hotglassofskank

femme lesbian | she/her pfp by vee-dmsr

[unexpectedbaggageinitemarea]

Tamsyn Muir Oxford Speaker Event

hello locked tomblr! i was at the tamsyn muir event in oxford - here are my notes i've tried to group them thematically rather than chronologically, and to point out spoilers when i can. there are some parts that i missed/didn't hear correctly - i would appreciate it if others at the event correct me :D

Key takeaways

Alecto is still being written! Muir was reluctant to say a year, so it will probably be more than that

Alecto won’t be written in a Biblical style, and there will be multiple POVs. It will mostly be told from Harrow’s POV (I hope I heard that right)

Muir loves the idea of a TLT videogame

Muir’s not yet done with Floralinda

Q&A: Alecto when?

(putting this first because I know you want to know!)

Alecto is not yet finished

Reason why:

Muir was already slated to write another book before Alecto (Floralinda, I think)

Floralinda took longer than expected

Muir also suffered from health issues

Muir was about to say Alecto would come out in a year, but was reluctant. It will be soon. It will be before she dies.

Once Alecto gets to the editor, it will be fast-tracked. There will be few advance reader copies

And Alecto will not be 2 books, do not fret!

Publishing journey for the Locked Tomb Series

TL;DR – Muir got published because she had good contacts

George R. R. Martin was Tamsyn Muir’s mentor at Clarion

Muir took what she described as the ‘traditional route’ into publishing

She spent around 3 years publishing short stories

Then she got contacted by an agent for a novel

Muir acknowledges that routes into publishing are not like that now

Sometimes, fanfiction writers are approached – Muir doesn’t approve as that ruins the hobby, it adds a financial incentive and makes people do it for a career rather than for fun.

Muir wouldn’t do anything differently

We joked a bit about an agent who remarked on the ‘sisterly relationship’ between characters in Muir’s manuscript

Advice for aspiring authors

Send stuff to an agent regardless of where you are

Work in the industry

There was a bit of discussion on self-publishing – it doesn’t suit Muir personally, but it’s a good route for someone with the energy to be their own editor, advertiser, etc.

Q&A: something about being a successful writer (sorry I forgot)

Basically, getting successful requires having good connections

Videogame Influence on Locked Tomb Series

Muir is a big fan of the emergent narrative that videogames afford

Muir worked for Disney and wrote videogame scripts before GtN. There’s an insane House of Mouse script archived somewhere, which Muir wrote.

Novel writing is very different from videogame writing.

In a videogame, you have to fully flesh out the in-game universe and provide enough choices and points of interest for players

This taught Muir to be in-depth when writing her novel universes…

…which particularly influenced her to write tonnes of AUs for the Locked Tomb series

There are two versions of Nona, for example: one which is what’s really happening, and one which is Nona’s POV

Q&A: did the videogame influence help Muir to write so confusingly in the Locked Tomb series?

Muir strongly cites Umineko as a key influence

This is a perfect example of a slow reveal, like in the Locked Tomb books

Muir doesn’t strictly plan her reveals (e.g., on the second reread, the reader finds this out), but she does love a slow reveal and works hard to make close reading rewarding for the reader

Tamsyn Muir would love for the Locked Tomb series to be adapted into a videogame!!

A funny story was told where Muir got approached by a gacha game company… which didn’t come to anything

POV voice shifts in the Locked Tomb series

A key reason for the books being so different is that Muir didn’t want to write the same thing again – she gets ‘easily bored’

She focussed on the sentence links of each character – Gideon’s sentence links are very different from Harrow’s

Vocabulary also played a key role (again, compare Gideon and Harrow)

The second person narrative in HtN was planned for a while, the tricky thing was convincing publishers to accept it

Muir has an HtN draft somewhere, 50% written, that’s in third person

POV in Alecto the Ninth: It will not be written in a biblical style

There will be different POVs

Q&A: Book inspiration for writing in the second person?

Muir notes that she didn’t write in perfect second person – it was actually first person

She will always turn to On a Winter’s Night a Traveller

And this is another videogame inspiration

She mentioned Homestuck then said don’t mention Homestuck so…

The theme of memory in the Locked Tomb series

Memory as a result of love, and memories which are a source of pain

This is a key theme in HtN – note how memory affected Harrow throughout the book

It’s also going to be a key theme in Alecto

Muir is using memory as horror

The horror of not being able to trust yourself and to know what is real

She’s drawing on her own experiences of being schizophrenic

Magic systems in the Locked Tomb series

Muir wasn’t actually a big fan of necromancy before writing TLT

She found it too passive in Dungeons & Dragons

She wanted an active magic system, something unintuitive that required hard work and study to learn

She also wanted a magic system to be gross!

TLT magic system was described as “telekinesis with meat”

Worldbuilding in the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: what was Muir’s worldbuilding starting point/seed?

Muir struggled to find this out. There’s no magic formula

Creative writing can’t be taught, only practiced

For GtN, she wanted a story about duty, and duty vs freedom

She wanted the story to be about two young women

Gideon was originally a cop/fireman

For Muir, worldbuilding is there to serve the plot. She does not worldbuild for worldbuilding’s sake

Everything in Muir’s books is there to serve the plot

Would the TLT protagonists make a good DnD party?

Absolutely not!

Although Camilla and Palamedes would be fine

There was some joking around about how Muir and her friends tried to play as Gideon and Harrow in DnD and it didn’t work out

Genre merging in the Locked Tomb series

Muir identified her blend of comedy and horror as unique to Kiwi fiction

She used Peter Jackson’s early films before the Lord of the Rings as an example

For Muir, science fiction and fantasy are merged – it only really feels like science if you do hard sci-fi

Muir grew up with Star Wars, so it felt natural to set her fantasy world in space

The genre merging created publishing problems

Publishers want an easy comparison to other books to make it sell, but there was nothing like Gideon the Ninth

We joked a bit about TLT being compared with Dune

Q&A: now that TLT books are out, has Muir noticed any very similar books that GtN etc. are being compared to?

