When queried about Nabokov, friends and former colleagues at Cornell invariably comment on the seemingly paradoxical manner in which the encyclopedic Nabokov mind could be enthralled by the trivial as well as the serious. One professor, at least twenty years Nabokov’s junior and an instructor when he was there, remembers how Nabokov once asked him if he had ever watched a certain soap opera on television. Soap operas are of course ultimately comic if not fantastic in the way they characterize life as an uninterrupted series of crises and disasters; but missing the point altogether, suspecting a deadly leg-pull and supposing that with either answer he would lose (one making him a fool, the other a snob), Nabokov’s young colleague had been reduced to a fit of wordless throat-clearing. Recalling it ten years later, he seemed disarmed all over again. On easier terms with Nabokov was Professor M. H. Abrams, who warmly recalls how Nabokov came into a living room where a faculty child was absorbed in a television western. Immediately engaged by the program, Nabokov was soon quaking with laughter over the furiously climactic fight scene. Just such idle moments, if not literally this one, inform the hilarious burlesque of the comparable “obligatory scene” in Lolita, the tussle of Humbert and Quilty which leaves them “panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle.”
Even though he had academic tenure at Cornell, the Nabokovs never owned a house, and instead always rented, moving from year to year, a mobility he bestowed on refugee Humbert. “The main reason [for never settling anywhere permanently], the background reason, is, I suppose, that nothing short of a replica of my childhood surroundings would have satisfied me,” says Nabokov. “I would never manage to match my memories correctly—so why trouble with hopeless approximations? Then there are some special considerations: for instance, the question of impetus, the habit of impetus. I propelled myself out of Russia so vigorously, with such indignant force, that I have been rolling on and on ever since. True, I have lived to become that appetizing thing, a ‘full professor,’ but at heart I have always remained a lean ‘visiting lecturer.’ The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth. And finally, I don’t much care for furniture, for tables and chairs and lamps and rugs and things—perhaps because in my opulent childhood I was taught to regard with amused contempt any too-earnest attachment to material wealth, which is why I felt no regret and no bitterness when the Revolution abolished that wealth” (Playboy interview).
Professor Morris Bishop, Nabokov’s best friend at Cornell, who was responsible for his shift from Wellesley to Ithaca, recalled visiting the Nabokovs just after they had moved into the appallingly vulgar and garish home of an absent professor of Agriculture. “I couldn’t have lived in a place like that,” said Bishop, “but it delighted him. He seemed to relish every awful detail.” Although Bishop didn’t realize it then, Nabokov was learning about Charlotte Haze by renting her house, so to speak, by reading her books and living with her pictures and “wooden thingamabob[s] of commercial Mexican origin.” These annual moves, however dismal their circumstances, constituted a field trip enabling entomologist Nabokov to study the natural habitat of Humbert’s prey. Bishop also remembered that Nabokov read the New York Daily News for its crime stories,21 and, for an even more concentrated dose of bizarrerie, Father Divine’s newspaper, New Day—all of which should recall James Joyce, with whom Nabokov has so much else in common. Joyce regularly read The Police Gazette, the shoddy magazine Titbits (as does Bloom), and all the Dublin newspapers; attended burlesque shows, knew by heart most of the vulgar and comically obscene songs of the day, and was almost as familiar with the work of the execrable lady lending-library novelists of the fin de siècle as he was with the classics; and when he was living in Trieste and Paris and writing Ulysses, relied on his Aunt Josephine to keep him supplied with the necessary sub-literary materials. Of course, Joyce’s art depends far more than Nabokov’s on the vast residue of erudition and trivia which Joyce’s insatiable and equally encyclopedic mind was able to store.
