A (3:22)

Doctor of smell is a different MD. No. So smell doctor PhD slash DPhil, which I guess is true. But she's also a literary scholar, which is why she's here today in that capacity as a literary scholar of more than just smells, but also including the ven Diagram smells.

B (3:44)

Because I have written about smell in this novel.

A (3:46)

Yes, yes, exactly. So, so we are debating what the first question, because I always do these sort of warm up questions should be. And I think the one we settled on and you had very little time to think about is if you were not studying what you study right now and someone said you can't be a literary scholar and I'm going to say you also can't make perfume or anything and you had to have something that's not related to what you are known for right now. I'm setting a lot of boundaries on this. What would you do? Would you be like, you know, I'm like, oh, I could open a cafe or have an interior design business or something. What would you.

B (4:24)

Oh my God. I feel like it's a really common thing for women to want to own like a bookshop slash cafe. And I'm not sure that that is what I would want to do. But I completely understand the semi universal appeal to that. Doesn't really make sense for something to be semi universal, but it feels like universal among women.

A (4:45)

I have a fun fact which is that for the end of my Ph.D. i was managing a bookshop cafe. So I literally did that for the end of my PhD and did it

B (4:57)

live up to the hype?

A (4:59)

Yeah, it was really amazing. It was Edinburgh Community Bookshop. Anybody, if you're in Edinburgh, go there. It was really cool because we sold both new and used books. And so I used to be like, you know, carrying big boxes of books around and seeing all these crazy things people had donated, but then also seeing some new books that it was, it was a really, really cool job. So just so you know, your fantasy is awesome.

B (5:26)

Well, honestly, I mean, you're going to have to pry smell out of my cold. I can imagine myself working on smell for a good few decades after this.

A (5:37)

Do you always get asked what your favorite smell is? I feel like people must ask that all the time.

B (5:41)

They do. And I really know which smell to go for because I think my actual favorite smell is vanilla. And people think that's really, really boring and basic.

A (5:52)

They think it's vanilla.

B (5:54)

Well. But at which point I kind of go into this diatribe about the cultivation of vanilla and the history of vanilla and how important it is to us as a culture, and then they're like, okay, fine. All right. It can be vanilla.

A (6:10)

It's loud.

B (6:11)

I also think that genuinely one of my favorite smells is, like, people think this is so strange. But you know what? There is no judgment here.

A (6:22)

This is safe. This is a safe space.

B (6:23)

It's like the smell of baked bream slime. Bream is a kind of fish.

A (6:29)

Yes.

B (6:29)

And my dad is a fisherman, and our car, for my whole life, basically, has always smelled like hot baked fish.

A (6:40)

Nice.

B (6:40)

From when his, like, fishing nets and stuff have been thrown into the back of the car and it's gotten sunny. And that smell, I think, would be my, like, desert island smell if there was such a thing as desert island smells.

A (6:52)

I have a similar one. I'm from the Pacific Northwest in the US which, like, from Oregon, which is famously a very gray and rainy place. And one of my favorite smells that I wouldn't necessarily wear or, like, even make my house smell like, this, much like fish slime. I love, like, really wet pavement. And that's, like, a classic one where people will say, oh, it's nostalgic. But there's a difference between being like, I like this in theory, and the actual nasty smell of wet pavement that exists in Oregon. And, like, I like this. The latter. Like, I want it to smell dirty and horrible. And like, anybody who's listening to this will be like, if they're from Oregon or the Pacific Northwest in general, they'll be like, I know this very specific damp.

B (7:41)

Oh, I do think as humans, we're so much more attracted to ambivalence than we really ever accept about ourselves.

A (7:50)

Yeah, when I wear perfume, like, because I wear. Actually, I have, like, a pretty big perfume collection and clone collection, and when I wear it, people sometimes ask what my taste in scent is or in personal smell is. And, like, I always describe it as a sort of greenish brown smell and everything that fits within this.

B (8:13)

So, like, that's so evocative.

A (8:14)

Is it? Well, you know who else gets described as having a greenish brown smell? Which is weird, but because I like spices, I love vanilla, I like, like, a cardamom smell, but I also love, like, a really.

B (8:29)

Do you like Odwell by Dip?

A (8:31)

Yes. I wear well. I wear right now 10 Noir by Le Labo. And I have been wearing. I used to work for Aesop and, like, during my master's and PhD.

B (8:42)

You've had many lives.

A (8:43)

I have lived many lives. To be clear. I've worked every job that exists on the planet, but I used to work for Aesop, and one of my best friends still does, and so she gets me Aesop scents. And there's a Nuon above us Stiora that I'm obsessed with that I wear a lot. It's like a vanilla cumin, but also has this, like, green. It's so good.

B (9:04)

They have such great, like, aromatics.

A (9:06)

This is. We're so off track.

B (9:07)

Yeah. So, so sorry. This is what my life is like. People are like, oh, what do you work on? I work on smell. Oh. Continues to list every thought, thought, or feeling that they've ever smell. And we just spend hours talking about it.

A (9:21)

Yeah, this is better than when I say I work on Nazis. And people are like, oh, well, let's talk about my great grandfather's. The helmet that he brought back from the Second World War, that is. And I'm like, whoa.

B (9:35)

Can get quite deep quite quickly, actually, in both. Both Smell and Nazis can get quite quickly.

A (9:41)

You know, you won't get that anywhere else. Guys, everyone listening, this is the only space where that's gonna come up in a podcast for you. We should probably talk about the thing that's the point of the podcast.

B (9:55)

Yeah, I actually could definitely make a point about smell and Nazism in this novel. So we can bring it back somehow.

A (10:01)

Great. We'll circle back on that front. Before we talk about your guy, though, I have to make a little clarification for the people listening. We ran a poll for our subscribers a while ago, like, months ago, and I did not follow the results until now because I just kind of put it off. But the poll was asking what occasional one off format they might like us to do. And we offered a bunch of different things, including, like, some really psycho ones, like an ASMR episode, and they were like, don't do that.

B (10:30)

I would actually love that.

A (10:32)

I ended up doing that first. I did an ASMR Medieval battlefield episode before the one they actually asked me to do. Really? The overwhelming winner here was an episode on a fictional character.

