A Three-Way
Jul. 9th, 2024 08:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
smokingbootPotential CA triggers here.
I read the FB post by Mallory's Camera re the revelation that Nobel prize winner Alice Munro knew her husband was sexually abusing her daughter. https://archive.is/MxRvk
The family knew and kept it quiet.“There was doubt, there was ignorance of the consequences, there was fear, there was cowardliness and there was the fame factor. That was a big deal.”
Beyond fury I found my responses splitting, and the easiest way to describe them is that it feels like walking down different three paths at the same time.
Path the first leads to Glastonbury and can't avoid echoes of Marion Zimmer Bradley, writer of The Mists of Avalon, now notorious for greater involvement than protection of her child-abusing partner. I recall reading transcripts from Moira Greyland and turning away in disgust at the recounting of MZB's personal cruelty towards children and animals. I have never been able to go back and find those transcripts again, probably because I really do not want to. MZB was a big deal to demi-hippy-neopagan Glastonbury. Some had taken a sense of identity from that bestseller, alongside Robin of Sherwood, to a background score of Loreena McKennitt and Clannad. I tried to read The Mists of Avalon but it was genuinely turgid and I gave up. Her wafty priestess guardians of ancient knowledge seemed rooted in Dion Fortune's work, indeed I think MZB must have read some of Dion Fortune's occult novels before starting her own. But MZB had captured the zeitgeist and the overthrow of the idol was a shock to many. It was hard for folk to separate their identities from their inspiration. Avalon was in disarray. Time for everyone to disappear down the pub and get Enya off the jukebox.
Path the Second leads into a tarot landscape, card XX, Judgement. I am a great believer that one cannot judge any piece of work if one is attached to the artist one way or another. I also believe that great art has no connection to moral merit, that a terrible person can be a tremendous creator. A bane of our time is the need to demand otherwise, the idea that someone who inspires us must be perfect in every way, and most especially must give voice to current cherished beliefs. It creates the censor's perfect situation, in which the individual's enjoyment of any given art is a sign of connection to the artist, and therefore the moral imperative is to hate the work of a person one considers to have hateful principles. It's hunger for power preying on social anxiety, deeply inauthentic and manipulative. I like to think I'm too smart for that but you know... what can happen is that awareness of an ugly shadow may stop me going there in the first place. I am repulsed enough already to give her writing no chance. That's my loss given that she was a widely lauded writer but it's likely I will never feel it. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite.
Path the Third leads to New England. Moving back to Alice Munro, these men and their 'Lolitas.' One thing about reading the above link was the abuser's narcissism. He's no ordinary p**dophile, no, no, of course not. He was lured. Are any of them not lured? He speaks about knowing there are 'Lolitas' and that he can respond to a 'Lolita,' which begs the question; if he is telling the truth and knows he can respond to a 'Lolita' why allow his stepdaughter to sleep in the same room with him?
That word, oh that word 'Lolita.' When Nabokov wrote the book, he used the narrator Humbert Humbert as an exercise in beguilement. Humbert Humbert is erudite and convincing to the extent that writers like Auberon Waugh and JK Rowling either find sympathy with him or see it as a love story. But Nabokov is not caught in his own dweomer. In an interview, the author describes the narrator as "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching'". Nabokov never loses sight of what he is creating. Humbert Humbert is not a romantic tragic figure. He is a child rapist. Everything he says is a poetic excuse.
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
First paragraph of the book, extraordinary. We know almost straight away what Humbert Humbert is, but we are being cajoled by the author who isn't trying to lure us into sympathy, rather he wants to show us how easy that is to achieve. He cannot have guessed Humbert Humbert's lasting triumph ; the predator's word of desire, 'Lolita,' has entered our language to signify, not the abused child she really is, but a sexually precocious little dream-huntress deemed ready and willing by those who want her to be ready and willing. His prose has won over, if not our hearts, then at least our lexicon. Here's where Alice Munro's partner Gerry is hiding behind all these now-cliches, useful for blaming his step daughter, exonerating himself, and lifting him to the status of literary legend in the eyes of his literary legend wife.
And because this is not a critical essay, but simply the three way info-dump that occurred as I read, I allow myself to stop with almost no conclusion. Nabokov understood Humbert Humbert without a moment's sentiment, MZB didn't mind her partner's hideous behaviours because she was into them. But what the hell happened to Alice Munro?
I read the FB post by Mallory's Camera re the revelation that Nobel prize winner Alice Munro knew her husband was sexually abusing her daughter. https://archive.is/MxRvk
The family knew and kept it quiet.“There was doubt, there was ignorance of the consequences, there was fear, there was cowardliness and there was the fame factor. That was a big deal.”
Beyond fury I found my responses splitting, and the easiest way to describe them is that it feels like walking down different three paths at the same time.