Nabokov is very selective, whereas Joyce collected almost at random and then ordered in art the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life. That Nabokov does not equal the older writer in this respect surely points to a conscious choice on Nabokov’s part, as his Cornell lectures on Ulysses suggest.22 In singling out the flaws in what is to him the greatest novel of the century, Nabokov stressed the “needless obscurities baffling to the less-than-brilliant reader,” such as “local idiosyncrasies” and “untraceable references.” Yet Nabokov also practiced the art of assemblage, incorporating in the rich textures of Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada a most “Joycean” profusion of rags, tags, and oddments, both high and low, culled from books or drawn from “real life.” Whatever the respective scales of their efforts in this direction, Nabokov and Joyce are (with Queneau and Borges) among the few modern fiction writers who have made aesthetic capital out of their learning. Both include in their novels the compendious stuff one associates with the bedside library, the great literary anatomies such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy or Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary, or those unclassifiable masterpieces such as Moby-Dick, Tristram Shandy, and Gargantua and Pantagruel, in which the writer makes fictive use of all kinds of learning, and exercises the anatomist’s penchant for collage effected out of verbal trash and bizarre juxtapositions—for the digression, the catalogue, the puzzle, pun, and parody, the gratuitous bit of lore included for the pleasure it can evoke, and for the quirky detail that does not contribute to the book’s verisimilar design but nevertheless communicates vividly a sense of what it was like to be alive at a given moment in time. A hostile review of Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin offered as typical of the Commentary’s absurdities its mention of the fact that France exported to Russia some 150,000 bottles of champagne per annum; but the detail happens to telescope brilliantly the Francophilia of early nineteenth-century Russia and is an excellent example of the anatomist’s imaginative absorption of significant trivia and a justification of his methods. M. H. Abrams recalls how early one Monday morning he met Nabokov entering the Cornell Library, staggering beneath a run of The Edinburgh Review, which Nabokov had pored over all weekend in Pushkin’s behalf. “Marvelous ads!” explained Nabokov, “simply marvelous!” It was this spirit that enabled Nabokov to create in the two volumes of Onegin Commentary a marvelous literary anatomy in the tradition of Johnson, Sterne, and Joyce—an insomniac’s delight, a monumental, wildly inclusive, yet somehow elegantly ordered ragbag of humane discourse, in its own right a transcendent work of imagination.
Nabokov was making expressive use of unlikely bits and pieces in his novels as early as The Defense (1930), as when Luzhin’s means of suicide is suggested by a movie still, lying on The Veritas film company’s display table, showing “a white-faced man with his lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his hands from the ledge of a skyscraper—just about to fall off into the abyss”—a famous scene from Harold Lloyd’s 1923 silent film, Safety Last. Although present throughout his work of the thirties, and culminating logically in The Gift, his last novel in Russian, Nabokov’s penchant for literary anatomy was not fully realized until after he had been exposed to the polar extremes of American culture and American university libraries. Thus the richly variegated but sometimes crowded texture of Bend Sinister (1947), Nabokov’s first truly “American” novel,23 looks forward to Lolita, his next novel. Bend Sinister’s literary pastiche is by turns broad and hermetic. Titles by Remarque and Sholokov are combined to produce All Quiet on the Don, and Chapter Twelve offers this “famous American poem”:
A curious sight—these bashful bears,
These timid warrior whalemen
And now the time of
tide has come;
The ship casts off her cables
It is not shown on any map;
True places never are
This lovely light, it lights not me;
All loveliness is anguish—
No poem at all, it is formed, said Nabokov, by random “iambic incidents culled from the prose of Moby-Dick.” Such effects receive their fullest orchestration in Lolita, as the Notes to this volume will suggest.
If the Onegin Commentary (1964) is the culmination, then Lolita represents the apogee in fiction of Nabokov’s proclivities as anatomist and as such is a further reminder that the novel extends and develops themes and methods present in his work all along. Ranging from Dante to Dick Tracy, the allusions, puns, parodies, and pastiches in Lolita are controlled with a mastery unequaled by any writer since Joyce (who died in 1941). Readers should not be disarmed by the presence of so many kinds of “real” materials in a novel by a writer who believes so passionately in the primacy of the imagination; as Kinbote says in Pale Fire, “ ‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye” (p. 130).
By his example, Nabokov reminded younger American writers of the fictional nature of reality. When Terry Southern in The Magic Christian (1960) lampoons the myth of American masculinity and its attendant deification of the athlete by having his multimillionaire trickster, Guy Grand, fix the heavyweight championship fight so that the boxers grotesquely enact in the ring a prancing and mincing charade of homosexuality, causing considerable psychic injury to the audience, his art, such as it is, is quite late in imitating life. A famous athlete of the twenties was well-known as an invert, and Humbert mentions him twice, never by his real name, though he does call him “Ned Litam”—a simple anagram of “Ma Tilden”—which turns out to be one of the actual pseudonyms chosen by Tilden himself, under which he wrote stories and articles. Like the literary anatomists who have preceded him, Nabokov knows that what is so extraordinary about “reality” is that too often even the blackest of imaginations could not have invented it, and by taking advantage of this fact in Lolita he has, along with Nathanael West, defined with absolute authority the inevitable mode, the dominant dark tonalities—if not the contents—of the American comic novel.
Although Humbert clearly delights in many of the absurdities around him, the anatomist’s characteristic vivacity is gone from the pages which concern Charlotte Haze, and not only because she is repugnant to Humbert in terms of the “plot” but rather because to Nabokov she is the definitive artsy-craftsy suburban lady—the culture-vulture, that travesty of Woman, Love, and Sexuality. In short, she is the essence of American poshlust, to use the “one pitiless [Russian] word” which, writes Nabokov in Gogol, is able to express “the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term.” Poshlust: “the sound of the ‘o’ is as big as the plop of an elephant falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a bathing beauty on a German picture postcard” (p. 63). More precisely, it “is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (p. 70).24 It is an amalgam of pretentiousness and philistine vulgarity. In the spirit of Mark Twain describing the contents of the Grangerford household in Huckleberry Finn (earlier American poshlust), Humbert eviscerates the muddlecrass (to wax Joycean) world of Charlotte and her friends, reminding us that Humbert’s long view of America is not an altogether genial one.
