COINCIDENCE. Speak, Memory is filled with examples of Nabokov’s love of coincidence. Because they are drawn from his life, these incidents demonstrate how Nabokov’s imagination responds to coincidence, using it in his fiction to trace the pattern of a life’s design, to achieve shattering interpenetrations of space and time. “Some law of logic,” writes Nabokov in Ada (1969), “should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth” (p. 361). Humbert goes to live in Charlotte Haze’s house at 342 Lawn Street; he and Lolita inaugurate their illicit crosscountry tour in room 342 of The Enchanted Hunters hotel; and in one year on the road they register in 342 motels and hotels. Given the endless mathematical combinations possible, the numbers seem to signal his entrapment by McFate (to use Humbert’s personification). But they are also a patent, purposeful contrivance, like the copy of the 1946 Who’s Who in the Limelight which Humbert would have us believe he found in the prison library on the night previous to his writing the chapter we are now reading. The yearbook not only prefigures the novel’s action, but under Lolita’s mock-entry of “Dolores Quine” we are informed that she “Made New York debut in 1904 in Never Talk to Strangers”—and in the closing paragraph of the novel, almost three hundred pages later, Humbert advises the absent Lolita, “Do not talk to strangers,” a detail that exhibits extraordinary narrative control for an allegedly unrevised, first-draft confessional, written during fifty-six chaotic days. Clearly, “Someone else is in the know,” to quote a mysterious voice that interrupts the narration of Bend Sinister. It is no coincidence when coincidences extend from book to book. Creations from one “reality” continually turn up in another: the imaginary writer Pierre Delalande is quoted in The Gift and provides the epigraph for Invitation to a Beheading; Pnin and another character mention “Vladimir Vladimirovich” and dismiss his entomology as an affectation; “Hurricane Lolita” is mentioned in Pale Fire, and Pnin is glimpsed in the university library. Mythic or prosaic names and certain fatidic numbers recur with slight variation in many books, carrying no burden of meaning whatsoever other than the fact that someone beyond the work is repeating them, that they are all part of one master pattern.
PATTERNING. Nabokov’s passion for chess, language, and lepidoptery has inspired the most elaborately involuted patterning in his work. Like the games implemented by parody, the puns, anagrams, and spoonerisms all reveal the controlling hand of the logomachist; thematically, they are appropriate to the prison of mirrors. Chess motifs are woven into several narratives, and even in The Defense (1930), a most naturalistically ordered early novel, the chess patterning points to forces beyond Grandmaster Luzhin’s comprehension (“Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board,” writes Nabokov in the Foreword). The importance of the lepidopteral motif has already been suggested, and it spirals freely in and out of Nabokov’s books: in Invitation to a Beheading, just before he is scheduled to die, Cincinnatus gently strokes a giant moth; in Pale Fire a butterfly alights on John Shade’s arm the minute before he is killed; in Ada, when Van Veen arrives for a duel, a transparent white butterfly floats past and Van is certain he has only minutes to live; in the final chapter of Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls seeing in Paris, just before the war, a live butterfly being promenaded on a leash of thread; at the end of Bend Sinister the masked author intrudes and suspends the “obvious plot,” and as the book closes he looks out of the window and decides, as a moth twangs against the screen, that it is “A good night for mothing.” Bend Sinister was published in 1947, and it is no accident that in Nabokov’s next novel (1955) Humbert meets Lolita back in 1947, thus sustaining the author’s “fictive time” without interruption and enabling him to pursue that moth’s lovely diurnal Double through the substratum of the new novel in the most fantastic butterfly hunt of his career. “I confess I do not believe in time,” writes Nabokov at the end of the ecstatic butterfly chapter in Speak, Memory. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.”