B (10:44)

I'm just now processing the medieval battlefield asmr and how incongruous those two things are.

A (10:51)

Yeah, it was pretty off the wall, but people really liked it. And we ended up making a second. And we have a third on the way too. The second one was, you encounter a witch's sabbath in the forest.

B (11:03)

Amazing.

A (11:04)

And the third one is gonna be, you're being burned at the stake at a witch trial. In response to these three, I promise they're funny, though. They're funny. Anyways, because people chose fictional character, we've decided to do two fictional character episodes in honor of our birthday. We're doing three episodes for our birthday, but one of them is this. And the second fictional character one will come out next week. The idea here is that we're not just critiquing the character himself, which is a very easy thing in the case of who we're going to be talking about, but that we're critiquing both what they represent historically and also what they engender or enable in conjunction with their creation and how they're received. Now, and I said this before we started, but I want everyone listening to hear this. I've done 60 of these episodes so far. And even though I had read the book that this character is from more than once, rereading it for the purpose of this show was easily one of, if not the most upsetting preps I've done for this show. So you get, like, a really dubious honor of giving me the worst prep for an episode.

B (12:11)

I feel that I have slightly shared my trauma in this way because, like, so much of my work from my PhD was about these horrible, horrible men in literature. And I was constantly putting myself into periods of actual depression by reading these texts.

A (12:31)

Sure.

B (12:31)

Over and over again, to be able to analyze them. So, yeah, apologies.

A (12:35)

Well, I mean, we're trauma bonded in multiple ways now. Right. Like, there's this. And then, like, one of the ways that we sort of started talking and became friends, even though we had followed each other on Twitter, was through our shared experience of, like, harassment online. So we have. The constellation of shared trauma between us is actually, like, ever growing. Yeah. And, you know, we'll see what comes out of it. It's potential that we. Either the burden is shared or that we end up being a force multiplier for each in this space. So who knows? That being said, who are we talking about today?

B (13:13)

We are talking about Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of the 1955 novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, or Nabokov is the correct

A (13:23)

pronunciation, but you can say whatever.

B (13:25)

I have Anglicized it.

A (13:27)

Well, that's what everyone says. To be fair. Like I said before we started the show, I first came to this book as a sort of bright eyed, bushy tailed 19 to 20 year old in a Russian and Eastern European emigre literature class and then ended up taking a class on Nabokov. But I had never heard his name pronounced Nabokov until it was pronounced by an Eastern Europeanist. And then I was like, ah, yes, of course that's supposed to be said, but people speaking English say Nabokov for sure. Where did you first come to this book and meet this man? When did you meet this man?

B (14:09)

Thankfully, I've never actually met, but I read it for the first time when I was 17 and for no other reason than that I found the COVID intriguing. Just picked it up in a bookshop.

A (14:22)

Which cover does yours have? Just as a side note, because mine has a gross cover.

B (14:27)

Yeah, they pretty much all do. Which is exactly against the wishes of the author himself, who objectively proposed that there should be anything, anything other than a picture of a little girl, including like nice sunset and all sorts of things that also would have not really fit the theme particularly well. My cover had a picture of a garden and you could just make out two legs of a girl lying on the grass.

A (14:59)

Oh, you guys can't see this, but mine is close up of a girl's mouth. Yeah, don't like that.

B (15:05)

It's better than the, the. I think the image that has come to epitomize the novel, which is Su Leon from the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation of the novel. Like licking a heart shaped lollipop. Yeah, I think that's maybe the worst one.

A (15:21)

Maybe. Let's talk about the book itself. Let's talk about the person. How would you describe or sum up Humbert Humbert? Part of me wants to say Humbert Humbert as though it's French and it's not. It's Humbert which is worse. How would you describe him as a character?

B (15:38)

He is a manipulative and delusional pedophile.

A (15:43)

Yes.

B (15:44)

Who attempts to convince his audience that he is actually a kind of aesthete.

A (15:51)

Yeah. And I'm glad that you used the word pedophile straight off the top here because I think the avoidance of identifying that as the problem here has bled out into reception of the book where people are sort of like, he has this doomed, passionate love affair with literally a child and it's Sort of like. No, the point here is that he's a pedophile. Like, that is actually what's at heart here. It's not about the, like, you know, depravity necessarily of passion as a general concept. Right, yeah. And he's kind of the epitome of the unreliable narrator in the book. Right. Like, it's really striking when you read the book because it starts up from the perspective of a psychiatrist or a therapist who's like writing a preface to this sort of diary memoir thing being written by Humbert Humbert. And the whole rest of the book is Humbert Humbert explaining why he. And everything I'm saying is in quotations, but why he sort of falls in love with this. I think she's what, 12, 13 in the.

B (17:09)

12 at the beginning.

A (17:10)

Yeah, yeah, important detail here. He's justifying all of these feelings that he has throughout the book and he's also justifying his behavior. So, like, you're not supposed to be reading this and perhaps there's no way to say one is supposed to read something in a certain way, but I'll say you're not supposed to be reading this. As though he's like, the things he's saying are reasonable and understandable, I think.

B (17:33)

Well, yeah, I mean, there is a fair amount of evidence in the text itself that suggests that none of this is fair, reasonable or even true, in fact. So maybe I should like gloss the plot of Lolita, please. So Humbert Humbert, which is a pseudonym, this is not his actual name, moves to New England in the late 1940s. And the account of events that constitutes most of the novel details his erotic obsession and victimization of the daughter of his landlady, 12 year old Dolores Hayes. That's the victim, not the landlady. Over the course of the novel, he marries Dolores mother to become her stepfather, kidnaps her and holds her hostage whilst traveling across America, and repeatedly sexually assaults and rapes her. In the novel, as we've kind of just discussed, the account of events is framed as a kind of memoir and testimony for a recently deceased man who was awaiting trial for an unspecified crime, also named Claire.

A (18:44)

Could I just say shout out to all the Claires. We only encounter bad Claire's in this show.

B (18:51)

Oh yeah, there is definitely a bad Clare in this book, I'm afraid. And he addresses us, the readers, as the ladies and gentlemen of the jury. So the idea is that we as readers are tasked with sort of deciding whether he's guilty even though he's dead.