In the course of showing us our landscape in all its natural beauty, Humber satirizes American songs, ads, movies, magazines, brand names, tourist attractions, summer camps, Dude Ranches, hotels, and motels, as well as the Good-Housekeeping Syndrome (Your Home Is You is one of Charlotte Haze’s essential volumes) and the cant of progressive educationist and child-guidance pontificators.25 Nabokov offers us a grotesque parody of a “good relationship,” for Humbert and Lo are “pals” with a vengeance; Know Your Own Daughter is one of the books which Humbert consults (the title exists). Yet Humbert’s terrible demands notwithstanding, she is as insensitive as children are to their parents; sexuality aside, she demands anxious parental placation in a too typically American way, and, since it is Lolita “to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster” she affords Nabokov an ideal opportunity to comment on the Teen and Sub-teen Tyranny. “Tristram in Movielove,” remarks Humbert, and Nabokov has responded to those various travesties of behavior which too many Americans recognize as tenable examples of reality. A gloss on this aspect of Lolita is provided by “Ode to a Model,” a poem which Nabokov published the same year as the Olympia Press edition of Lolita (1955):
I have followed you, model,
in magazine ads through all seasons,
from dead leaf on the sod
to red leaf on the breeze,
from your lily-white armpit
to the tip of your butterfly eyelash,
charming and pitiful,
silly and stylish.
Or in kneesocks and tartan
standing there like some fabulous symbol,
parted feet pointed outward
—pedal form of akimbo.
On a lawn, in a parody
of Spring and its cherry-tree,
near a vase and a parapet,
virgin practising archery.
Ballerina, black-masked,
near a parapet of alabaster.
“Can one”—somebody asked—
“rhyme ‘star’ and ‘disaster’?”
Can one picture a blackbird
as the negative of a small firebird?
Can a record, run backward,
turn ‘repaid’ into ‘diaper’?
Can one marry a model?
Kill your past, make you real, raise a family,
by removing you bodily
from back numbers of Sham?
Although Nabokov called attention to the elements of parody in his work, he repeatedly denied the relevance of satire. One can understand why he said, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist” (Playboy interview), for he eschewed the overtly moral stance of the satirist who offers “to mend the world.” Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,” but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” Moreover, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, re
al and imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each is captive of the other, imprisoned together in a succession of bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can share nothing of what they see—making Humbert seem as alone during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has left him and the car is an empty cell.
Nabokov’s denials notwithstanding, many of Humbert’s observations of American morals and mores are satiric, the product of his maker’s moral sensibility; but the novel’s greatness does not depend on the profundity or extent of its “satire,” which is over-emphasized by readers who fail to recognize the extent of the parody, its full implications, or the operative distinction made by Nabokov: “satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Like Joyce, Nabokov shows how parody may inform a high literary art, and parody figures in the design of each of his novels. The Eye parodies the nineteenth-century Romantic tale, such as V. F. Odoevsky’s “The Brigadier” (1844), which is narrated by a ghost who has awakened after death to view his old life with new clarity, while Laughter in the Dark is a mercilessly cold mocking of the convention of the love triangle; Despair is cast as the kind of “cheap mystery” story the narrator’s banal wife reads, though it evolves into something quite different; and The Gift parodies the major nineteenth-century Russian writers. Invitation to a Beheading is cast as a mock anti-utopian novel, as though Zamiatin’s We (1920) had been restaged by the Marx Brothers. Pnin masquerades as an “academic novel” and turns out to parody the possibility of a novel’s having a “reliable” narrator. Pnin’s departure at the end mimics Chichikov’s orbital exit from Dead Souls (1842), just as the last paragraph of The Gift conceals a parody of a Pushkin stanza. The texture of Nabokov’s parody is unique because, in addition to being a master parodist of literary styles, he is able to make brief references to another writer’s themes or devices which are so telling in effect that Nabokov need not burlesque that writer’s style. He parodies not only narrative clichés and outworn subject matter but genres and prototypes of the novel; Ada parodically surveys nothing less than the novel’s evolution. Because Chapter Four of The Gift is a mock literary biography, it anticipates the themes of Nabokov’s major achievements, for he is continuously parodying the search for a verifiable truth—the autobiography, the biography, the exegesis, the detective story—and these generic “quests” will coalesce in one work, especially when the entire novel is conceptually a parody, as in Lolita and Pale Fire.
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Page 5