Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

This belief that we know better—a moral feeling, if ever there was one—is very comfortable. This idea of the inexorable, benign teleology of justice, of liberalism, of fairness, is seductive. So deeply seductive that it clouds our thinking and our awareness about ourselves. We are the culmination of every good human thought.

We think about Wagner and we ask the question: what should we do about sins from the past, now that we’re enlightened? But what if we rephrased it: what should we do about sins from the past, when we haven’t improved?

What do we do with the art of monsters from the past? Look for ourselves there—in the monstrousness. Look for mirrors of what we are, rather than evidence for how wonderful we’ve become. Looking for ourselves in the monsters of the past can raise some uncomfortable specters: Is it accidental that so much vitriol has been spilt on Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, two Jewish men, one accused, one convicted? Is there an anti-Semitic energy in our vilification of them? After all, the oldest trope of anti-Semitism is: they’re coming to take our children. It’s a question that must be asked, and is impossible to answer.

The very term “cancel culture” is hopelessly non-useful, with its suggestion that the loss of status for the accused is somehow on a par with the suffering endured by the victim. Stephen Fry’s distance from the past—his assumed enlightenment—allows him to say something to a historical figure that he might not say to someone alive.

This is a hint that our self-concept of being at the apex of enlightenment is maybe a little off. Because if we were really so enlightened, wouldn’t we celebrate that this pointing out has occurred? I don’t mean to pretend an innocence that I don’t really have. Of course I know that the pointing out of wrongdoing can become, has become, virulent. Of course I know that because of the way we process accusations, there now exists a culture of fear, a sense of imminent exposure. Personally, I regret things I’ve said, things I’ve written, things I’ve done. They’re out there and I know I was wrong. I have a sense of fear that I might be shamed for my mistakes.

This trade-off is depressing and maybe even inhuman—but, to my mind, it’s the bargain that’s on the table right now. Some people endure shaming, deserved or undeserved, so that some other people can say what happened to them. Instead of accepting that bargain, we make up an insulting and increasingly dumb name—cancel culture—that invalidates half the equation: the half where people

are able to say something is wrong. Perhaps this is the wrong bargain; probably it is. But it’s the reality we live in. The liberal fantasy of effortless enlightenment simply assumes we’re getting better all the time. But how on earth can we improve unless we listen to people saying what’s wrong?

We shouldn’t punish artists for their subject matter. But we do. We punish artists for their subject matter all the time. Now more than ever.

Why did Nabokov spend all this time with Humbert? It’s a mistake to ask this question in search of a biographical answer. In other words, we need to ask the question not about Nabokov as a man, but about Nabokov as an author. We must ask, as we learned to do in lit class and as we yearn to do when we find ourselves trapped, clutching a glass of warm white wine, at interminable book groups where the idea of authorial intention is anathema: Why does the author choose to do this? What is happening in this book, and why? The biographical answer to such questions is a brick wall, where Nabokov is concerned. The only answer is the aesthetic answer.

To put it another way: why did Nabokov, possessor of one of the most beautiful and supple and just plain funny prose styles in the modern English language, spend so much time and energy on this asshole?

What does Humbert’s ordinariness mean to Nabokov? It means that Lolita’s victimization is a tragedy, precisely because it is not unique. Lolita is isolated, but not alone. Everyone wants to fuck young girls.

Lolita has been defended from the time of its first publication, and the defense goes like this: Nabokov has found the humanity in a monster. This reading re-centers Humbert, and reifies Humbert’s own self-concept as extraordinary. But Nabokov is clearly saying something different—Humbert is, in reality, ordinary as dirt. He’s the dirty old man who walks by you every day, disguised in this case by a fancy prose style. Humbert is not special. Humbert is not extraordinary. He’s Frank Lasalle. He’s everywhere. If Humbert is ordinary, then Lolita is too. She too is everywhere. She’s all around us—the girl whose life has been destroyed. The ubiquitous victim of the ubiquitous monster. And it’s her ubiquity that ultimately concerns Nabokov. The clue is in the title. The book is actually about what it says it’s about: a mere girl. The fact that we can’t quite see her is part of the story. She’s obscured from our view. We only see what Humbert wants to see—or wants us to see. Humbert reduces Lolita to her downy parts; or, more correctly, to his own idea of her. But even as that’s happening, Nabokov gives us—sneakily and not very often—her real, lived experience.