A (19:09)

And the thing we're deciding whether he's. Oh, well, maybe we're. Maybe I'm giving something. No spoilers for Lolita. This has been out for a long

B (19:16)

time, actually, hold on.

A (19:17)

I'm gonna say maybe I'm giving something away here. But we're deciding whether he's guilty of being a pedophile and committing a series of sexual assaults against a child, but of murdering the Claire character in the book, which I think is fascinating, because even this, it's not about, like, it's pretty stark that he definitely did this other bad thing, but it's. Did. Is he guilty?

B (19:41)

And he admits to it.

A (19:42)

Yeah, repeatedly.

B (19:43)

In excruciating and practically, like, parodic detail.

A (19:47)

Yeah. And he also kind of near the end, right. He says, well, I should be convicted of rape and child rape. I should not be convicted of murder. Like, he knows that what's happening here is bad. Like, that he's not supposed to be doing. And that's part of the whole thing. Because this is also the erotic thrill of I'm not supposed to be doing. It's thinking about this feels. I cannot believe you spent so much of your life thinking about this book. Yeah. A strong woman. Stronger than me.

B (20:19)

I mean, his attempts to legitimize and exonerate himself. This is something that. The thing, maybe that I find most interesting about this novel is that there are so many layers. So even in his attempts to legitimize and exonerate himself, he includes these moments of moral clarity where we seem to hear Dolores voice. Or he condemns himself. And even in these moments where it seems like he understands that what he's doing is foul and evil, he does so in a way that manipulates the reader even further. So, yeah. I mean, the reason that I've spent so long on this novel is obviously not because I like reading his content. It's because the novel itself is an absolute masterpiece in what it means for us as readers to enjoy fiction, because it requires complicity in us, and it requires kind of speculation and introspection in its readers. Otherwise, you end up in a situation which obviously has been the case because it's had many readers that weren't critical, where Lolita, this, like, construct, becomes mythologized and somehow becomes this attractive thing that people want to emulate.

A (21:43)

Yeah. Either they want to emulate the child character. So Dolores Hayes is called Lolita in the book. Like, that's the nickname that Humbert Humbert has for her. Also calls her, like, low throughout the book.

B (21:59)

And Dolly and Lola.

A (22:01)

Yeah. Is all Kinds of little horrifying nicknames for her. But it's really interesting because some people want to emulate her, but other people are wanting to emulate the. Not necessarily him, but the sort of, like, voyeuristic gaze that he has on the young woman. And I mean, there's no. I don't wanna be like, you know, this is the Epstein moment or whatever. But, like, people are. I think there's a moment right now we're having culturally where we're reckoning with the, like, what's going on with the way that we think about and look at young people and particularly young women and girls. And it's just very strange that on the one hand, there's this reckoning and there are also people like, God, what a beautiful love story Lolita is. You know, like, this book really makes you feel yourself, feel your way into that in a way that I think is fascinating. And it is also baffling to me that people, not that they've learned the wrong lessons necessarily, but that they've basically taken this utterly unreliable narrator, who is set out to be that way, is portrayed in the book as incredibly deceptive and delusional and manipulative. They've read that and been like, you know, but he's right about children.

B (23:16)

Yeah. I mean, yes, I'm afraid you've missed the point.

A (23:26)

Hello, everybody, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're currently listening to the free version of our show. Because we're trying to make accessible, engaging history independently and sustainably. We switch off between free weeks and Patreon weeks. So if you're a fan of public history made by actual experts and it's in the budget for you, consider supporting our Patreon. It's only one tier, which means everyone who subscribes gets access to the same perks across the board. For the price of a pint of beer, you'll get access to a new episode every week instead of just the bi weekly free ones. And they'll all be ad free for you. You'll also get access to the full episode archive, bonus content, early access to merch, and lots of other fun Patreon exclusives to sweeten the deal, just head over to patreon.com this guy sucked. Or follow the link in our episode description to sign up.

B (24:13)

It is concerning and it's kind of through and through. Like, you can see it in the worst cases in people like Dorothy Parker, who is a kind of famous critic of the novel, who suggested that Dolores, the 12 year old girl had in fact seduced Humbert. Humbert who was just a weak willed person and hopeless to her advances. And that's like, you know, the kind of worst end. But it kind of creeps into other ways in which this novel is talked about. Even in critics referring to Dolores as Lolita or any of the other nicknames. I always find it very strange when people refer to her as anything other than the actual name.

A (24:55)

Yeah.

B (24:56)

And instead opt to refer to one of the. Of Humbert Humbert's nicknames for her.

A (25:01)

There's also a level of agency that's implied when you talk about seduction, right. Where you're like, oh, this 12 year old seduced this adult man. I find that very fascinating from a sort of psychoanalytic standpoint in that, like part of the adult child relationship, like the juncture between these two things or this rupture moment is sure, like children feel sexual or erotic urges towards adults. Sure, we understand this. The juncture here is that adults have a level of agency and a level of cultural power where they are supposed to know that that erotic feeling can only go in one direction. Like that's what growth and adulthood is. And so it is baffling to me that so many people read this book, Parker being an example, read this book and are like, no, it can go the opposite direction too. Cause that is the moment of adulthood.

B (26:11)

Yeah. I mean, but that is exactly what Humbert is trying to convince you of. And by agreeing with him, you have fallen into his trap. You know, he has won.

A (26:23)

And it's also interesting that you bring up her name because you're right, like people do still call her Lolita, but like, that's not her name. That's the name this pedophile, not the pedophile author, but the author of this memoir within the world of this, who is a pedophile is giving her. And I think that says a lot about. I don't want to always like extrapolate to like, this is broader culture, whatever, but this does say something about how we view victims of assault or survivors of assault. I don't know, what are your thoughts on this?

B (26:59)

No, I mean, I agree. My way into this conversation is funnily enough, if you know my work, it's through smell. And what I suggest, I mean, maybe we need a little preface for this in the sense that something that is very important in the way that Humbert Humbert attempts to legitimize his own actions, is that he creates what is essentially a kind of race or species. I'm still not 100% sure which is the correct way. I kind of err towards species because little known fact about Nabokov is that he studied butterflies. He was a butterfly scientist, I was gonna say.

A (27:41)

Are you talking about the butterfly thing?