ALLUSION. Humbert’s references to art and literature are consistent with his mind and education, but in other novels and stories such cultural allusions point to Nabokov. In Invitation to a Beheading, for instance, Cincinnatus, imprisoned by the State, cannot identify the bits and pieces from Baudelaire’s poem L’Invitation au voyage (1855) that echo in his consciousness, inform the novel’s garden motif, and sound in the book’s title. They’re emanating from the mind of his maker, who especially cherishes Baudelaire’s utopia of the spirit as he writes the book at hand in Nazi Germany, in 1934—Hitler’s voice echoing across nocturnal Berlin from rooftop loudspeakers at the very moment that Nabokov defies dystopia by writing the farcical, and finally joyous, Invitation to a Beheading.
THE WORK-WITHIN-THE-WORK. The self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles, are clearly of the author’s making, since no point of view within the fiction could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they create. The course of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which purports to be an attempt to gather material for a proposed literary biography of the narrator’s half brother but ends by obfuscating even the narrator’s identity, is refracted in Knight’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale.” Like an Elizabethan play-within-a-play, Quilty’s play within Lolita, The Enchanted Hunters, offers a “message” that can be taken seriously as a commentary on the progression of the entire novel; and Who’s Who in the Limelight and the class list of the Ramsdale school magically mirror the action taking place around them, including, by implication, the writing of Lolita. The a-novelistic components of Pale Fire—Foreword, Poem, Commentary, and Index—create a mirror-lined labyrinth of involuted cross-references, a closed cosmos that can only be of the author’s making, rather than the product of an “unreliable” narrator. Pale Fire realizes the ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twenty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the fourth chapter of The Gift. If it is disturbing to discover that the characters in The Gift are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within Hamlet, “that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”9
THE STAGING OF THE NOVEL. Nabokov wrote the screenplay of Lolita, as well as nine plays in Russian, including one of his several forays into science fiction, The Waltz Invention (1938), which was translated and published in 1966. It is not surprising, then, that his novels should proliferate with “theatrical” effects that serve his play-spirit exceedingly well. Problems of identity can be investigated poetically by trying on and discarding a series of masks. And, too, what better way to demonstrate that everything in a book is being manipulated than by seeming to stage it? In Invitation to a Beheading, “A Summer thunderstorm, simply yet tastefully staged, was performed outside.” When Quilty finally dies in Lolita, Humbert says, “This was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”; and in Laughter in the Dark (1932), “The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting Proteus.” Nabokov the protean impersonator is always a masked presence in his fiction: as impresario, scenarist, director, warden, dictator, landlord, and even as bit player (the seventh Hunter in Quilty’s play within Lolita, a Young Poet who insists that everything in the play is his invention)—to name only a few of the disguises he has donned as a secret agent who moves among his own creations like Prospero in The Tempest. Shakespeare is very much an ancestor (he and Nabokov even share a birthday), and the creaking, splintering noise made by the stage setting as it disintegrates at the end of Invitation to a Beheading is Nabokov’s version of the snapping of Prospero’s wand and his speech to the players (“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits a
nd / Are melted into air, into thin air”; IV.i).
AUTHORIAL VOICE. All the involuted effects spiral into the authorial voice—“an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me,” Nabokov calls it—which intrudes continually in all of his novels after Despair, most strikingly at the end, when it completely takes over the book (Lolita is a notable exception). It is this “deity” who is responsible for everything: who begins a narrative only to stop and retell the passage differently; halts a scene to “rerun” it on the chapter’s screen, or turns a reversed lantern slide around to project it properly; intrudes to give stage directions, to compliment or exhort the actors, to have a prop moved; who reveals that the characters have “cotton-padded bodies” and are the author’s puppets, that all is a fiction; and who widens the “gaps” and “holes” in the narrative until it breaks apart at “the end,” when the vectors are removed, the cast of characters is dismissed, and even the fiction fades away—at most leaving behind an imprint on space in the form of a précis of “an old-fashioned [stage] melodrama” the “deity” may one day write, and which describes (as in the case of Pale Fire) the book we’ve just finished reading.
