pen names, and evil protagonists

I’ve read two interesting articles on the New Yorker magazine website recently.

1) “What’s in a Pen Name”

I think I’ve always found this fascinating, too, probably also partly because of a adolescence shaped by comic books. In my case, I reflect this in my fiction, since many of my characters are using names they weren’t born with. They have different reasons, and they handle the question differently (and one even does have a comic-book-style secret identity), but they’re all probably expressing that fascination (and also it shows that the place where they live invites people to recreate themselves).

2) “Trigger Warnings and the Novelist’s Mind”

This one was about trigger warnings (which we’ve also been discussing over at Maggie’s blog), but the thing I want to comment on here is at the beginning.

The writer talks about his enjoyment of the novel Lolita, which ended when a professor in graduate school said, “When you read Lolita, keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl.” The writer said that he was never able to read the book again because of “the weight of [the professor’s] judgment.”

This astounded me. For one thing, that’s not a “judgment” — it’s a fact. That is what the book is about (and I’ve read and enjoyed it several times).

But here’s what’s astounding to me: Yes, Humbert does monstrous things. Do we avoid literature that depicts monstrous actions, or even literature which depicts monstrous actions by the main character? Macbeth and Othello do monstrous things — do we stop seeing and reading Shakespeare’s tragedies? That seems a weird way to approach literature.

Take that to its logical conclusion and you’d rule out a lot of great writing. As I commented over at the New Yorker website, I don’t demand that fictional protagonists be admirable people.

My feelings about this are probably reflected in the fact that the two characters I’ve been writing about for the longest time (several decades) are an internationally renowned amateur detective and a notorious mass murderer.

(By the way, to follow up on my last post, Humbert Humbert is a classic illustration of the difference between a protagonist and a hero, since he is definitely the former and obviously the opposite of the latter.)