Child

It’s a piece of obviousness, but it bears stating: my vertiginous, scary, illuminating experience of reading female erasure was contingent upon Nabokov’s decision to write as the monster. He had to risk his own conflation with Humbert in order to make the reader see and feel Lolita’s annihilation. This conflation is what raises the question: Was Nabokov a monster? Did he feel the things

Every good artist knows this is true of the best work: It takes some plundering of the self. You go in there and you have a look around and you bring back something that might make people uncomfortable and you write it down—even if it’s awful, even if people don’t want to hear it, even if it makes you, the artist, seem like a freak.

The

great writer knows that even the blackest thoughts are ordinary. —

But for pete’s sake, that doesn’t mean you have to act them out. Nabokov and child rape: The writing exists and the action never did—does that mean the writing replaced the action? It’s possible that Nabokov had monstrous desires, and channeled those desires into his own work. Which is not to say that his work was written from a therapeutic or cathartic standpoint—god forbid—but that he h...

Nabokov, in writing these dark desires, rejected the formula that genius deserves license. Greatness does not mean a free pass to do whatever you want. (And, again, we have no proof that having sex with children was something Nabokov wanted to do.) Earlier in this book, I quoted lines from Jenny Offill describing Nabokov as a kind of monster: an art monster. And this may well be so. He may have inhabited the role of the writer whose needs are primary. But when we think about the license enjoyed by genius, we can see that Nabokov refused the criminal possibility of his own monstrosity. He never became that particular kind of all-consuming gorgon.

The world is full of voices unheard. We think of Dora Maar or Shakespeare’s sister, but of course we don’t know what we don’t know. The work made by people who never found publishers; the work un-made by people crushed by poverty and racism or just indifference. Part of the problem is that we don’t always think to notice these absences—even when it’s us who’s missing.

Institutional presence matters. Taking up space in cultural institutions is meaningful, whether that’s as an artist or as an administrator. It’s not a perfect solution to the monster problem. It’s wrongheaded to think that people from historically oppressed groups will never be monstrous. A person’s identity does not automatically make them bad; and it does not automatically make them good either. I don’t think that if institutions start supporting women and people of color and queer people and trans people, all those people will turn out to be good. But I do think the institutions will be better, simply because they will be fairer.

The protesters’ tears—ridiculous, melodramatic, over-the-top—reminded the world of the existence of the artist who got lost when a man silenced her, the courts didn’t vindicate her, and institutions forgot her. The weeping protesters reminded me of the girl I met in the crepe shop, who allowed herself to feel love for the musicians who had disappointed her, even after everything. Like the crepe girl, the protesters were writing their own kind of criticism: a criticism made of feeling. They made a humming bird hum that got louder and louder.

Am I a monster? I’ve never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I’ve never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn’t molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven’t been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster? I don’t beat my children. (YET.) Am I a monster? I’m not noted for my anti-Semitism. Am I a monster? I’ve never presided over a sex cult where I trapped young women in a gilded Atlanta mansion and forced them to do my bidding. Am I a monster? I didn’t anally rape a thirteen-year-old.

My initial list of female monsters was short and the sins had to do, but entirely, with motherhood. To be precise: negligent motherhood. If the male crime is rape, the female crime is the failure to nurture. The abandonment of children is the worst thing a woman can do. —

Even

women who’ve done this terrible thing, who’ve abandoned their children, seem to agree that it’s the blackest of crimes.

Only two classes of people are asked to be purely good: mothers and children.

What exactly constitutes leaving? The question arises as soon as you make the assertion that a mother who leaves her children is a monster. Does it mean doing as the journalist’s wife did: packing up, hauling ass across the Intermountain West, and seeing the kids only on occasional holidays, or never? How long does one have to be gone to qualify as an abandoner? If I shut my door against my children, am I an abandoner? No, you say, of course not, that’s outrageous. But what if I do it all day long, every day, up to and through and beyond the dinner hour, as a male writer I know does for months or years on end when he’s deep into a project? What if I go to a writer’s retreat for a week? A month? A year? What if I simply go to work? The idea of what constitutes abandonment exists on a continuum. I mentioned to a dear friend—who happens to be a very accomplished and hardworking civil rights lawyer—that I was writing a chapter about abandoning mothers.

Men leave their children to pursue their art, or their whatever, so often that it hardly bears noticing. And it’s certainly not perceived as monstrous enough to disrupt our experience of their work. But I look at Lessing with a gimlet eye, my experience of her altered, stained by this perception of monstrousness, wondering if her fierce intellect is somehow causally tied to her cold abandoning heart. I’m not saying it’s fair. I’m saying it happens. Again: that’s how stains work.

