welcome to downtown coolsville

Last night Amy and I went out to dinner with her mum, her ex-stepfather, and her stepbrothers. It was going quite well overall- there was wine and pasta and at one point the stepbrothers were yelling about their sister, who lives in Ottawa and seems to be universally hated, and it's always interesting to get a sudden window into other people's family drama- and then I had a conversation I've had more times than is strictly necessary. Which is to say, at all.

One of her stepbrothers was cold, and asked if anyone had a jacket he could borrow. I wasn't cold, and he looked kind of sad and puppylike, so I gave him mine. It's a green jacket with a yellow smiley face button on the lapel. He noticed it after a few minutes and asked- slurring a little because we were most of the way through a bottle at that point- what it was.

"It's a smiley face button," I said.

He shook his head. "It should be an anti-immigration button," he said.

Please note: we were not talking about immigration. We had not been talking about immigration the whole evening. As I recall, the last thing this gentleman and I had actually spoken about was his partner, Steven, and how they might be breaking up soon. So I suppose immigration was just on his mind, and he wanted to have a good long gumflap about how much he didn't like it. Or something.

I said, "My mother's an immigrant."

Now, in this conversation, saying that a person close to you (a family member or spouse for preference, although sometimes a close friend or coworker is good enough) is an immigrant has one of two results. Either 1) the person gets very embarrassed and backtracks, often naming all the perfectly lovely people they know who are immigrants, or 2) they ask where exactly the person is from. Which this gentleman did.

"The UK," I replied.

The gentleman made a face I've seen a fair few times during this conversation. When I tell people that my mother is an immigrant, they tend to assume I mean that she is not white, because that is the picture they have filed inside their head under "immigrant." An immigrant is a person of colour, or at least a delightfully "ethnic" shade of white. (Like a kooky Greek, maybe, or a fiery Italian.) The face is a sort of relieved grimace, an oh-thank-God-I-thought-you-might-be-one-of-them expression.

"Oh, well, that's different," he said. "That's not the kind of immigration I was talking about."

You always know the kind of immigration they're talking about. Always. But I bit anyway.

"What kind of immigration were you talking about?" I asked.

He waved his hands expressively. "You know," he said. "Terrorists!"

I shut the conversation down after that.

"I felt really sorry for Humbert. Lolita seduced him!"

Before I ever read Lolita I used to hear people say this a lot. Since I hadn't read the book, it kind of went in one ear and out the other. I knew what the book was about, of course- I don't think there're many people who don't know what Lolita is about- but I thought that maybe I'd gotten it wrong. Maybe there was some sort of dynamic I didn't understand. Or maybe Dolores was secretly a forty-year-old Russian prison guard posing as a little girl and the book was really a jab by Nabokov at international communism.

Or maybe I was just more immune to bullshit back then.

Having read the book this year- yeah, it took me this long- and wow, those people sure were full of it, eh?

Humbert Humbert- quite aside from being an unreliable narrator- is not a nice guy. Not even a little. It's weird that I feel like I need to say that about a guy who marries one woman because she looks and acts like a prepubescent girl, marries another woman to gain access to her prepubescent daughter (all the while ripping this woman to pieces in his own mind out of some misplaced superiority complex), kidnaps and rapes said daughter, and drags her around the country after telling her that her mother is in the hospital, but apparently this all adds up to "poor innocent adult man seduced by dastardly twelve-year-old."

Buying sleeping pills so you can drug your stepdaughter and rape her for six hours does not qualify as "seduced." Neither does justifying your attraction to underage girls by telling yourself they're not really children at all, but demonic temptresses in the form of twelve-year-olds.

The weird thing is, even Humbert doesn't try to argue that Lo seduced him. In fact, he usually sets himself up as the active party, and even (sort of) acknowledges that he's hurting her- although, being Humbert, he goes about it in a particularly florid, patronizing way:

"There was the day, during our first trip- our first circle of paradise- when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn- to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on- a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face... that look I cannot exactly describe... an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration- and every limit presupposes something beyond it- hence the neutral illumination." (283)

He mentions it again a few pages later:

"But the awful point of the whole argument was this. It had become gradually clear to my conventional Lolita during our singular and bestial cohabitation that even the most miserable of family lives was better than the parody of incest, which, in the long run, was the best I could offer the waif." (287)

Yeah, Lo had a crush on Humbert. Yeah, she'd experimented with other kids her own age. Yeah, she seems to be in control the first time they had sex- that is, after Humbert fed her what he thought were sleeping pills and tried to rape her in her sleep. She even uses her influence over him to get things she wants, because she is helpless and wants to gain some sort of control over her life, and to do that she needs to use the means at hand.

This does not mean she seduced him. You know, due to that whole "asswipe child molester" thing.