Not really.

Muir sees the most similarities with people who know her and have had similar influences

An example is A. K. Markwood

Another book that seemed very similar is ‘Dawn Hound by Necksy Strownack’ another New Zealand author (I did a quick google and I think this is the Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach?)

Comedy and Humour in the Locked Tomb series

Muir’s advice for aspiring writers is not to write humour to appeal to everyone, as you’ll please no one. Stay true to yourself.

Muir writes plenty of humour into her manuscripts, which are often cut away during editing

Q&A: memes that didn’t make it: (note: I struggled to catch what was being said under all the laughter and I am also woefully uncultured – many of these are me transcribing as best as I can. Do correct me if I’m wrong!)

Mr Bones’ Wild Ride

Emperish meme

Horse Plinko (this got referred to a lot!)

Harrow calling Ianthe the ‘God of Thot’ in HtN

And many more

Muir mused about whether she will dial back the humour in later work, or whether she will go full throttle as she doesn’t care anymore

Writing process for short stories vs books

Muir sees her short story days as mostly behind her, although she is getting one published soon (as we are aware!)

With short stories, you only have time for one thing, whilst with a novella, you have time for plot and subplot

Short stories are great to practise your technical writing skills

Muir personally would not turn her short stories into novels – she wants to do something new

Q&A: The planning process for the Locked Tomb series

Muir had already planned the whole story before writing GtN

GtN and HtN are the question arcs

NtN and AtN are the answering arcs

Muir really enjoyed writing a New Zealand story

Lesbians as epic heroes in the Locked Tomb series

Muir doesn’t see this as jarring – why can’t epics have lesbians in them?

All epics want you do to is die gloriously

You can do anything after that

Q&A: Epic influences on the Locked Tomb series

The Iliad. It all comes back to Homer, and the Iliad.

There was some insightful discussion on how the Locked Tomb world codifies its past. In a sense, it’s stuck in time. There’s no golden period to hark back to.

The discussion then turned to the idea of the hero, and what a hero should be.

This is heavily explored in Gideon the Ninth, which centres around Harrow failing to prevent Gideon from being the hero

Add lesbian to anything

Muir would love to see a lesbian Hunger Games

Floralinda vs Gideon and Harrow

“Floralinda blows” – Tamsyn Muir

Floralinda is a supervillain story about a ‘bad girl who gets worse’

Muir has written/is planning to write more on Floralinda

Q&A: Advice for writing characters who suck?

Just let them be shit, go hard first and don’t hold back

Take a sin, take a virtue

All of Muir’s characters, in some way, are a ‘fuck up’

Catholic imagery in the Locked Tomb series and Catholicism in general

Q&A: was it difficult to link lesbians with Catholicism in the Locked Tomb series?

It felt good for Muir, a lesbian Catholic

And also very fun!

Q&A: who’s the hottest saint?

In the TLT universe: Valancy!

In the real world: Saint Barbara

This sparked some light-hearted banter

Q&A: Meaningful names in the Locked Tomb series

Muir loves writing meaningful names that hide things in plain sight

Muir does not browse ‘Behind the Name’ lol

She has a ‘laundry list’ of names she likes which she’s accumulated throughout her life

Homer and ancient Greek influences played a key role

Also Biblical names

Changing names are highly important in the books, e.g., Gideon to Kiriona

Muir doesn’t mind if people sus out a character’s plot after immediately reading their names

Umineko inspiration

Lolita and the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: the audience member read Lolita at the same time as NtN. They were wondering if the similarities between the two were deliberate.

Muir loves Lolita and thinks that Nabokov is an expert in writing misery

Muir was open about being a child sexual abuse survivor. The influence of this is pervasive in her work.

There is a strong focus on relationships with authority people

Particularly in NtN, which contains sexual threats. This was hard for Muir to write.

Another example is the relationship between John and Alecto.

They are not a one on one comparison between Humbert and Lolita, but the theme of a man fashioning a girl into the perfect partner is there

Whether there is a sexual element in this will be answered in Alecto the Ninth

Muir explicitly does not want to include overt sexual violence in her work

Misogyny in the Locked Tomb series

Q&A: In the worldbuilding of the Locked Tomb series, how do you balance the misogyny that still exists (which is particularly obvious when John talks to/about Mercymorn) and the outward appearance/initial impression people get of the houses having gender equality (e.g., Abigail as head of the fifth, Jeannemary as a knight)?

This question had Muir wriggling in delight

The answer to this is addressed in Alecto

Why is John fucking up in the creation of his utopia?

Muir encourages readers to question what you, the reader, perceive as misogyny, versus what the characters perceive as misogyny.

Q&A: Cannibalism in the Locked Tomb series

Cannibalism is a metaphor for toxic love

Cannibalism of the soul is much more severe than cannibalism of the flesh

Link to Lolita

It’s eating someone’s life and personhood. A central theme in TLT is exploring love as something taken violently

Can you love someone without taking something from them? This is one of Muir’s favourite ideas

And, it’s not necessarily negative

Example of Camilla and Palamedes (spoiler for NtN!!)

They had to eat each other

Grappling with the question: Is love weightless?

Q&A: How much of their old selves are preserved in the Lyctors?

HtN spoilers!!

John didn’t simply wipe and rewrite them – if not, why are they trying to kill him?