You start to see how abandonment could become an option for a mother-artist, even one who passionately loves her children. Perhaps—radical thought—especially one who passionately loves her children. In fact, the thought can be taken a step further: A young artist, a young female artist, might be forgiven for thinking that maybe it would be better not to have children in the first place. If you are going to be accused of child abandonment when you go to work—and, more important, if you are inevitably going to internalize those accusations—perhaps better to skip the children and go straight to the art.

They are opposite poles of the uneasy continuum that all artist-mothers walk. On one end you have the woman who gives up a child in order to form herself into an artist; on the other end you have a woman who gives up the artist self for the sake of the children. Artist-mothers dwell on all points between these two poles, and maybe for some lucky (that word again) ones there are fleeting moments, flashing fugitive points when they are able to make work in a way that’s supported by the people around them. Faith needed to live her two identities—mother, artist—in succession. She couldn’t do both things at the same time, as is the case for many women. Mitchell went the other direction, schismed herself, cut the mother self from the artist self altogether. Instability, capriciousness, and outright fury fueled Mitchell’s fame at its height. She was trying to make something great and at the same time trying to navigate the decidedly non-great waters of the music industry, which kept wanting her to be a woman in a very particular way.

Mitchell—embattled, difficult, demanding—gave us this explosive quote, so germane to our purposes here: “Most of my heroes are monsters, unfortunately, and they are men. If you separate their personalities from their art, Miles Davis and Picasso have always been my major heroes.” For Mitchell, separating the life from the art was not an aesthetic question, but a point of view necessary to her survival. In other words, she wasn’t confronting the problem as an audience member, but as an artist. In that way, I am like her. Just trying to figure out how to do it. Perhaps the monstrousness of Picasso and Miles Davis provided an unlikely, even a topsy-turvy, model for building a life where the most personal thing—motherhood—is set aside in the name of art. Maybe Joni was, like me, looking for models, looking at artists, trying to figure out how to behave.

She did what a great artist does: vigorously, aggressively protected her ability to make something vulnerable and tender. Men often have a woman in their lives who does this work for them; the wife who takes the calls, etc., so the man can be the shit in the shuttered chateau. Joni Mitchell was an asshole on behalf of her own vulnerability. Women like Joni Mitchell are the essence of difficult: both the asshole-ness and the vulnerability disrupt the order of things.

The question arises stubbornly, again and again: What about empathy for the stained among us? What about empathy for wrongdoers? Monster, the stained, the accused—these are names for people whose identities have been boiled down to something terrible they did. But of course no one is purely a monster. Even the worst of the people discussed in these pages is a human, with a life that means more than whatever terrible thing he or she did.

My feminism—which was elastic enough to allow me to consume the work—was not elastic enough to countenance empathy for these men. They had behaved terribly; they had abused positions of power; they had brought shame upon themselves. They had me as an audience; they did not also deserve my sympathy.

The recovery movement tells us we are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. If we believed otherwise, wouldn’t the alcoholic just stay in the gutter, an XXX bottle tipped to her lips like a cartoon drunkard? What would be the point of even trying, if we’re only going to be defined by our shittiest moment? The idea of redemption is crucial to the survival of the drunk, the addict, who must believe in a future that is at least a little free of what she was.

Recovery, as a way of living, makes you see things from the monster’s point of view. You see things from his point of view because you are him. You sit in the rooms and listen and you hear terrible, terrible things, but they are also ordinary things. Because everyone in that room has been through them. Leslie Jamison has written about this gift of the ordinary—your own story is not paramount after all. It’s a new experience of empathy for me—the empathy of saying what is worst about me, what is most monstrous, and having it accepted not because I am special, but because I’m not. (An uncomfortable echo here of Humbert’s not-specialness.)

course the complicating factor is that many addicts and alcoholics are survivors of abuse (even of abuse within the recovery world, which has had its own #MeToo reckonings). It’s been shown time and again that trauma and abuse lead to substance abuse. The fact is, alcohol is a really useful way of managing trauma—until it is not. This understanding has profoundly changed the model for thinking about alcoholism. AA framed alcoholism as a disease, but drinking can also be thought of as a solution. Drinking and drugging are a shit solution in the long run, but in the short run they are extremely effective strategies for managing Bad Feelings.

In a nutshell, addicts are often people who have been badly hurt—sometimes by other people, sometimes by more structural abuses like poverty and racism. When we sit in a room and accept our fellow monsters, this knowledge—of our own experiences with pain—informs that acceptance as well. We’re monsters and we’re victims.