B (27:42)

Yes. But I also feel quite compelled by the notion of race, especially given the cont of the time, because of his kind of relationship with Judaism and his wife was a Jew. And anyway, this is a very complicated discussion to get into. Just to preface what I was going to say, things where you think, why have I opened this can of worms

A (28:09)

anyway, this can of butterfly larva. What do they start?

B (28:12)

Butterfly larva? Caterpillars.

A (28:16)

Caterpillars. Oh yeah, famously caterpillars. Which is much cuter.

B (28:19)

Yeah, that's actually quite sweet. Anyway, so he constructs this species or race of children, girls called nymphets. It was coined by Nabokov and has taken on many after lives. But Humbert Humbert defines these girl children as between the ages of 9 and 14. And he explicitly says that they're not fully human. They're kind of demonic.

A (28:47)

I was at 12, to be clear.

B (28:50)

Yeah. I think we're all a little demonic at the age of 12.

A (28:54)

Yeah.

B (28:54)

But by calling Dolores Lolita, it's feeding into this kind of mythologizing of the nymphet as this category of beings that don't need to be treated as you would treat a normal human child.

A (29:12)

Yeah. And he's obsessed with this sort of crystalline version. Right. Like that you live in this moment, a nymph that exists in this perfect sort of like pure moment of their life. They're at all moments also in danger of being corrupted in some way or of aging out, or someone is not quite in the moment of being an infest. So it is. He creates this like both its own age. But he also says some. You could ask an adult man. I'm not gonna quote this exactly, but he says you could ask an adult man to look at a photo of girls and Girl Scouts and choose which of them is the comeliest. And they most will not choose the nymphet. So he's saying not all girls at this age are nymphets. That's almost a direct quote, actually. So if someone can find this. Because I remember him using girls and Girl Scouts and comeliest amongst it. But he says that like, not all children are this. There's this special kind of child that he in particular is able to identify.

B (30:11)

Yes. And his broad aim with his work is to fix once and for all the perilous Magic of nymphets. So the idea is that he's trying to record in his writing the way that these nymphets are and affect people because of these very specific temporal parameters and the kind of rarity of these specific kinds of girls, which mean that they can only ever be experienced for a short amount of time. The nymphet is inherently ephemeral.

A (30:47)

Yeah. And to fit with your. I almost said your whole smell thing. Yeah, your whole smell thing. Because we talked about this a little bit before this, the episode. But, like, he even says that there's sort of a particular smell associated with the nymphet. With nymphatry. Like, with. With. He talks about.

B (31:07)

Indeed.

A (31:08)

There's one passage that I am very struck by because part of this is that he is supposed to be kind of lovers with Dolores mother, the landlady, but he's actually doing that so that he can get close to her daughter. And he, like, contrasts the mother's, what he calls sterile smell with Dolores's. I think he says brown smell in this context, much like myself, unfortunately, you know, because I said I was like, a green brown.

B (31:34)

Yeah.

A (31:35)

Also in order to sort of say that the nymphet, the child is like. And this is just my reading, but it's closer to, like, the natural is more like. There's a sort of, like, earthy thing that he's always talking about. He always says, not that she smells bad, but she smells like she needs a bath. And she's like.

B (31:52)

Yeah. So the first thing that's worth mentioning is that Nabokov says that all of the kind of named nymphet characters throughout the novel smell exactly like one another.

A (32:04)

Oh.

B (32:04)

And then he goes on to describe how they absolutely don't just like quintessential Humbert Humbert trickery, where he's like, this thing is true, and then goes on to say completely the opposite thing 14 times over for the rest of the novel.

A (32:21)

Yeah.

B (32:21)

So they are described as having this odor that's like orchards in nymphet land. And it's this kind of transcendent, very difficult to actually imagine smell. But then Dolores has this specific, intoxicating brown odor, which is like. Brown is a. Is a very ambivalent, complicated term. It kind of conjures both, like, chocolate and soil and maybe biscuits or something, and also, like, feces and decay. And there's something interesting going on with Dolores. And, yes, he is constantly talking about how he wants her to wash her hair or wishes that she would bathe. And I think there's something Slightly like fascist about this in the sense that I think Michelle Sayre says that fascists are motivated by a kind of hygiene impulse.

A (33:17)

I mean, I've talked about this before as fascism being the desire for an annihilation of difference. So, like, the idea that one can just cleanse oneself of their difference, of the thing that separates them is also, I think, kind of fascinating.

B (33:33)

And then this all leads back to this original nymphet character called Annabelle Annabel Lee, which is taken from an Edgar Allan Poe, which is done specifically because Edgar Allan Poe married a 13 year old bride when he was 27.

A (33:48)

Get him on the podcast. Making a note. One second. Poe, child bride.

B (33:54)

Okay. Similarly, the Orchard's in nymphet land. And he also describes Dolores Hair as like a breeze from Wonderland. He's constantly talking about Lewis Carroll. Yeah. And Alice in Wonderland, which is another kind of famous figure who had very concerning relationships with young girls.

A (34:12)

Yeah.

B (34:13)

So he's constantly drawing on this kind of legacy of intellectual figures, writers, artists, who have at one point or another groomed children, and is kind of situating himself within this legacy to paint the picture that actually this is a kind of aesthetic connoisseurship that only a certain genius kind of man can access and understand. But what the smell of the nymphets also functions as doing to bring it back to the way that we think about victims is it draws on this kind of romantic mode of understanding smell as something that is intense and difficult to resist or potentially even impossible to resist and kind of motivating and unconscious. It's kind of like the olfactory version of like, she asked for it, basically saying, like, she is giving me these smell vibes and I am powerless to resist. What can I do?

A (35:23)

Yeah, this is what we were talking

B (35:24)

about earlier and it was like, in my actual critical work, I would not say smell vibes, but because I'm on a podcast, it smell vibes.