John wanted his friends, so he tried to bring his friends back

Interesting implications for the two people he didn’t know well and only saw as cowrokers

BUT then the Lyctors are changed by their immortality and John

Q&A: What was it like to write immortality?

Muir acknowledges that she doesn’t do a perfect job, and that it’s actually impossible to actually write immortality – it will be too alien for the reader

But this links back to the theme of memory – how much can the Lyctors retain?

The Lyctors are heavily weighed down by time, Mercymorn in particular

Q&A: How long would Muir last in the TLT universe?

0.5 seconds

Muir doesn’t see herself as a necromancer or cavalier

Nor is she particularly aligned with any House

Q&A: Books that Muir is reading right now that she would recommend

(again, my poor listening skills and lack of culture limit me here!)

Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran

‘Payback for Malory Towers’

A.K. Markwood’s new book, the Seventh Banisher

Muir has advance access. AK is her friend.

Q&A: Books and media that influenced Muir as a child

She was a highly prolific reader as a child!

Obviously Animorphs

Weird Kiwi fantasy stories

Margaret Margey

She read a lot of David Eddings as a teenager and got annoyed at the role of women in the books

Gormandust was a key inspiration for TLT (I googled this and ‘Gormandust’ doesn’t exist, hopefully someone more in the know can help to translate my poor transcription!)

Grimmbolts was another influence (again, I probably didn’t hear this correctly)

Q&A: Warhammer inspiration

Muir didn’t get into Warhammer until after HtN. She loves it.

She has been approached to write for the Black Library but she had to decline as she had too much work

Q&A: What’s Muir going to do next?

Muir does not want to keep going back to TLT, she is happy to release it to the fanfiction writers once it’s done!

There are a couple more things in the TLT universe she may add

For example, there’s a big Harrow AU…

Muir wants to go back to videogames

But in her history, the projects she works on tend to fold

Muir is trying to write her own videogames and is slowly learning Python

A very good question about deconstruction was asked, but I missed it because I was too excited

Everyone was really lovely at the event! Cambridge folk, you have a lot to look forward to :))

[vengeful-horde-of-angry-ghosts]

Hi. I'm seeing a resurgence of, "Kiriona's such a bitch, I hate her now" posts and I would like to submit the following non-exhaustive list of trauma Gideon went through since leaving the Ninth House. This doesn't even touch at all the trauma from her upbringing, just the trauma since we meet her.

1. The deaths of Abigail and Magnus (some of the first people to ever even be polite to her)

2. The deaths of Isaac and Jeannemary (while she was present)

3. The death of Palamades (while she was frozen in the hall)

4. Battle with Cytherea

5. She dies (willingly, but still)

6. Harrow cuts her brain up and (to Gideon) rejects her ("turns her brain into soup rather than be beholden to her" is a line that lives rent free in my mind)

7. She's stuck in Harrow's body unable to do anything while Harrow (who she cares about) is also traumatized and having people constantly treat her like shit. She's present for every murder attempt.

8. She gets control of Harrow's body and has to fight off heralds

9. She hears her mother's ghost say that she got pregnant solely so she could kill the baby, which she called Bomb. The mother she desperately wanted to love her only thought of her as a weapon to kill god and was going to kill her. Her very existence was only so that she could die.

10. Her dad is the reason G1deon was trying to kill Harrow

11. Her dad is a lying liar who lies and kills his lyctors when called on it

12. She almost dies in the river

13. Her soul is stapled to her corpse, despite the fact that one of her dad's first tricks was being able to bring corpses back to life

14. She spends at least 6 months with just Jod (in his breakup era) and Ianthe (who we know is 100% going to try to make things worse for shits and giggles)

15. Everything she ever wanted to earn was handed to her as a nepo baby, meaning she can never earn it now

16. Cam and Pal treat her like an object

17. Her dumb necromancer she's been chasing after and pining for kisses her, but wait! It's not actually her. Who knows where she is?

And underneath it all, she died for Harrow who she now thinks didn't want her.

This is where we meet her again as Kiriona.

If that's not cause for depression, I don't know what is. Yes, part of her soul is likely in Harrow still. But at her core, Kiriona is Gideon with major depression and trauma. Nona has never seen someone so sad. Her chapter title is The Saddest Girl in the Whole Entire World. I'd lash out too.

[lastflowerofyourhouse]

childhood griddlehark goes crazy from harrow's perspective btw. what if you were a sin and a war crime and a monster and a horror and the adults around you told you this the second you were old enough to process the words as they were said to you, and every year since then the scale of the death that produced you has gotten a little more comprehensible. and what if the massacre of your soul left one singular survivor, one little straggler, a girl just a bit older than you, over whom you had absolute and unquestioned power. and what if even the most flagrant abuse of this power did nothing to make up for the fact that, every time you looked at her, you saw only her dead crechemates, and what if you couldn't stop looking at her. what if she spent her whole life refusing to be ignored, the loudest person in every room, the problem child, the rogue element. what if her life was a constant reminder of the deaths of hundreds, and she was so very alive. what if you lived a life in the cold and dark, everything in shades of black and gray, stone and frost, but not her, no. because she has red hair and eyes like molten gold and she burns like a candle in the dark.

i'd be insane about her too.

[mayasaura]

Harrow the Ninth is in second person because it's a eulogy. Hear me out.

In the tangihanga, speech is addressed to the tūpāpaku (the body of the deceased). Songs, rituals, speeches, they're addressed in second person to the dead. The narration in Harrow the Ninth—the sharp, funny, angry, second-person narration studded with moments of aching tenderness—that's Gideon. Gideon addressing Harrow from the last moments of the book, when she's afraid that Harrow is dead and she has been left behind with her body.

[ic4rus-fell]

Long rambling post about The Locked Tomb below - beware, spoilers ahead for the whole damn thing.

