Monsters by Claire Dederer;

Author:Claire Dederer; [Dederer, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2023-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

On the other hand, it’s true that, in one way, Lolita is perfect for Humbert. Lolita is perfect because she is improperly protected. Her perfection lies in her vulnerability, her availability, her access.

These are special qualities sought by that most ordinary of criminals, the pervert.

* * *

—

Humbert, in fact, realizes his own ordinariness in the end. The realization of his ordinariness comes contemporaneously with the realization that he’s destroyed Lolita. Just before the fight scene with Quilty, he wonders parenthetically: “(Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?).” The question answers itself. Humbert is no more special than Frank Lasalle.

Nabokov then almost immediately revisits the theme of Humbert’s non-specialness as we move into the passages about Clare Quilty; here H and Q are melded together, doubled. Quilty wears a purple bathrobe “very like the one I had,” says Humbert. The two become one as they fight it out: “He rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.” There’s a case to be made that Quilty is not a real person, but a figment—even so, his existence makes this point: Humbert Humbert is not so singular after all.

Lolita herself seems to understand Humbert’s ordinariness. After the first time he rapes her, she herself names it as an ordinary crime: “ ‘You chump,’ she said, sweetly smiling at me. ‘You revolting creature. I was a daisy-fresh girl, and look what you’ve done to me. I ought to call the police and tell them you raped me. Oh you dirty, dirty old man.’ ”

What could be more common than a dirty old man? Humbert and his fancy prose style are reduced in three words to a stock character. Nothing special.

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