A (35:32)

Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is, right, like, when you engage critically with these things, you have to be like, well, this is this olfactory pull that he's experiencing, this desire, blah, blah, blah. And we're also like, well, he's horny for her smell, which is kind of a. Like, that's. And he's feeling these impulses based on that. And he also says there are so many other things about her that he's sort of powerless to resist, which is, I think, fascinating in terms of the reception here with the idea that other people have had where they say, well, she kind of seduced him and there's actually this other stuff going on because, like, at every juncture in the story, he. He makes it clear that, like, she does something and he uses his agency to do something infinitely worse. Like, she has her legs near him on the couch, so he assaults her, like, that kind of thing. And it is intensely disturbing to me to hear that often the cultural reception is like, well, she had her legs near him, and he's just like a disgusting, creepy man. Like, what was he to do? We don't like him. But also, she did

B (36:45)

exist.

A (36:46)

Yeah. It's really appalling.

B (36:47)

There's never anything that could ever justify anything that happens.

A (36:51)

No.

B (36:52)

And he's constantly telling on himself as well. You know, he's saying things like, oh, well, she's weaving spells and enchantments. And then a few pages later, he's like, oh, but she remains completely unconscious of her power.

A (37:04)

Yeah.

B (37:04)

It's like, okay, well, is she weaving the spells and enchantments, or is she completely unaware of all of this Delulu stuff that's happening in your head?

A (37:12)

Yeah. And in some cases, literally unconscious. Right. Like, in some cases, it's not even that she's figuratively unconscious. Sometimes she is literally unconscious while somehow still weaving these spells about him. You know, like, that. To me, I get sort of, like, accused of being like, this woke scold sometimes. And it's like, okay, fine. But also, none of this is directed at Nabokov. I have no problem. He even says in the epilogue to the book, you should not take a moral lesson from Humbert Humbert in this book. Like, he says that. So it's not that. It's that the character has taken on this life and the view of the character has taken on this life that we have then allowed to basically, like, become reproduced. We've allowed the character of Lolita to become detached from the novel. We've allowed his view to be reproduced over and over again with the novel as justification for it. Which means that people are probably not reading this. Right. Or willfully.

B (38:13)

Exactly. I think that might actually be the problem. Because when ever anyone says, oh, that they don't want to read it or that they have read it and felt like Nabokov was somehow condoning what was going on, my feeling is, okay, but did you read it carefully? Because, yes, you know, we were talking about the drugging scene. So there's this scene in which Humbert Humbert drugs Dolores in order to sexually assault her, and he is literally drugging her whilst trying to convince the reader that the real drug is the smell of her hair.

A (38:52)

Oh, yeah. I didn't even think about that part, actually.

B (38:55)

In fact, it's a breeze from wonderland that's affecting my thoughts and making me do these things that I can't control. But it's very clear that Humbert is an organized and calculated stylist who is very carefully putting into place the necessary measures to keep Dolores lockdown and immobile.

A (39:15)

Yeah.

B (39:16)

So I think maybe I'm convinced by the debates about fiction and morality that go on that are more like, what does it mean for us as readers to choose to read this book? You know, given that we tend to read things for pleasure, even though a lot of literary critics completely ignore that fact and pretend that we don't. We do, in fact, read things because we want to receive pleasure. Pleasure from them. And what this book offers is an aesthetic experience, despite the things that it is describing being morally degenerate.

A (39:53)

Yeah.

B (39:53)

And I think, you know, that conversation is a lot more convincing to me than the conversation about Nabokov being a scoundrel because he wrote about scandalous things.

A (40:04)

Yeah. I mean, like, it is a beautifully written book. I remember specifically the final essay I wrote for the class. My, like, Nabokov class, which was on reading Lolita as the great American novel. Like, I remember writing an essay because it has all the hallmarks of, like, the. What people were considering the great American novel because it struck me so. And because I. I so badly wanted to talk about Lolita without talking about the pedophile stuff. And I was like, how do I do that? Let's talk about it as this, like, American experience. Yeah, but it is, like, baffling that there is an idea that one should only read things that one agrees with when instead, it's like, perhaps something one disagrees with is beautifully written. And maybe that's the point, actually. Or part of the point. And instead it's kind of like, part of the point is that you're, I think, not supposed to like Humbert Humbert that much, but you can. You're supposed to be drawn in by his. By his prose, by the. His thinking, whatever. Like, by the aesthetic experience. Experience of it. I find it, like, strange to be like, well, the writer must be immoral, then, in order to have written this. When. I don't think that's.

B (41:16)

And people will go to great lengths to make this argument as well. You know, they'll dig up a poem from 25 years ago that also had a kind of young girl in a sexual role in it and say, oh, well, this shows that he has Been perturbed by these thoughts for a long time. And it's like, well maybe he's actually just been interested in understanding like censorship and these ideas that because he, you know, across his oeuvre, he's interested in writing about things that really push the boundaries of what is acceptable reading.

A (41:50)

Yeah.

B (41:50)

You know, in ADA it's about incest. So in general I steer away from that kind of like biographical over criticism is what I think of it as. I'm like, do we need to go that far when the novel itself is giving us everything that we need to make informed judgments about the characters and scenarios in this work?

A (42:13)

Yeah. When the novel itself gives us so much to work with and we're certainly not done understanding the novel. Yeah, we haven't done enough of that in order to reach beyond it and be like, well let's make sure that we're now also implicating the writer. Like not in the sense that like we shouldn't be talking about the writer, but it is interesting to be like, well, we're done with the novel, we've decided it's bad, therefore the author must be bad too. When I think in reality we're very much not done with understanding and obviously

B (42:46)

like he doesn't help matters because he does not like explicitly condemn Robert Humbert at any point. I mean he describes him in interviews in various negative ways, but he doesn't in the novel at any point kind of give you guidance as to how to read. But he does reveal various things about Humbert Humbert that allow you to draw your own conclusions.

A (43:09)

Yeah, I mean I do feel like it's really hard to read this and come out not disliking him. So I'm pretty confused.

B (43:15)

I feel that way. I feel that way too. But you know, sometimes people can't be trusted.

A (43:24)

Yeah. One of the things I wanted to make sure to talk about in this is the framing of the novel and we've touched on it. But I'm really genuinely curious about your thoughts here. The framing of the novel outside of the novel itself as this sort of like love story or this forbidden romance thing a la like Romeo and Juliet where they're like two star crossed lovers who can't be together. Particularly because Dolores in the story we do not have her perspective. And we're supposed to be reading this, not we are supposed to be reading this. But if you take the love story thing on its face, you would be reading this book as though this is a mutual experience. What are your thoughts on that framing?