So I haven't seen anyone talking about something I noticed in my reread of The Locked Tomb books, more specifically in HtN, and that's the usage of the skull icons at the beginning of chapters:

Now, I'm sure it's no secret to anyone at this point that in GtN these are typically indicative of who or where is important or prominent in that particular chapter (ie. the First House skull for the candidates' arrival to the First, the Sixth House skull for when Pal and Cam are first introduced, etc), or to foreshadow events within the chapter (ie. the Firth and Fourth House skulls on the chapters containing their deaths).

Tasmuir continues this usage of the skulls into HtN, but adds another layer to it by having broken or cracked variants of the skulls in play as well:

On first read, they didn't really click for me, but looking at it again with the knowledge of Harrow's lobotomy, it makes perfect sense as these particular skulls only show up on chapters that contain falsehoods or take place within the bubble version of Canaan House.

Any time the skull at the top of a chapter is broken, you can be almost entirely certain that, somewhere within it (or sometimes even the entirety of it), there will be a lie concocted by Harrow's false memories.

Interestingly, as far as I've been able to find, the only chapter in the past and what should be distorted memories where Harrowhark is addressed as "Harrowhark" in the narration (ie. not narrated by Gideon) that has an unbroken skull is chapter 3. This tells me that, despite the fact that the memories have of course still had Gideon Ctlr+Alt+Deleted from them, the information we get is likely still more or less the truth.

And that's not all, cause Tasmuir continues the icon-at-the-start-of-chapters trick into NtN too, but here it's much more broad in terms of what you'll find. HtN introduced the bug heads for the chapters talking about the attack on the Mithraeum, but NtN throws a load more into the mix too.

These two are fairly obvious in terms of their usage: the cracked Sixth House skull is used when Paul happens, and the Gideon specific Ninth when Kiriona is revealed.

There's also a pair of icons depicting the Tomb, one locked and one not, that are also fairly self explanatory in terms of their usage on Nona specific chapters before and after the Tomb is opened.

However, there are a couple that are a little more interesting, mainly insofar as they are only used the once:

The tree makes sense, it's likely the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden to go with the name of the BoE as it's used when they're first mentioned, but it's the plant/leaf that's stumping me as it's from chapter 17 where we get to listen in on CamPal being soft for each other the morning after Pyrrha goes missing, Nona and the kids have their last day in school together, and we get a bit more lore about the Angel. Not sure yet how the symbolism works on this one, but I'm working on it.

Then there are only other two icons of note:

The tower one is fairly easy as it pertains to some of the chapters where the Tower Princes are mentioned or involved (and I have a WHOLE load more ideas about them that will not fit in this already far too long post). The broken Second House skull I'm not 100% on, but my assumption is, based on the fact that it's used on chapter 10, that it's to do with the presumably Second House barracks being taken over. Though don't quote me on that one as it's also where Pyrrha gets injured so hell if I know.

In any case, TLDR: Tamsyn Muir you have put altogether too much thought into the iconography of the joddamned chapters and I love you for it.

[liesmyth]

this girl can fit so many girls in her.

[emmophobia]

[corvophobia]

bword (bone sword)

[matimatti]

That one scene in Nona the Ninth

[cherriesinwinter]

thinking about how harrow, in harrow the ninth, felt so alone, confused, and like nobody cared, meanwhile gideon had once recognized harrow’s prolonged absence just by her unchanged bedding and laundry. she immediately started looking for her, tried to make herself stop looking for her, and then couldn’t even do that.

gideon cared so much, even when they “hated” each other.

[clubnich]

;(

[hotglassofskank]

what if i jumped??

[winewaythaka]

[kyotospartyart]

I revamped this for Pride month <3

[normally-blue]

The Emperor's Reason

[crisurdiales]

This one has been a real puzzle!

Plan of Canaan House, from Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Completely non official and compiled by me through an (obsessive) analysis of the text. Beware of spoilers if you haven't read the book

[familyabolisher]

hi! i saw that previously answered anon ask abt tlt/lolita and i was wondering if you could elaborate? that sounds like a Meaty reading and i would love to hear more about it if you felt up to it

oh finally some good fucking FOOD. okay so i wrote fairly in-depth about the tlt/lolita overlap in the third section of this, but a) i wrote that before nona the ninth came out, and nona expands on the lolita stuff in some absolutely WILD and fascinating ways, and b) i can appreciate not wanting to wade through 16,000+ words just to see me talk a little about lolita, lmao. i’ll do my best to lay out my reading of it here. going to talk about:

a brief summary of lolita and specifically what nabokov asks the reader to think about

the points where lolita is present in tlt

working from the assumption that lolita is consciously present in tamsyn muir’s mind as an intertext for tlt, how does she build on nabokov’s work?

nona spoilers abound below :~) 

i. lolita: a summary (in which i try to explain the discourses of the novel that i think are most relevant to the locked tomb)

lolita is an account of the pedophilic ‘relationship’ between humbert humbert and dolores haze, told from humbert’s first-person perspective wherein dolores haze is referred to as ‘lolita’ and represented as an object of desire capable of seduction. humbert’s narrative voice is loquacious, pretentious, bombastic, and filled with references to authors of the western literary canon. it is also a very effective veneer that obfuscates the violences moving under the surface of the novel: his rape and entrapment of dolores, his murder of charlotte haze, the death of dolores’ younger brother, to give just a few examples, are all present in the text but subsumed in favour of humbert’s constructed version of events. i use the word ‘constructed’ deliberately: what humbert humbert does is subdue what we might call the ‘real’ dolores haze and replace her with ‘lolita,’ a being who exists largely as a composite of literary and artistic references, the most prominent of which is edgar allan poe’s ‘annabel lee.’ 