Path the first leads to Glastonbury and can't avoid echoes of Marion Zimmer Bradley, writer of The Mists of Avalon, now notorious for greater involvement than protection of her child-abusing partner. I recall reading transcripts from Moira Greyland and turning away in disgust at the recounting of MZB's personal cruelty towards children and animals. I have never been able to go back and find those transcripts again, probably because I really do not want to. MZB was a big deal to demi-hippy-neopagan Glastonbury. Some had taken a sense of identity from that bestseller, alongside Robin of Sherwood, to a background score of Loreena McKennitt and Clannad. I tried to read The Mists of Avalon but it was genuinely turgid and I gave up. Her wafty priestess guardians of ancient knowledge seemed rooted in Dion Fortune's work, indeed I think MZB must have read some of Dion Fortune's occult novels before starting her own. But MZB had captured the zeitgeist and the overthrow of the idol was a shock to many. It was hard for folk to separate their identities from their inspiration. Avalon was in disarray. Time for everyone to disappear down the pub and get Enya off the jukebox.
Path the Second leads into a tarot landscape, card XX, Judgement. I am a great believer that one cannot judge any piece of work if one is attached to the artist one way or another. I also believe that great art has no connection to moral merit, that a terrible person can be a tremendous creator. A bane of our time is the need to demand otherwise, the idea that someone who inspires us must be perfect in every way, and most especially must give voice to current cherished beliefs. It creates the censor's perfect situation, in which the individual's enjoyment of any given art is a sign of connection to the artist, and therefore the moral imperative is to hate the work of a person one considers to have hateful principles. It's hunger for power preying on social anxiety, deeply inauthentic and manipulative. I like to think I'm too smart for that but you know... what can happen is that awareness of an ugly shadow may stop me going there in the first place. I am repulsed enough already to give her writing no chance. That's my loss given that she was a widely lauded writer but it's likely I will never feel it. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite.
Path the Third leads to New England. Moving back to Alice Munro, these men and their 'Lolitas.' One thing about reading the above link was the abuser's narcissism. He's no ordinary p**dophile, no, no, of course not. He was lured. Are any of them not lured? He speaks about knowing there are 'Lolitas' and that he can respond to a 'Lolita,' which begs the question; if he is telling the truth and knows he can respond to a 'Lolita' why allow his stepdaughter to sleep in the same room with him?
That word, oh that word 'Lolita.' When Nabokov wrote the book, he used the narrator Humbert Humbert as an exercise in beguilement. Humbert Humbert is erudite and convincing to the extent that writers like Auberon Waugh and JK Rowling either find sympathy with him or see it as a love story. But Nabokov is not caught in his own dweomer. In an interview, the author describes the narrator as "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching'". Nabokov never loses sight of what he is creating. Humbert Humbert is not a romantic tragic figure. He is a child rapist. Everything he says is a poetic excuse.
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”
First paragraph of the book, extraordinary. We know almost straight away what Humbert Humbert is, but we are being cajoled by the author who isn't trying to lure us into sympathy, rather he wants to show us how easy that is to achieve. He cannot have guessed Humbert Humbert's lasting triumph ; the predator's word of desire, 'Lolita,' has entered our language to signify, not the abused child she really is, but a sexually precocious little dream-huntress deemed ready and willing by those who want her to be ready and willing. His prose has won over, if not our hearts, then at least our lexicon. Here's where Alice Munro's partner Gerry is hiding behind all these now-cliches, useful for blaming his step daughter, exonerating himself, and lifting him to the status of literary legend in the eyes of his literary legend wife.
And because this is not a critical essay, but simply the three way info-dump that occurred as I read, I allow myself to stop with almost no conclusion. Nabokov understood Humbert Humbert without a moment's sentiment, MZB didn't mind her partner's hideous behaviours because she was into them. But what the hell happened to Alice Munro?
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2024-07-09 04:47 pm (UTC)I agree with you about keeping the art / artist separate. I do believe that most truly awe-inspiring art is not individualistic but rather part of all of us. That un / sub conscious sea churning below.
Munro is a wildly gifted writer, wry observer of the middle class. But I take a James Hillman approach to her work - it is a psychological veil which she donned. And wrote from beneath.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-09 06:34 pm (UTC)Yes, this has always been my belief as well.
But I don't think I will ever be able to read anything written by Alice Munro ever again, and that is a tremendous loss for me because Munro was one of my favorite writers, both for her subject matter (which could be described as "the secret life of women") and for her lucid, lyrical, economic style.
I think it's because this episode in Munro's life has all the plot elements of a Munro story, you know? Munro as an omniscient narrator is a pitiless judge; her characters may not suffer consequences in a traditional sense, but it's quite clear when you read one of her stories that she has the inside scoop on these characters, and forgiveness is not part of her storytelling.
For Alice Munro to suddenly metamorphose into one of the most flawed of her own characters...
It is staggeringly dissonant to me.
And that man, her husband, Andrea's stepfather. Projecting his guilt on to a nine-year-old child. Right, asshole. Nine-year-olds have all the power in our culture! Good for you for deciphering Nabokov's dots into the same type of secret message that schizophrenics get when they refuse to step on cracks.
How could Alice Munro value this monster? I mean, okay, we've all loved the wrong person from time to time; I could have cut her slack for that one if she had immediately separated from this jerk.
But she didn't.
And she gave the most ridiculous excuse. She couldn't drive.
I'll never read anything by her ever again.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-11 12:41 pm (UTC)I wish she hadn't failed her daughter and those who resonated with her gift, and understand why you will never read anything by her again. There's more than the death of her body in this.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-11 12:49 pm (UTC)There always seem to be people like Alice Munro, who, however colossal their connection to that churning sea, lose themselves.
And of course the predators remain until.