Dr. Ally/Allie Louks

Which is actually a very complicated smell.

And he also adds on to that, you know, the smell of a very special French perfume as well.

So we've got this

Special French perfume plus all of these kind of incongruous notes.

And I also included towards the end where there's this section about Humbert's own smell, where he kind of describes himself as, in his moments of moral clarity, if there are any, he kind of describes himself as this horrible stinking beast.

And so I included a sample of secretion magnifique, which is this horrible, some people actually quite like it, but I find it really repulsive.

This horrible kind of niche perfume, which is supposed to smell like bodily fluids and like blood and that kind of thing.

So the intended effect was for it to evoke in the examiners the kind of moral repulsion that Nabokov is trying to evoke in the reader.

They loved it.

They really did.

It got an incredibly high mark, I think probably just because it was so unique.

I can't imagine that many other people have ever sent in a dissertation like that.

I love that kind of thing.

Gosh, big question.

The nice thing about literature is that very often it kind of replicates but also intensifies life.

So all of those things can be found in literature.

Comments on people's bodily smells, comments on people's food, especially when that food is kind of new to someone.

The whole point of smell really is for us to notice new things in our environment.

So my former supervisor, Steve Connor, says that smell is the sense of discrimination.

It helps us distinguish the ripe from the rotten and the good from the bad.