B (44:12)

I mean, it's incredibly clear that very, very little of what they do together is consensual. And that even belies the point that a 12 year old can't consent to engage in sexual acts with a grown man.

A (44:29)

Yeah.

B (44:30)

So pretty straightforwardly, it is objectively not a romance novel. It was for a while kind of categorized as erotic literature in the sense that people felt that it had, you know, perverse sexual themes. There is no explicit sex in the novel. There are moments where Humbert Humbert admits that he has done something, but there is never any actual descriptions of what's going on as they happen. So to frame it as erotic literature, I think is silly. Yeah. And it's actually harmful.

A (45:12)

Say more. I mean, what are the harms, you think, from framing this as erotic literature?

B (45:17)

I mean, essentially, essentially what Lolita is about is a sacrificial form of violence.

A (45:26)

Yeah.

B (45:27)

For the, like, hedonic pleasure of an abuser. And okay, so some. That means that some hedonic pleasure is happening through these described sexual acts, but that does not make those sexual acts any less horrifying for any informed reader. It wouldn't be any different. Ultimately. It wouldn't actually be any different if Dolores was totally in for the ride and was actually enjoying any of this. But as it stands in the novel, it's very, very clear that this girl is traumatized and not able to say no.

A (46:09)

Yeah.

B (46:10)

And does not want to be involved in any of this.

A (46:15)

Yeah. He does very much kidnap her and drive her around the country after lying to her about her dead mother.

B (46:22)

Yeah.

A (46:23)

Like, that is pretty key plot point that's happening here. So it's hard to read that and think like, well, the power dynamic here must be equally shared amongst the two of them.

B (46:35)

You know, I mean, it's actually just absurd. Like it feels like, I mean, okay, so I appreciate that we're living in a political moment at the moment where it's like, oh, I feel slight nostalgia for when we could just say this is pedophilia. And that is objectively wrong.

A (46:53)

Sure.

B (46:53)

It feels like slightly absurd that we have to even engage in a discussion about whether this should be seen as erotic consensual content. Of course it's not. Of course.

A (47:04)

Obviously not. But I mean, you're right, we are in a moment where people are. When you have this conversation, they're like, well, no, it's actually a fibophilia, which is teenagers. That's a different thing. You know, like there's this thing where people are like, well, we have to parse this out into these different ways. And we have to understand how a 12 year old might feel these feelings. And it's like, okay, sure, I guess if you really, really, really want to have this conversation, you can. It doesn't fit this book, though. Like, that's actually not what's happening in this novel. Yeah, there's a very clear power imbalance happening here. And the fact that this even has to be identified is insane. That this is like. It is absurd. You're right. This is an absurd thing that we're having a conversation about. And I feel like part of why I was so disgusted rereading this was we're in this moment where pedophilia is thinking about it, at least for me, is making me like think back to my youth and what it was like being a 12 year old, for example, a 12 year old young girl in the early 2000s. Like I was 12 in 2006. And that was also the moment of things like America's Next Top Model, which was constantly playing on everyone needing to look young and skinny and basically undeveloped. And the culture back then was incredibly pedophilic. Like incredibly. Where like, if you had one wrinkle that was bad. And we're now in a moment where like 25 year olds are getting botox because they don't want to look old. And like, it's like this thing where in my head it's like if I think too much, I'm like beset by this like feeling of deep dread and doom. And like reading this, I always like felt sad for young me who was at one point a 12 year old girl. Does that make sense? Am I being crazy?

B (48:55)

Yeah, it does. And in some ways I sort of feel like the antidote. This is a crazy thing to say, but just go with me.

A (49:05)

I'm following.

B (49:05)

The antidote to this kind of thinking is reading Humbert Humbert talking about women because he is so misogynistic and that misogyny is so based around age. Yeah, he talks about women his age, you know, his appropriate sexual mates, as smelling like the plague, as being sterile and disgusting and foul. And I mean, at some point he describes Dolores, I think at the age of 13, maybe just 14, as developing a wenchy smell.

A (49:43)

Oh, what do you mean? What does a wench smell like? Well, indeed. Great question. Look, people have been thinking about this,

B (49:55)

but like, she can't be a wench, she's 13. Yeah, get a hold of yourself.

A (50:01)

Yeah, this is what we're talking about. This aging out of being a nymph at this Thing where you're like, all of a sudden, the womanly smell has. She's been overcome with the wenchy smell.

B (50:11)

With the wenchy smell. And when I read things like that, it instills this spiteful energy in me that makes me think I'm gonna age because I hate you.

A (50:23)

You know what's so funny is I knew that by the end of this episode we would pull this out of you. Like, I. I knew that. I was like, okay, we're gonna start off being like, everyone loves Ali because she's so nice online and she's so sweet. And by the end, because this is what this show is for, by the end you'll be like, I am filled with spite.

B (50:44)

And I mean, you have to. You have to be. You have to hate some people and what they stand for. Unfortunately, it's easier when they're fictional.

A (50:55)

Sure, Yeah. I mean, and this is a particularly hateable person, I think. But you're right here. Like that. The way that we cope with this is by understanding that, like, this is just a person who hates women. Like, this is not just. Not only a person who hates women, but he hates women.

B (51:12)

Yeah.

A (51:13)

And that's either the Loving children is creating that or that is creating the loving children, but in either direction, it's important to understand that as a particular aspect of his character.

B (51:27)

Yeah.

A (51:28)

And how someone could read this and be like, I missed the days of being a young girl who's constantly being set upon by freaks. Like, you know, like. Like.

B (51:41)

Yeah.

A (51:41)

No, I don't get it. I get it, but I don't get it. This whole episode is me saying I understand something, but I also don't understand it. At the same time, I'm here with my usual quick shout out to tell you about other multitude shows I think you'll like. If you're enjoying this guy section this week, I want to tell you about wow if Tru. Wow. If True is an Internet culture show explaining how what's happening online shapes the real world and tech culture. Journalist Amanda Silberling and science fiction author slash attorney Isabel Kim are the right Internet experts and real life besties to help us all understand what the hell is going on. If you haven't listened to our episode on inshittification and the suckitude of the Internet, I can confirm that wow. If True is a very fun to be a guest on and b will take you on some unexpected journeys as a listener. More importantly, they're the only show that will explain both neopets and horizontal mergers in the same Episode. So go check out. Wow. If true, wherever on the Internet you find your podcasts, like literally the app you're using right now, new episodes drop every other Wednesday.