The vertiginous conclusion of a Nabokov novel calls for a complicated response which many readers, after a lifetime of realistic novels, are incapable of making. Children, however, are aware of other possibilities, as their art reveals. My own children, then three and six years old, reminded me of this one summer when they inadvertently demonstrated that, unless they change, they will be among Nabokov’s ideal readers. One afternoon my wife and I built them a puppet theater. After propping the theater on the top edge of the living room couch, I crouched down behind it and began manipulating the two hand puppets in the stage above me. The couch and the theater’s scenery provided good cover, enabling me to peer over the edge and watch the children immediately become engrossed in the show, and then virtually mesmerized by my improvised little story that ended with a patient father spanking an impossible child. But the puppeteer, carried away by his story’s violent climax, knocked over the entire theater, which clattered onto the floor, collapsing into a heap of cardboard, wood, and cloth—leaving me crouched, peeking out at the room, my head now visible over the couch’s rim, my puppeted hands, with their naked wrists, poised in mid-air. For several moments my children remained in their open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at the space where the theater had been, not seeing me at all. Then they did the kind of double take that a comedian might take a lifetime to perfect, and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had never seen before—and not so much at my clumsiness, which was nothing new, but rather at those moments of total involvement in a nonexistent world, and at what its collapse implied to them about the authenticity of the larger world, and about their daily efforts to order it and their own fabricated illusions. They were laughing, too, over their sense of what the vigorous performance had meant to me; but they saw how easily they could be tricked and their trust belied, and the shrillness of their laughter finally suggested that they recognized the frightening implications of what had happened, and that only laughter could steel them in their new awareness.
When in 1966 I visited Vladimir Nabokov for four days in Montreux, to interview him for Wisconsin Studies and in regard to my critical study of his work, I told him about this incident, and how for me it defined literary involution and the response which he hoped to elicit from his readers at “the end” of a novel. “Exactly, exactly,” he said as I finished. “You must put that in your book.”
In parodying the reader’s complete, self-indulgent identification with a character, which in its mindlessness limits consciousness, Nabokov is able to create the detachment necessary for a multiform, spatial view of his novels. The “two plots” in Nabokov’s puppet show are thus made plainly visible as a description of the total design of his work, which reveals that in novel after novel his characters try to escape from Nabokov’s prison of mirrors, struggling toward a self-awareness that only their creator has achieved by creating them—an involuted process which connects Nabokov’s art with his life, and clearly indicates that the author himself is not in this prison. He is its creator, and is above it, in control of a book, as in one of those Saul Steinberg drawings (greatly admired by Nabokov) that show a man drawing the very line that gives him “life,” in the fullest sense. But the process of Nabokov’s involution, the global perspective which he invites us to share with him, is best described in Speak, Memory, Chapter Fifteen, when he comments on the disinclination of
… physicists to discuss the outside of the inside, the whereabouts of the curvature; for every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again.
The ultimate detachment of an “outside” view of a novel inspires our wonder and enlarges our potential for compassion because, “in the spiral unwinding of things,” such compassion is extended to include the mind of an author whose deeply humanistic art affirms man’s ability to confront and order chaos.
2. BACKGROUNDS OF LOLITA
Critics too often treat Nabokov’s twelfth novel as a special case quite apart from the rest of his work, when actually it concerns, profoundly and in their darkest and yet most comic form, the themes which have always occupied him. Although Lolita may still be a shocking novel to several aging non-readers, the exact circumstances of its troubled publication and reception may not be familiar to younger readers. After four American publishers refused it, Madame Ergaz, of Bureau Littéraire Clairouin, Paris, submitted Lolita to Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris.10 Although Girodias must be credited with the publication of several estimable if controversial works by writers such as Jean Genet, his main fare was the infamous Travellers Companion series, the green-backed books once so familiar and dear to the eagle-eyed inspectors of the U.S. Customs. But Nabokov did not know this and, because of one of Girodias’ previous publishing ventures, the “Editions du Chěne,” thought him a publisher of “fine editions.” Cast in two volumes and bound in the requisite green, Lolita was quietly published in Paris in September 1955.
