During a graduate-school lecture on “Lolita,” my professor stood up in front of a crowded classroom and said something I have never been able to shake: “When you read ‘Lolita,’ keep in mind that what you’re reading about is the systematic rape of a young girl.”
I had read “Lolita” in high school and then again in college, when it became my personal literary liquor store—whenever I got stuck in a scene, or whenever my prose felt flat or typical, I’d open “Lolita” to a random page and steal something. My professor’s pronouncement felt too didactic, too political, and, although I tried to put it out of my mind and enjoy “Lolita” ’s cunning, surprising games with language, I could no longer pick up the book without feeling the weight of his judgment. The professor wasn’t wrong to point out the obvious about Humbert and Dolores Haze, and I don’t believe—at least not completely—that literature should only be examined as an object unto itself, detached from time and history, but I haven’t read “Lolita” since.
I thought of that professor and his unwelcome intrusion when I read a page-one story in last week’s Times about how several colleges across the country have considered placing “trigger warnings” in front of works of art and literature that may cause a student to relive a traumatic experience. For example, a student might be forewarned that J. M. Coetzee’s “Disgrace” details colonial violence, racism, and rape with a note on the class syllabus that would read something like “Trigger Warning: This book contains scenes of colonialism, racism, and rape, which may be upsetting to students who have experienced colonialism, racism, or rape.”
The story’s headline, “WARNING: THE LITERARY CANON COULD MAKE STUDENTS SQUIRM,” and the inclusion of some seemingly innocuous titles, like “The Great Gatsby,” as candidates for such warnings, dredged up all my distaste for my professor’s prescriptive reading of “Lolita.” If he could produce such a chilling effect, what harm could a swarm of trigger warnings—each one reducing a work of literature to its ugliest plot points—inflict on the literary canon? What would “Trigger Warning: This novel contains racism” do to a reading of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”? What would “Trigger Warning: Rape, racism, and sexual assault” do to a reading of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”?
Social media, which mostly acts as an agreement machine whenever the liberal consensus squares off with a more radical cousin, seemed to confirm my annoyance. The novelist Darin Strauss tweeted, “Trigger Warning: All human experience.” Matt Bai, a national columnist for Yahoo News, added, “Maybe the entire Web should have ‘trigger warning’ so I never have to feel uncomfortable or challenged.” Colson Whitehead joined in: “Your face should have a trigger warning for reminding me you exist.” There were dozens of other examples, from jokey to dire, and, by the time the news cycle kicked up on Tuesday, op-eds questioning the use of trigger warnings had been published in the Guardian, the Atlantic, and Mother Jones.
Out on the far end of the agreement machine, feminist writers and academics defended the use of trigger warnings, and tried to explain their utility and their history. The modern iteration of “trigger warning,” or “TW,” as it’s commonly written, came out of the feminist blogosphere, and, like many other terms used within insular, politically active communities, addressed a specific need. Roughly ten years ago, editors at feminist and progressive Web sites realized that they needed a way of encouraging frank and candid conversation about sexual assault without catching readers unaware. Many survivors of sexual assault experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress; graphic depictions of rape or violent attacks can trigger flashbacks, nightmares, and crippling anxiety. The editors theorized that a warning posted before disturbing narratives could allow readers to prepare for what might be an upsetting but, ultimately, necessary conversation.
“Censorship was never the point,” Alexandra Brodsky, an editor at the Web site Feministing, told me. “We knew that violent and traumatic narratives could have a grave effect on the reader, so we, working together as a community, created guideposts for people to navigate what has always been a tricky terrain.” Those guideposts helped. Trigger warnings “made people feel like they could write explicitly and honestly about things that they may have not written about under different circumstances,” Brodsky said. “They let people know that this was going to be a different type of conversation.”
That logic eventually found its way into the academy. Last year, Bailey Shoemaker-Richards, a master’s student at the University of Findlay, in Ohio, started using trigger warnings in her academic presentations on cyber sexism and online abuse. The warning, she said, takes up roughly fifteen seconds at the start of a talk, and serves only as a reminder that those who are uncomfortable discussing online abuse are free to leave the room. “I don’t think a trigger warning will prevent conversations that may be upsetting,” Shoemaker-Richards told me. “But they might force people in the class to think through their reactions a little more.” Shoemaker-Richards’s use of trigger warnings largely mirrors the way that they have been implemented in classrooms across the country, and, although the term itself sounds forbidding and censorious, in practice these warnings are meant to protect students from public traumatic flashbacks. “If you know you’re about to read a graphic depiction of state racism, and you know that you’d rather be at home than in the library, the trigger warning is just information you need to make that decision,” Brodsky explained.