nabokov also imbues his novel with the subtle presence of the supernatural in ways that muir clearly takes and runs with. lolita is framed as humbert humbert’s memoir written from prison (v similar to how pale fire is framed as a fictional commentary—it helps to think of lolita as discursively equivalent to pale fire, wherein john shade is dolores haze and charles kinbote is humbert humbert.), and comes with a fictitious paratext: an introduction written by a freudian psychologist called john ray. nabokov deplored freudianism and clearly wrote john ray to be read as clueless and misguided; we see him valorise the family structure and extol the memoir as evidence of the need for tighter family units and sound psychiatric institutions, whereas we see in the text itself that the fabric of the family unit is the means by which humbert’s abuse became possible, and the psychiatric institutions were easily manipulable and thus evaded. anyway, john ray tells us at the start that almost all the parties involved in the story are dead: crucially, he informs us that ‘mrs. richard f. schiller died in childbirth.’ much, much later in the novel, we realise that ‘mrs. richard f. schiller’ is dolores haze. he goes on to say, sardonically, that ‘the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.’ 

in the absence of, as it were, ‘material’ ghosts of the sort that john ray would recognise and say to be ‘walking,’ nabokov locates the ghosts of humbert humbert and dolores haze within the text itself. lolita is an act of necromancy(!); it is an account of the end of dolores haze’s life, starting with her meeting humbert humbert (and how humbert’s abuse was made possible) and ending with the pregnancy that we are told at the very beginning will kill her. what makes it effectively necromantic is a) the foreclosure of that death at the very beginning, before humbert’s memoir even starts, and b) the fact that humbert predicates the publication of his memoir on his and dolores’ death, expressing a desire for them each to be preserved in the literary immortality that the text will win him when they are no longer alive. that lolita is an extant text not only in ‘our’ world but within its own internal world (as the paratext establishes) means that both humbert and dolores are dead, and the ‘immortality’ that humbert imagined the book would elevate them to is now the only space where they can persist. (humbert, at one point, implores the reader to ‘imagine me, or i shall not exist!’.) to read and reread lolita is to kill and reanimate dolores haze over and over again, and the reanimated dolores, to borrow the parlance, comes back wrong; she comes back as ‘lolita,’ not a real person but an imagined, composite fantasy projected onto her by her rapist and encapsulating the sites of violence by which abuse can be enacted and rhetorically justified. 

death as the way in which a finite temporality is made possible, and by extension immortality as a disruption to finite temporality, is taken up in lolita along similarly supernatural lines, wherein nabokov conflates a detemporalised, suspended space where ‘nymphets’ can persist indefinitely with the literary immortality to which humbert aspires. the publication of lolita is the relegation of himself and dolores haze to that space; dolores dies in childbirth as a teenager, positioning her on the cusp of adulthood but never allowing her to make that transition. this suspended space is what humbert refers to as an ‘enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.’ enchantment crops up in the novel multiple times; humbert rapes dolores at a hotel called ‘the enchanted hunters,’ and dolores later acts in a play of the same name (written by clare quilty, who also preys on her; the ‘hunters’ in question are ofc both humbert and quilty, and their pedophilia is likened to an ‘enchantment’). the kind of fairytale-type language that similarly makes up the atmosphere of poe’s ‘annabel lee’ (which is, as i will come to, a crux of sorts in nabokov’s novel from which most of what i’m explaining now springs) is also the substance of humbert’s ‘nymphet’ imaginary; there is something a little magical about the veneer that he puts over the violence he commits.

in short: what lolita is concerned with is an examination of the various processes by which humbert humbert’s abuse of dolores haze became possible. one channel of this is the interrogation of the white, middle-class nuclear family unit, into which humbert interpolates himself in order to gain access to dolores and facilitate both his rape of her and his ability to hold her captive long-term. fatherhood for nabokov becomes a site of violence. we see that this violence is bolstered and naturalised by the social institutions around us—humbert humbert evades the imposition of psychiatric diagnoses and ‘cures,’ manipulates the social cues of the middle-class neighbourhood where the hazes lived to get away with his killing of charlotte haze and abduction of dolores, and the private school he sends dolores to becomes both another site where his abuse is naturalised and a means by which he can ogle other teenage girls. nabokov also considers the relationship between humbert’s abuse and the various authors + artists he makes reference to; if lolita represents a social mechanism within which rape is possible (if, indeed, the discursive ‘killing’ of dolores haze as explained above and creation of ‘lolita’ is equivalent to his rape of her, even), and the composite ‘lolita’ is made up of this rolodex of canonical creators, what does that tell us about what the literary canon can and does facilitate? if the imaginary that made poe’s annabel lee possible is the same as the one that allowed him to marry his thirteen year old cousin, what can we say about that imaginary? and what does it mean to couch rape and pedophilia and incest in the language of enchantment and fairytale and magic?

ii. a case for the presence of lolita in tlt

from the above section, you can probably get a sense of how the ideas that nabokov lays out are galvanising a lot of what muir does; however, i should actually make a solid argument for lolita being consciously gestured towards in the text before i go any further with this, lol. before getting into the text itself, it’s worth pointing out that muir has written about lolita before, multiple times, but most notably in her 2017 short story the magician’s apprentice, wherein she refigures those themes of magic and enchantment to be literally equivalent to grooming. at one point, the character being groomed suggests that lolita is about pedophilia, to which her groomer responds that it is also about ‘devouring someone’s life’—which we then see him follow through on, with the claim that he ‘ate her childhood’ coming at the very end. taking up what nabokov gestures towards—predation and grooming as a type of consumption (humbert at one point compares himself to a vampire; there’s a lot of eroticised consumptive language in the novel)—sets the stage for what she later does in tlt with eg. lyctorhood. besides anything else, i would argue that it’s near enough impossible for someone familiar enough with lolita that they write a responsive short story to reference annabel lee without knowing what such a reference could signify and developing it accordingly.

