, questioned, banned, or even taken to court. He also thought about giving up, about destroying the manuscript, and after being blocked by his wife from finally writing it, he wanted to publish it under a pseudonym. Even when it came time to sign a publishing contract with Minton, he demanded that the publisher be willing to defend the book in court. It can be seen that he is fully aware of the negative impact that such a book may bring to him, and he fully knows how many people will be uncomfortable with such a book with deformed emotions in the social environment at that time.
Interestingly, Vera played a key role. Throughout the ages, there have been many women who have played a role in the birth of strange books, legendary writers, Goethe's lover, Tolstoy's wife, Fitzgerald's wife, Nabokov's wife, and so on. Among the 29 articles in Lolita Reborn, or 29 behind-the-scenes stories, one called Vera and Lo wrote that Nabokov's wife, Vera, was the one who most believed that Lolita was the best novel. She encouraged Nabokov's "offense" and campaigned for the publication to expand the book's impact—and when readers, especially Nabokov's students, saw that Vera, who was no longer young, was always by Nabokov's side, they were half dispelled of the book's doubts. Later, with the vigorous development of the worldwide sexual liberation movement, "Lolita" increasingly had its own time and place. Nabokov was finally eternated by it.
Years later, despite the controversy, there were more certainty, and mostly women.
Lolitas who have been telling
Why would there be so many female readers in a book about a 12-year-old girl who is physically violent and mentally controlled, and is always silent, leaving her perpetrator to speak in front of jurors? Like another question - why does "Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise" have so many female readers of the same age?
In "Lolita Reborn", there are many well-known female writers, female critics, and female filmmakers who write about the "soul-destroying beauty of Lolita like poison gas" from different angles, so that even the most vigilant readers can not resist, it stimulates the most private experience of women.
Young writer and feminist Lauren Groff said in The Joy of Sin: "At the age of 13, I saw myself in this girl's sexual awakening. At the age of 20, I saw the moral decay of the pedophile and the abyss in his soul, and came to a certain cautious understanding of him. At the age of 30, I was a mother, and I saw myself in Lolita's mother, poor misunderstood Charlotte Haze, and the echoes of the horrific experience of the little girl at the center of the novel. But despite this, it was only recently that I had come to terms with the essence of my involvement. ”
Robin Gifan, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, said in Lolita Vogue: "Lolita can be a declaration of strength when Lolita is accepted by adult women as a public identity label." What women are fascinated by, provoked, and lustful about should be considered and respected. ”
In his essay "Lolita Liberates Me from My Humbert," young Indian writer Bindu Bansinas describes in detail the process of being stared at and dominated by his 53-year-old uncle, a good friend of his father, from the age of 15. For her, she says, the novel was "more than a coping mechanism, it became my guide."
In addition, Victor Laval's "Sering Wisdom" from the perspective of a university professor, from the handsomeness of Humbert to his student Terry, reflects on whether appearance may make people ignore those irritable and sensitive personalities; columnist Ian Fraser on Lolita's relationship to the road trip culture of the '50s in the United States; Alexander Hemon, a Bosnian-born writer who writes in a non-native language and screenwriter of "The Matrix: The Matrix Reboot" and "Super Sense Hunt: The End Special", recalls his experience of practicing writing in English by learning the language of "Lolita"; Alexander Chi recalled being sexually assaulted by a man 30 years older when he was a boy, and in his eyes, Lolita was not just a woman; Sloan Crossley explores Lolita's relationship with pop culture...
Feeling the feminist movement that has swept many countries in recent years, feeling that the taboos on the topic are becoming fewer and fewer, but more and more sensitive to the reality, and feeling that young girls on the Internet who actively erotic themselves are proud of winning male gaze, Jenny Quigley, the editor-in-chief of "Lolita Reborn", began to re-evaluate her father's courage to decide to publish "Lolita", pondered the significance of "Lolita" to different groups of people, and began to question: If Nabokov completed "Lolita" now, would it be published smoothly? Lolita Reborn tries to respond to these questions in a noisy way, but at the same time, it raises more questions – classics are always icebergs, and there is more to be discovered than already understood.
She found that people's moral concepts have changed a lot compared with seventy years ago, but the conflict between reality and ideas has never abated, and the problems of gender relations are not getting simpler, but more complex. At the same time, she also found that people of different ages and different life situations will have fiercely opposing reading feelings about "Lolita", and they all make sense. As for Nabokov's poetic and lustful writing, the ability to create characters between perverted crime and extreme affection keeps people back to the fundamental question of fiction: Do we need to take moral principles from literature? How should we read Lolita today? How to see Lolita in life? How to think about love? How to define crime and love in a relationship? How exactly to assert women's rights...
For more than seventy years, Lolita's telling has not stopped, and as long as this novel is read, Lolita will continue to be reborn. She is always able to constantly find a parasite in her afterlife. And recently in China, her parasite is the TV series "Imperfect Victim". When the young girl Zhao Xun faced the "male gaze" of her married elite boss, falling into the fear of power, the hazy worship of material, and the confusion of self, she did not have the courage to say "no", let alone the ability to say "no", her cowardice, fear, silence mixed with shame and surprise, she hesitated, hesitated, repeated, stumbled. Fortunately, there is lawyer Lin Kan, police officer Yan Ming, and even strong woman Xin Lu, otherwise, Zhao Xun may never have the courage to say "no", and it will be difficult to escape Lolita's end in the end. In fact, the seemingly powerful Lin Kan is also another "imperfect victim", and all her rescue actions are actually to save herself and save herself who was stared at by her father's teachers - in the end, Zhao Xun, who was disabled by suicide, and Lin Kan, who started a new business, formed an alliance.
If Lolita had known that she had a Chinese name called "Imperfect Victim" in her afterlife, they would not only have managed to escape, but also received a good fate, and they would probably cry with joy.
Chizuko Ueno said that for many years, there were always men buzzing in her ears: "Ueno-kun, no matter how old you live, there are still only men and women in this world." Men and women are a melon on the vine, inseparable, or it is best to live together. And she just wants to tell them: "Women have long begun to build a women's world without men, but they have become a dead end in your horizon, and you don't see it." ”
But she finally didn't say it because it was troublesome.
Feminism has always been a very troublesome thing, it seems to be just a position, but in fact it is ability, courage, cultivation, culture, character, situation... There is also race, ethnicity, physiology, childhood memories, and so on.
Bernardine Evaristo, the first black woman writer in Booker Prize history, published her novel "Girl, Woman, Other" in China last year, in which feminists find a non-binary identity for themselves, but she refuses to be a leader of the transgender movement, she just wants to be herself, and, she said, she wants to be her true self not out of whim, and this choice is only about herself.
In Chizuko Ueno's conception, feminism is freedom. All her efforts were not for equality, but for freedom. As long as there are options, freedom, and not being defined, women have won. Perhaps, this is also Nabokov's intention to "try" the prisoner Humbert with the novel, and it is the significance of "Lolita Reborn" that deserves attention.