Brodsky feels conflicted about university-mandated trigger warnings for potentially troubling works of art and literature, as do other feminist thinkers I spoke to, but she still thinks that they should be used in the classroom. “You can’t copy the language from a Jezebel post and paste it onto a syllabus,” Brodsky explained. “With that being said, literature is important, and has effects beyond momentary pleasure and discomfort. ‘Trigger Warning: Colonialism,’ seems a bit reductive, but there should be a way that we acknowledge that what we’re going to read will have a significant impact.” The expansion of higher education onto the Internet has depersonalized the classroom, Brodsky argued, and with fewer settings in which a professor can adequately prepare a class for a potentially disturbing work of literature or art, trigger warnings could stand in, at least in part, for a nuanced and sensitive introduction.
It should be noted that none of the schools cited in the Times article have actually implemented a policy that would mandate trigger warnings, and that college classrooms have often served as testing grounds for vital policies that might at first have seemed apocalyptic or Pollyannaish. Trigger warnings could eventually become part of academic environments, as unobtrusive and beneficial as wheelchair ramps and kosher toaster ovens.
Many of the op-eds and articles on trigger warnings published this week have argued on behalf of the sanctity of the relationship between the reader and the text. For the most part, I have agreed with them. A trigger warning reduces a work of art down to what amounts to plot points. If a novel like José Saramago’s “Blindness” succeeds because it sews up small yet essential pockets of human normalcy against a horrific backdrop, a preëmptive label like “Trigger Warning: Violence and internment” strips it down to one idea.
I relayed these thoughts to Brodsky, along with the anecdote about my professor and “Lolita.” “What a delight it must be to read a book full of graphic accounts of sexual violence and still have the book not be about sexual violence to you!” she said. “Why is the depersonalized, apolitical reading the one we should fight for?” I admit, this was an angle I had not yet considered, and I recalled the severe annoyance I’d felt in college seminars and coffeehouse conversations whenever a white person would say a bit too ringingly that a book written by a person of color somehow “transcended race,” as if that was the highest compliment that could be paid to a work written by one of us poor, striving minorities. Every reliable figure, whether from academic study or from the Obama Administration, says that somewhere between one in four and one in five women are sexually assaulted during their time in college. To argue that their concerns are somehow marginal does not correlate with the math or the ethos of the classroom.
And yet, as a novelist who spent seven years writing an ultimately unpublished novel and two years writing another, I wonder about the effect a trigger warning—even a discreet, well-placed one—might have on the creative process. I kept thinking of the professor’s pronouncement about “Lolita,” and how difficult it had been for me to get it out of my head. After a few phone calls to fellow former classmates who had attended the same lecture, and who remember the professor’s comments with the same clarity, I finally figured out why. We had all enrolled in this particular graduate program because we wanted to write fiction. This was a foolish, likely doomed endeavor, sure, but if we were to have any chance at writing anything worthwhile, our commitment to the task would have to be irrational and unrelenting. Every young writer has to go through a stage of relating to works of literature as if they’re planets, with their own elegant ecosystems and gravitational pull.
A good reader may very well finish “Lolita” and conclude that the book is about the systematic rape of a young girl, or that such a troubling text should require a trigger warning, but a writer should have the freedom to look at “Lolita” as nothing more than a series of sentences that exist only for their own sake. If reading, as Joyce Carol Oates wrote, is the “sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul,” a trigger warning, even through gentle suggestion, guides us into that skin. For writers, who cull everything from what they read, any amount of guidance will lead to dull conformity.
In a good novel—it hardly needs to be said—every word matters. Dedications matter. Epigraphs matter. The size of the font on the Library of Congress listing matters. The order of the names on the acknowledgment page matters. A writer friend of mine once likened a completed novel to a pressure cooker—the weight placed on every stylistic decision should be extraordinary and evenly distributed. A trigger warning or, really, any sort of preface, would disrupt the creation of those highly pressurized, vital moments in literature that shock a reader into a higher consciousness. I cannot be the only person who believes that James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” has the power to radically change the way all people look at race in this country—Baldwin’s brutal treatment of himself, his perfect choice of detail, and his mode of dragging the reader through Harlem elevate the story of a young man preparing himself to attend the funeral of his father to a complete, gorgeous whole. Any excess language—in the form of a trigger warning—amounts to a preëmptive defacement. It’s worth considering how the next Baldwin would react to the possibility that his account would be stamped with “Trigger Warning: Child abuse.” How does that moment, when he picks up his head and stares out at his future reader, change the words he chooses? Can we really afford to have “Notes of a Native Son” be three, four, or even one word worse?
Illustration by Nishant Choksi.