which ofc brings me to: the fact that annabel lee, which john reads to harrow in an attempt to introduce ‘A.L.’ and after which alecto is (re)named, is the principle driving text in lolita. when we meet humbert humbert, he first tells us about his childhood romance with a girl called ‘annabel leigh,’ whom he met with in a ‘princedom by the sea,’ and who died young; he tells us that ‘lolita began with annabel’ and that annabel sparked the ‘enchanted island’ nymphet imaginary. at one point, he searches for a ‘princedom by the sea’ (ie. a beach) on which he can rape dolores, then refers to her as ‘annabel haze, alias dolores lee, alias lo-lee-ta’; here + in the very beginning of the novel, the middle syllable of ‘lolita’ is elongated into ‘lee’ such that annabel lee is invoked (as a presence at the centre of the ‘lolita’ composite imaginary). annabel lee remains a constant presence throughout the text—from humbert calling dolores ‘my darling,’ to her mockingly retorting ‘my dahling,’ imitating poe’s ‘my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,’ to the slow death over the course of the poem (‘kingdom by the sea’ into ‘tomb by the sounding sea’) becoming the way in which the novel gradually ramps up to dolores’ inevitable death. its significance in the novel is paramount, such that—as i said—it’s inconceivable to me that muir could know lolita intimately enough to have written about it in the past, yet have that reference to annabel lee be a coincidence. i’ll come to what a reading of those references to annabel lee which assumes a covert lolita reference can do for understanding john and alecto, but for now i’m just noting it as indicative of a desire to signal lolita as shaping the momentum of muir’s text.

there’s also, for example, this:

“I understand why cavaliers primary carry their House titles,” said God. “It makes sense. But it is a corruption of the original. D’you know why you’re really the First? Because in a very real way, you and the others are A.L.’s children ... There would be none of you, if not for her.”

to me at least, is clearly written to echo this:

‘[...] for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.

In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure.

here we can see the play on numerical titles (typically associated with monarchy, in turn often associated with the sort of fairytale-type fantasy that nabokov plays with—the ‘magic nymphage,’ as he puts it here) to present an account of pedophilic incestuous rape; if we assume that alecto/‘annabel’ as john recounts her ‘is’ lolita (not dolores; lolita), as far as muir’s intertextual engagement with lolita is concerned, then we see this process playing out as an establishment of a ruling class and a population of an imperial core. this specific reference tethers the text to what i will later argue is one of the key developments that muir makes on nabokov’s text; muir expands the gestures nabokov makes towards sites of social violence that facilitate abuse to consider how those logics of abuse make up the sinew of the process by which imperialism becomes possible. the discourse encoded in the act of sexual violence is held up against the violence of conquest and subjugation, and lolita is the conduit for doing so.

this is hopefully enough to demonstrate that lolita is consciously woven into the text of tlt, and deliberately gestured towards by muir when she invokes annabel lee. (another one—we know that the opening sentences of alecto the ninth make reference to the divine comedy; at one point, humbert says: ‘lolita, you are my girl, as vee was poe’s and bea dante’s.’ ‘vee’ here is virginia clemm poe, largely believed to have inspired annabel lee.) if not, then, idk, treat this as a thought experiment examining what tlt would look like if lolita was an intertext, i guess.

iii. how does muir build on nabokov’s text?

so if john and alecto can be read as humbert humbert and dolores haze—if alecto is the figure onto whom the ‘annabel lee’ imaginary is being projected by john, and if the ‘annabel lee’ imaginary is intended to encode a reference to lolita—it then follows that what john ‘does’ to alecto should a) be read as discursively concerned with sexual violence, and b) stand in dialogue with what nabokov renders equivalent to sexual violence in lolita itself. john’s killing and reconstituting alecto follows the lines drawn by nabokov, wherein ‘lolita’ is a composite construction made up of references to western canonical art and poetry, and whilst i don’t read john’s fashioning alecto as a barbie doll from his childhood as necessarily being a moment where he consciously sexually covets barbie, it still draws upon the connotations that barbie carries; artificial, patriarchally constructed womanhood sold as a product. the violence of patriarchy as the violence of capitalism. & the composite nature of it all is really emphasised here:

He said, From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done. I made you look like a Christmas-tree fairy ... I made you look like a Renaissance angel ... I made you Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair.

the ‘renaissance angel’ line especially captures my interest, since dolores haze is twice compared to botticelli’s venus. and ofc, part of what drives nona the ninth is the inevitability of nona remembering this process, and ‘becoming’ alecto again once she does. we see the echoes of trauma without an anchor, and what shape of its source we do get—entrapment, embodiment as terrifying to nona—is figured in language that, to me at least, seems designed to invoke sexual assault. for instance:

Nona dropped to her haunches and clutched her hand between her thighs, afraid to look at it. Her heart was beating so hard that she was worried it would burst. Her gaze lurched drunkenly, as though her eyes were independent of herself. For a moment she wanted to yell, Help, like she had done before, pretending to be the Captain. She wanted to shout. She wanted to be listened to. She wished the barrier had taken her hands. She wished she had thrust herself into it—become that big seething mass of flesh and meat and tendrils—ruined her body, just melted it; come back messed up, so that nobody could want her body but her, so that it would be hers and nobody else’s.

the hand between the thighs here to me is quietly suggestive of a sexual violation. (not literally, of course—it’s a metaphorical invocation. interestingly, this whole sequence comes from nona going through an entropy field—the other time we saw an entropy field dealt with in significant detail was in gideon the ninth, with gideon and cytherea. there’s an argument to be made for the avulsion chapter representing a similar metaphorical sexual violation between cytherea and gideon, whose entire relationship is conducted as a form of predation that maps onto naturalised sites of social violence, but that’s a whole other tangent.) the final sentences are near enough self-explanatory—wanting to mutilate your body such that nobody but you could ever ‘want’ it connects dots between nona’s in-text desire for agency and selfhood outside of who she ‘was’ or might be or could be used for to the subtextual sexual trauma figured through metaphor.

