Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

Lolita has been defended from the time of its first publication, and the defense goes like this: Nabokov has found the humanity in a monster. This reading re-centers Humbert, and reifies Humbert’s own self-concept as extraordinary. But Nabokov is clearly saying something different—Humbert is, in reality, ordinary as dirt. He’s the dirty old man who walks by you every day, disguised in this case by a fancy prose style. Humbert is not special. Humbert is not extraordinary. He’s Frank Lasalle. He’s everywhere. If Humbert is ordinary, then Lolita is too. She too is everywhere. She’s all around us—the girl whose life has been destroyed. The ubiquitous victim of the ubiquitous monster. And it’s her ubiquity that ultimately concerns Nabokov. The clue is in the title. The book is actually about what it says it’s about: a mere girl. The fact that we can’t quite see her is part of the story. She’s obscured from our view. We only see what Humbert wants to see—or wants us to see. Humbert reduces Lolita to her downy parts; or, more correctly, to his own idea of her. But even as that’s happening, Nabokov gives us—sneakily and not very often—her real, lived experience.