Because it seemed to confirm the judgment of those nervous American publishers, the Girodias imprimatur became one more obstacle for Lolita to overcome, though the problem of its alleged pornography indeed seems remote today, and was definitively settled in France not long after its publication. I was Nabokov’s student at Cornell in 1953–1954, at a time when most undergraduates did not know he was a writer. Drafted into the army a year later, I was sent overseas to France. On my first pass to Paris I naturally went browsing in a Left Bank bookstore. An array of Olympia Press books, daringly displayed above the counter, seemed most inviting—and there, between copies of Until She Screams and The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe, I found Lolita. Although I thought I knew all of Nabokov’s works in English (and had searched through out-of-print stores to buy each of them), this title was new to me; and its context and format were more than surprising, even if in those innocent pre-Grove Press days the semi-literate wags on fraternity row had dubbed Nabokov’s Literature 311–312 lecture course “Dirty Lit” because of such readings as Ulysses and Madame Bovary (the keenest campus wits invariably dropped the B when mentioning the latter). I brought Lolita back to my base, which was situated out in the woods. Passes were hard to get and new Olympia titles were always in demand in the barracks. The appearance of a new girl in town thus caused a minor clamor. “Hey, lemme read your dirty book, man!” insisted “Stockade Clyde” Carr, who had justly earned his sobriquet, and to whose request I acceded at once. “Read it aloud, Stockade,” someone called, and skipping the Foreword, Stockade Clyde began to make his remedial way through the opening paragraph. “ ‘Lo … lita, light … of my life, fire of my … loins. My sin, my soul … Lo-lee-ta: The …
tip of the … tongue … taking … a trip …’—Damn!” yelled Stockade, throwing the book against the wall. “It’s God-damn Litachure!!” Thus the Instant Pornography Test, known in psychological-testing circles as the “IPT.” Although infallible, it has never to my knowledge been used in any court case.
At a double remove from the usual review media, Lolita went generally unnoticed during its first six months. But in the winter of 1956 Graham Greene in England recommended Lolita as one of the best books of 1955, incurring the immediate wrath of a columnist in the Sunday Express, which moved Greene to respond in The Spectator. Under the heading of “Albion” (suggesting a quaint tempest in an old teapot), The New York Times Book Review of February 26, 1956, alluded briefly to this exchange, calling Lolita “a long French novel” and not mentioning Nabokov by name. Two weeks later, noting “that our mention of it created a flurry of mail,” The Times devoted two-thirds of a column to the subject, quoting Greene at some length. Thus began the underground existence of Lolita, which became public in the summer of 1957 when the Anchor Review in New York devoted 112 of its pages to Nabokov. Included were an excellent introduction by F. W. Dupee, a long excerpt from the novel, and Nabokov’s Afterword, “On a Book Entitled Lolita.” When Putnam’s brought out the American edition in 1958 they were able to dignify their full-page advertisements with an array of statements by respectable and even distinguished literary names, though Lolita’s fast climb to the top of the best-seller list was not exclusively the result of their endorsements or the novel’s artistry. “Hurricane / Lolita swept from Florida to Maine” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire [1. 680]), also creating storms in England and Italy, and in France, where it was banned on three separate occasions. Although it never ran afoul of the law in this country, there were predictably some outraged protests, including an editorial in The New Republic; but, since these at best belong to social rather than literary history, they need not be detailed here, with one exception. Orville Prescott’s review in the daily New York Times of August 18, 1958, has a charm that should be preserved: “ ‘Lolita,’ then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive.”11 Prescott’s remarks complement those of an anonymous reviewer in The Southern Quarterly Review (January 1852), who found an earlier, somewhat different treatment of the quest theme no less intolerable: “The book is sad stuff, dull and dreary, or ridiculous. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are the wretchedest dolts and drivellers, and his Mad Captain, who pursues his personal revenges against the fish who has taken off his leg, at the expense of ship, crew and owners, is a monstrous bore.…”
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Page 3