& there is, of course, the fact that what causes her to come apart at the end is ianthe saying ‘John loves Alecto—John needs Alecto’; by this point, kiriona has already referred to alecto as alecto, meaning that the thing which nona remembers (and can no longer go on existing as nona, having remembered) is specifically the naming of john’s relationship to her—ie. his having ‘loved’ her. (her first chapter opens with ‘Late in the year of nobody she really thought about that much in particular,’ the ‘nobody’ here of course being john.) 

so what john ‘does’ to alecto, or to the earth—kills it and fashions its resurrected soul into the body of a woman who is made up of cultural touchstones of womanhood that coalesce ideas of classical and biblical beauty along with the commodification of such beauty under capitalism, in an act of violence that prefigures and galvanises the violence by which he carries out his long campaign of imperialism—can be read as discursively equivalent to what humbert ‘does’ to dolores. sexual violence and murder and imperialist violence here become one and the same. 

i would argue, however, that john’s extension of power as a humbert humbert-equivalent figure has a far broader reach than alecto; in fact, several characters are pulled into alecto’s orbit for the specific purpose of figuring them in similar positions of subjectivity as that which we see her occupy. there’s a throwaway line in nona the ninth during ianthe and corona’s reunion scene whose implications drove me absolutely wild:

“Judith Deuteros, who, when we played Marry, Kill, Reanimate, you used to say reanimate because nobody would be able to tell the difference? That Judith Deuteros?”

instead of fuck, marry, kill, it’s marry, kill, reanimate. in the barest sense, to reanimate is to fuck. we understand the process of reanimation to be a site of violence; necromancy is the base unit of imperialism as john enacts it, death in the world of tlt is wholly reduced to its utilitarian function (to the point where they make soap out of human fat, even), and this figuring of ‘reanimating’ and ‘fucking’ as equivalent brings that violation into the discursive field of sexual violence. with this in mind, it’s worth then looking at the passage where john first resurrects ulysses + titania:

He said, You know, I can’t even remember how it came together now. There was no catalyst, no revelation. I was too far gone for revelations. It was like I’d been dozy and now I was waking up. So, my two kids, the guinea pigs, they were U— and T— on their certificates, you know, their old names. I thought about using those but it didn’t seem appropriate. They weren’t around to say yes or no. I was starting to really care about that. What they would’ve thought, what they would’ve wanted. My two kids with their frozen brains and their perfect internal temperatures. There wasn’t a place on the poor bastards I hadn’t breached with a thermometer, and now I was knocking before I came into their room. Yeah, I was nuts. But I was waking up.

He said, I can’t remember how or why I brought M— and A— into the room. I was like, Hey you two, I want you to meet someone. I wasn’t trying to be a dick. I think I hadn’t slept for two days.

So I brought them into the room with the bodies and I was all, Let me introduce you to ... Ulysses. Let me introduce you to ... Titania.

if we read this moment—john’s ‘first’ reanimated corpses—along the line that ‘marry, kill, reanimate’ makes possible, ie. where to reanimate means to fuck, it clearly reads as an account of sexual violence, and the language used in this passage seems to want to guide the reader towards such a conclusion. the emphasis on U— and T— being ‘kids,’ that they ‘weren’t around to say yes or no’ (john’s suggestion that using their birth names might not be ‘appropriate’ and changing them somehow constituted a respect for their capacity to consent rings incredibly hollow when you consider that at every other point in this series, (re)naming is used to indicate an extension of ownership and authority—annabel, kiriona, to point to the most obvious examples, in contrast with the communal naming practices of BOE for example), their having ‘frozen brains and perfect internal temperatures’ (invoking the detemporalisation of the ‘enchanted island’ and alecto’s ‘closed eye and stilled brain’—as in lolita itself, the enchanted island is a state of death), the thermometer that ‘breaches’ them (figuring penetration as a violation). ulysses, titania, and alecto, as the three ‘first’ resurrections & the three catalysts for john’s necromancy, together posit that sexual violence as nabokov rendered it (as a violence facilitated and naturalised by the social paradigms of western hegemony) is near enough axiomatic to necromancy, and necromancy in turn is axiomatic to imperialism. 

& the other major figure onto whom we can graft this reading is gideon/kiriona. this ofc becomes clear through the renaming that takes place in nona; like earth into alecto and alecto into annabel, gideon into kiriona is an expression of john’s ownership; like dolores into lolita, it’s a stripping of her independent agency and a fashioning of her into a reflection of his own desires and a means to his own ends. what makes this so interesting to me is the form that john’s ownership over kiriona + remaking of her in his image takes in the text:

“My father has made my body’s bones denser than titanium plex,” said the Crown Prince coldly. “My father has made my skin turn away bullets. I am the perfect sword hand and the final expression of the art of the Nine Houses. Don’t you get it? I am the Emperor’s construct.”