B (52:51)

It does not help that a lot of the ways that. That this novel has found its way into popular culture are so heavily romanticized and divorced from the novel in every way. You know, we're talking Katy Perry saying that she religiously studied Lolita for her first album, or lan Del Rey consistently talking about Lolita in so many of her songs and using it as a kind of fashion or like, style as well. And so these things, they inevitably become kind of blended with the way that we understand the character. And so I see what you mean in the sense that, like, you can see how people arrive at this completely warped sense of what the character is or was, it has to be understood as completely separate from the character in the novel.

A (53:51)

Yeah, totally.

B (53:52)

And the things that happen to her.

A (53:54)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there were lots of other things I've been thinking about, but I think it's important that you mentioned that she's often aged up in representations of her. Like, Sue Lyon is 14 when she plays her engine, 15 when it's released.

B (54:08)

These movies were a mistake. They are a disaster. And it may be one of the only novels ever written that actually cannot. It cannot from a philosophical standpoint, be turned into a film. It completely dissolves the point of the narrative, which is to solipsize Dolores to make her unreal.

A (54:32)

Yeah.

B (54:33)

The point of the novel is to draw attention to the fact that you might be being convinced of this fact. But the point of Humbert Humbert's account anyway, is to convince you that what he did was not illegitimate or wrong. And that does not, cannot ever be conveyed in the form of a movie.

A (54:56)

Yeah.

B (54:57)

And that's why Nabokov didn't want a child on the COVID of his book. You can't visualize these things because it makes them real.

A (55:07)

Yeah, absolutely. And this repeated choice to age the. Not age the character up, but have the actress playing the character as an aged up. Who. How old is dolores in the 1997 version? Let's see. I do not know, actually 17 when they make it. So she's 17. Sue Lyon, that's Dominique Swain. Sue Lyon is 14 and then 15 while filming it. So beyond this, it's so known that it will create such a visceral disgust in the viewer that they're like, we can't have an actual 12 year old because a 12 year old looks vastly different from a 17 year old looks vastly different from a 15 year old. A 12 year old is a child. Like a child child. Not like they're all children, but like we're talking like child in some cases, still kind of prepubescent. They're like, well, we can't do that to a real 12 year old. Which to me says the ethical framework is bad here to begin with for making this into a film.

B (56:11)

Yeah, I mean, essentially they had to. And they marketed it thus. Had to make it into a kind of inappropriate romance story.

A (56:24)

Yeah.

B (56:24)

Which is not what the book is about.

A (56:26)

No, very much not. Because there's no way to be clear in a film that this is all being viewed through the eyes of Humbert Humbert. Like, unless you somehow made like a POV film where there's someone whispering in your head, like his thoughts saying, you know, like, here's Dolores.

B (56:47)

At which point, just read the novel.

A (56:51)

The solution here is to read. Well, actually we're coming to a conclusion, you know, that we've come to at several points in other episodes, which is that one of the main problems here is that people can't read. The real villain in all of this is always illiteracy, unfortunately. So I don't know. I mean, I don't have like a good. Well, maybe this is a good place to end on. But I've been also thinking about how this writing gets replicated and his thinking, Humbert Humbert's thinking gets replicated in the space of not romance novels, but, like, so I'm interested in weird stuff. Like, in the sense that, like, because I study Nazis and I am. I'm not squeamish because of what I research. I'm very curious. I read all kinds of weird shit all the time. Like, I'm reading the weirdest posts that are online.

B (57:42)

Are we going to talk about dark romance?

A (57:44)

Is that what sounds in those things? I'm not reading them because I enjoy them, but because I'm fascinated by them. Yeah, I understand, like, in the sense that, like, I'm curious about, like, what is going on in people's brains when they're thinking all these weird things. And I'm like, okay, let's go on Kindle Unlimited and see what kind of stuff people are up to in these spaces.

B (58:03)

And people are doing all sorts of stuff.

A (58:06)

All sorts of stuff. But some of the nasty ways, as in, like, physically repulsive ways that Humbert Humbert is describing Dolores and also himself and his, like, things, like his genitalia to me was like, this is like how these Dark romance people are writing about. I don't know. Is that something. Is there something there? I don't know. But I read one of the things and I was like, he calls. I'm sorry to everyone who has to hear this. He calls his penis a scepter of passion.

B (58:40)

At some point it's just self aggrandizement. I mean, he does. He kind of flip flops between thinking that he is the be all and end all and then also he thinking he's an absolute worm.

A (58:53)

Yeah.

B (58:54)

All of it is manipulation. Yeah.

A (58:57)

There's also. Okay, the final plot point that we didn't talk about is that he kills a fellow pedophile.

B (59:02)

Yeah.

A (59:02)

For kidnapping Dolores away from him while he is in the process of also kidnapping her. Yeah. And he. So he kills the guy for that because he's like, ah, well, he's a different and worse kind of pedophile than me.

B (59:16)

Which is not true at all.

A (59:18)

It's insane. It made me feel crazy.

B (59:20)

They are so similar.

A (59:22)

Yeah. And that's. Right, that's supposed to be part of the point that you're like, this guy is so, so self deluded too that he can't even see that he's.

B (59:29)

Exactly. And in this scene where he merges Claire Quilty, there's this like really weird like doppelganger effect going on where it becomes quite difficult to realize who is who anymore and differentiate them. And that is kind of part of the technique that Nabokov is employing to show you that actually they're just like one in the same.

A (59:50)

Yeah. That it actually does not matter where on the spectrum of pedophiles one falls. That really being under the umbrella is what matters here, unfortunately.

B (60:01)

But realistically, like Claire Quilty did not in the end do the things that he did to Dolores. Like what he did to Dolores was so much worse in the sense that it was calculated. And to be fair, Claire Quilty was also calculated. And it turns out that he had been, you know, following her for a long time and trying to get her to star in pornography and stuff.

A (60:22)

Yeah.