ie. as a weapon of empire. what this suggests is that we can consider sexual violence as, again, the crucible from which the weapons of empire emerge, and emblematic of the social relations and paradigms that make empire possible. to reanimate is to fuck and to fuck is to create a weapon of empire, all of which falls in line with our understanding of necromancy as the currency of imperialism. the parallels between gideon/kiriona & alecto run deep; as corpses that harrow is in love with, as harrow’s cavaliers (at least as of the end of nona), as characters figured as god’s children (gideon in the literal sense, alecto as having been created by him + as what can be inferred from ‘For John so loved her that he had made her she. For John had loved the world.’ being a reference to john 3:16), as subjected to grooming and abuse (both from john; in gideon’s case, also from cytherea, arguably also from harrow).

harrow, too, gets pulled into this net of subjugation and dolores haze-ism; she is made functionally john’s daughter in harrow the ninth (‘You’d make a hell of a daughter, Harrowhark. I almost wish you’d been mine.’), takes alecto’s place in the john chapters of nona to the point where john addresses the story to her; and of course, there’s this bit:

In the dream, they were back on the beach with their backs to the sea. The sand was soft and wet and grey—so fine that it dried as they plucked at it, then crumbled through their fingers like ash. The beach was a long, smooth stretch relieved only by hummocks, here and there, of thin grass and silvery driftwood sticking out of the dunes like exposed bone. He was scooping indentations in the sand, making big, print-block child’s letters with the tip of his forefinger. As she watched, he made a pothook—J—then the finned spine of E. He wiped that E clean, and replaced it with A. He wiped that clean, and he drew the prison bars of H. This J and H he barred around with an uneven heart.

(the ‘beach,’ incidentally, echoes the beach in lolita—the ‘princedom by the sea’ where humbert rapes dolores. imo, the beginning of nona when they eat meat on the beach echoes parts of the magician’s apprentice, where eating (human) meat is central to muir’s grooming metaphor.) not only is harrow ‘replacing’ alecto here; she undergoes the same process by which alecto became alecto (or annabel; it’s ofc not clear what the A stands for). john tells us in harrow that ‘[Alecto] had a real name, but I buried it with her, and no one says it anymore’; we learn here that that real name was earth. in substituting alecto/annabel for harrow, harrow is pulled into the process by which john names-owns-abuses. (from lolita, during the beach scene, the same quote i highlighted earlier: ‘Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Lo-Lee-Ta.)

the purpose of the misdirections in nona wherein the narrative tried to suggest that nona was either gideon or harrow (or both!) rather than alecto was less to wholly mislead the reader (it’s pretty obvious from early on that nona is alecto if you’ve been paying attention) and more to draw focus to what it is that makes gideon, harrow, and alecto one and the same: in particular, nona’s panicking at being shackled, entrapped echoing gideon (and later harrow—the ‘prison bars’ of her initial), the shared swordsmanship between gideon and alecto, the dreams. 

even beyond individual characters, we see the power relation that lolita encodes being reconfigured on a mass scale to make up the kind of social paradigm that facilitates imperialism; we could well read lolita as a process of humbert humbert killing and consuming dolores haze, and using that consumption as an instrument by which he facilitates his and putatively her literary immortality wherein she serves as a passive prop to his active agency. this is the relationship that muir maps onto lyctorhood, with john and alecto as necromancer/cavalier being inextricable from john and alecto as humbert and dolores. or even the process of puppeting—what cytherea does to protesilaus is rendered equivalent to what she does to gideon (and arguably what she does to loveday); killing and reanimating a person is seducing them is violating them is subjugating them in a hegemonic social relationship is killing and batterising them to become a lyctor. here, again, muir posits sexual violence as a core tenet of the broader forms of violence, oppression, social stratification etc. that need to take place in order for imperialist hegemony to organise and assert itself. even the resurrection beasts—in a sense, embodied consequences of imperialist violence—contain echoes of lolita; at the end of part one, after humbert rapes dolores, he says that he feels as though he were ‘sitting with the small ghost of somebody he had just killed.’ as lolita is a text obsessed with infanticide as a parallel to the violence done to dolores haze—dolores’ death, the death of her younger brother, the death of annabel leigh, the death of a barber’s child—so too is tlt; john and kiriona both wear a crown of infant fingerbones, harrow’s parents kill 200 children to make her birth possible, wake asks john ‘how many babies died in the bomb,’ the deaths of children produce significant thanergetic reactions, alecto sees a ‘crowd of dead children’ on the shore of the tomb, etc. etc. etc. in a sense, sexual violence and death each become metaphors for one another, and those metaphors converge on imperialist social paradigms.

so—what do we do with all of this? like, what does this interpretation actually do—how does it build on nabokov’s text? imo, muir posits the following: if nabokov understands fatherhood to be a site which affords the sort of social protection by which abuse can be covertly carried out, muir asks how this could disrupt notions of god as ‘the father.’ if fatherhood as humbert carries it out is not a site of safety, but a social relation orchestrated to shore up whiteness, then god as a father becomes a similar instrument of whiteness encoded in the christian imperialism to which we see muir appeal throughout. the sexual violence that ‘fatherhood’ as a social paradigm makes possible is connected to the imperialist violence that a paternalistic understanding of the christian god is designed to facilitate. from here, she interrogates all sorts of things, from gender (lesbian gender in particular) to the internal conditions of empire to the external imposition of imperial hegemony to christianity to the legacy of nuclear testing in polynesia. but the core of it seems to be expanding on the social violences towards which nabokov gestured such that the imperialist dimension in particular is made clearer, and incorporating questions about imperialist christianity into that discursive fold.

i hope this was helpful! i haven’t even covered everything, there were several points in this where i could have elaborated and/or appealed to other parts of the text that i haven’t even mentioned, but this is long enough and provides at least an overview of the intertextual relationship at play. i would really, really recommend reading lolita; it really did, like, fundamentally alter how i think about this series.

[queermania]

good news i'm the most fuckable person at this vehicular manslaughter