B (60:22)

Anyway, they are very much doing the same thing. Yeah, very much doing the same thing. But he doesn't have a moral leg to stand on when it comes to criticizing him. He definitely is no more of a pedophile. This is, you know, when you talk about this novel and the things that you say becomes slightly ridiculous.

A (60:44)

Yeah. I mean, it is like we're here

B (60:45)

parsing more or less of a pedophile.

A (60:47)

We're out here parsing the varying degrees to which one can be a pedophile. It's baffling. Like, there's a reason this novel has the sticking power that it does. Right. There's a reason because it's so fascinating. The issue is that your and my reason for being interested in it is not always the reason that others share for an interest in it. Or we're identifying not with Humbert Humbert or with his mythologized sexy little girl, but with, like, the little girl who is abused in this way. Like, we're identifying with, like, the child who is, like, subjected to all these things and then basically gets her name stripped away from her. Has no perspective in the book. That's what we're identifying with. It is very worrisome to me that there are people who are reading this and identifying with either him or with the mythologized version of her that he's imagined. And they've taken that as, like, a character that one would want to emulate, which is, like, deeply sad to me. I don't know. I don't know where a good moment to end this is, because it's like a. It's one of those, like, we can't tie this up in a box and then, like, click out of our conversation and then open the news, which is like 1 million more Epstein emails have been released.

B (62:03)

Yeah. It's hideous. You know, it is hideous.

A (62:07)

Yeah.

B (62:07)

And I think the thing is that most people are. Are not Vladimir Nabokov. They do not have the way with words that Vladimir Nabokov has. This is like a concerted, lengthy attempt to legitimize paedophilia with. And he's throwing everything he's got at it. Right. As one of the best writers in the English language, he's trying his darndest to convince you that this is actually a normal and perfectly sane thing to do. And he completely fails if you read the novel properly. So what we can take away from that is that paedophilia is wrong. You heard it here first, kids.

A (62:49)

And I'm always saying that, to be clear, just in case anyone wanted to know, both mine and Ali's and the show. Probably our publisher's view on pedophiles, it's that they're bad and they shouldn't do that.

B (63:03)

Horrible people. Yeah.

A (63:04)

I feel comfortable, confident, speaking for anyone who I've ever been employed by in saying that pedophilia is bad.

B (63:13)

Yeah. But it is terrifying that we are now at a point in society where it's, like, not always clear that everyone agrees.

A (63:23)

Yeah. That we do need to underline this one. We need to underscore that we have a pretty strong moral boundary here. And we thought that that was shared by most people and it turns out it's not always shared by many people, in which case maybe we reassert it. I did not need to be convinced by you whether Humbert Humbert sucked because as soon as you said you wanted to do him, I was like, excellent.

B (63:47)

Of course. Please spend an hour bitching about him.

A (63:51)

Yeah, let's spend an hour with him. Great. Thank you so much for this. I really appreciate it. This has one of the more manic energies of any of the episodes we've done, so I hope people enjoy that. And part of that is my.

B (64:04)

My fault. I'm so sorry.

A (64:06)

No, but it's all. Part of it is our pre existing relationship. That's part of this. But also there's no. This is a real, like, if you don't laugh, you'll cry situation where you're like, there's no other way to do this other than to turn into, you know, in It's Always Sunny, the like, Pepe Silvia meme where he's like, in front of the blackboard with all the red lines and he looks crazy, like, that's us. Like that's the only way to approach this. Otherwise you will just fall into a deep depression, unfortunately. Where can people. This is a stupid question for me to ask you because everyone knows already. Where can people find you online?

B (64:46)

I am, I think, Dr. Ali Lukes everywhere on all the platforms that I'm on, which is, I guess, Twitter, slash X, whatever you want to call it. Instagram, Blue Sky, TikTok.

A (65:02)

Great. We'll link all your stuff below. Is there anything else you want people to buy or do? I mean, your book's not out till next year.

B (65:12)

Going to be shelling help.

A (65:14)

This is.

B (65:15)

Like I said earlier, I will not be selling a meme coin. But this gives me my opportunity just in case I want to change my mind. Yeah, the book isn't ready yet.

A (65:24)

Well, then when it is, we'll put it on our bookshop storefront thing for you. Thank you so much. I'm so sorry that I just made you spend an hour of your life, another hour of your life thinking about this.

B (65:37)

I knew. I mean, it was inevitably going to descend, I think into chaos, given that everything going on in the world at the moment is making us question our perfectly normal and legitimate readings of this novel.

A (65:49)

Yeah. If you think too hard about it, it's like you start hearing the like sound and you're like. You're like your tunnel vision it. Well, I'm working on it. Thank you so much.

B (66:01)

This is why you do ASMR content now.

A (66:04)

Actually, the funny part about that is that Misha Stanton, we love them. Was the one who audio designed the out of that ASMR episode. But I was like, I should be doing more sound effects. My boyfriend recently taught me how to do a good explosion sound. So do you want to hear it?

B (66:19)

Do you get to hear it? Yeah.

A (66:20)

Okay. Julia, you can edit this out if it's bad.

B (66:25)

Yeah, no, I like that.

A (66:28)

There you go.

B (66:29)

That was great.

A (66:30)

Okay.

B (66:30)

I feel privileged to have witnessed that.

A (66:36)

Thanks for tuning into this episode of this Guy Sucked. A member of the Multitude podcast collective. This episode was hosted by me, Dr. Claire Aubin, featuring special guest Dr. Ali Luks and edited by the woman the with the wedgend Julia Sheffini. All of our theme music was written and produced by sorta sweet smellin guy Marshall Dean Williams. If you'd like to support the show and get access to all episodes, including two extra episodes per month and access to our full archive of episodes, you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or to our patreon@patreon.com thisguysucked See you next week. Foreign. Hey, it's Howie Mandel and I am inviting you to witness history as me and my Howie do it gaming team take on Gilly the King and Wallow two six seven's million dollars gaming in an epic global gaming league video game showdown. Four rounds, multiple games, one winner, plus a halftime performance by multi platinum artist Travy McCoy. Watch all the action and see who wins in advance chances to the championship match against Neo right now@globalgamingleague.com that's globalgamingleague.com everybody games.