In form, Pale Fire is a grotesque scholarly edition, while Lolita is a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Romantic novel that chronicles the effects of a debilitating love, the Doppelgänger tale, and, in parts, a Duncan Hines tour of America conducted by a guide with a black imagination, a parodic case study, and, as the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight says of his half brother’s first novel, The Prismatic Bezel, “It is also a wicked imitation of many other … literary habit[s].” Knight’s procedures summarize Nabokov’s:
As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade, The Prismatic Bezel soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, (p. 91)
“But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard” (p. 92), says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for although Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary burlesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland (1912) does not. The description of The Prismatic Bezel and the remainder of Chapter Ten in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and, like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.” There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most audacious parodies: Lolita makes fun of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody of the Double as a convention of modern fiction and a Double who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life.
With the possible exception of Joyce, Nabokov is alone among modern writers in his ability to make parody and pathos converge and sometimes coincide. Joyce comes closest to this in Ulysses (1922), not in the coldly brilliant “Oxen of the Sun” section but in the “Cyclops” episode in Barney Kiernan’s pub, which oscillates between parodic passages and a straightforward rendering of the dialogue and action; in the “Nausicäa” episode on the beach, which first projects Gerty MacDowell’s point of view in a style parodying sentimental ladies; magazine fiction, and midway shifts to Bloom’s non-parodic stream-of-consciousness; and in parts of the “Hades” Nighttown section, especially the closing apparition of Bloom’s dead son, Rudy. Nabokov has gone beyond Joyce in developing parody as a novelistic form, for in Lolita and Pale Fire, which are totally parodic in form and may be the finest comic novels since Ulysses, the parody and pathos are always congruent, rather than adjacent to one another—as though the entire “Nausicäa” or “Cyclops” episodes were cast as parody, without in any way diminishing our sense of Bloom’s suffering, or that Joyce had been able to express something of the humanity of Bloom or Mrs. Purefoy in the “Oxen of the Sun” tour de force. Nabokov has summarized in a phrase his triumph in Lolita and Pale Fire. Just before Humbert takes Lolita into their room at The Enchanted Hunters hotel in what is to be the most crucial event in his life, Humbert comments, “Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death.” To paraphrase Marianne Moore’s well-known line that poetry is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Nabokov’s “poem” is a parody of death with real suffering in it. With characteristic self-awareness, Nabokov defines in The Gift the essence of his own art: “The spirit of parody always goes along with genuine poetry.”
This spirit in Nabokov represents not merely a set of techniques but, as suggested above, an attitude toward experience, a means of discovering the nature of experience. The Prismatic Bezel is aptly titled: a “bezel” is the sloping edge on a cutting tool or the oblique side of a gem, and the luminous bezel of Nabokov’s parody can cut in any direction, often turning in upon itself as self-parody.
To stress the satiric (rather than parodic) elements of Lolita above all others is as limited a response as to stop short with its sexual content. “Sex as an institution, sex as a general notion, sex as a problem, sex as a platitude—all this is something I find too tedious for words,” Nabokov told an interviewer from Playboy, and his Cornell lectures on Joyce further indicate that he was not interested in sexual oddities for their own sake. On May 10, 1954, in his opening lecture on Ulysses (delivered, as it turns out, at the time he was completing Lolita), Nabokov said of Leopold Bloom, “Joyce intended the portrait of an ordinary person. [His] sexual deportment [is] extremely perverse … Bloom indulges in acts and dreams sub-normal in an evolutionary sense, affecting both individual and species.… In Bloom’s (and Joyce’s) mind, the theme of sex is mixed with theme of latrine. Supposed to be ordinary citizen: mind of ordinary citizen does not dwell where Bloom’s does. Sexual affairs heap indecency upon indecency …” Coming from the creator of Humbert Humbert, the fervent tone and the rather old-fashioned sense of normalcy may seem unexpected. On May 28, the last class of the term and concluding lecture on Joyce, he discussed the flaws in Ulysses, complaining that there is an “Obnoxious, overdone preoccupation with sex organs, as illustrated in Molly’s stream-of-consciousness. Perverse attitudes exhibited.”26 In spite of the transcriptions in notebookese, one gets a firm idea of Nabokov’s attitude toward the explicit detailing of sexuality, and his remarks imply a good deal about his intentions in Lolita. The “nerves of the novel” revealed in the Afterword underscore these intentions by generalizing Humbert’s passion. That the seemingly inscrutable Nabokov would even write this essay, let alone reprint it in magazines and append it to the twenty-five translations of Lolita, surely suggests the dismay he must have felt to see how many readers, including some old friends, had taken the book solely on an erotic level. Those exposed “nerves” should make it clear that insofar as it has a definable subject, Lolita is not merely about pedophilia. As Humbert says, rather than describing the details of the seduction at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, “Anybody can imagine those elements of animality. A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets.” Humbert’s desires are those of a poet as well as a pervert, and not surprisingly, since they reflect, darkly, in a crooked enough mirror, the artistic desires of his creator.
Humbert’s is a nightmare vision of the ineffable bliss variously sought by one Nabokov character after another. For a resonant summary phrase, one turns to Agaspher (1923), a verse drama written when Nabokov was twenty-four. An adaptation of the legend of the Wandering Jew, only its Prologue was published. Tormented by “dreams of earthly beauty,” Nabokov’s wanderer exclaims, “I shall catch you / catch you, Maria my inexpressible dream / from age to age!”27 Near the end of another early work, the novel King, Queen, Knave (1928), an itinerant photographer walks down the street, ignored by the crowd, “yelling into the wind: ‘The artist is coming! The divinely favored, der gottbegnadete artist is coming!’ ”—a yell that ironically refers to the novel’s unrealized artist, businessman Dreyer, and anticipates and announces the arrival of such future avatars of the artist as the chessplayer Luzhin in The Defense (1930), the butterfly collector Pilgram in “The Aurelian” (1931), the daydreaming art dealer and critic Albert Albinus in Laughter in the Dark (1932), the imprisoned and doomed Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1935–1936), who struggles to write, the inventor Salvator Waltz in The Waltz Invention (1938), and the philosopher Krug in Bend Sinister (1947), as well as poets manqués such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955), and such genuine yet only partially fulfilled artists as Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift (1937–1938), Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and John Shade in Pale Fire
(1962). When perceived by the reader, the involuted design of each novel reveals that these characters all exist in a universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of Vladimir Nabokov, the only artist of major stature who appears in Nabokov’s work.
Some readers, however, may feel that works that are in part about themselves are limited in range and significance, too special, too hermetic. But the creative process is fundamental; perhaps nothing is more personal by implication and hence more relevant than fictions concerning fiction; identity, after all, is a kind of artistic construct, however imperfect the created product. If the artist does indeed embody in himself and formulate in his work the fears and needs and desires of the race, then a “story” about his mastery of form, his triumph in art is but a heightened emblem of all of our own efforts to confront, order, and structure the chaos of life, and to endure, if not master, the demons within and around us. “I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art,” says Humbert in the closing moments of Lolita, and he speaks for more than one of Nabokov’s characters.
It was the major émigré poet and critic Vladislav Khodasevich who first pointed out, more than fifty years ago, that whatever their occupations may be, Nabokov’s protagonists represent the artist, and that Nabokov’s principal works in part concern the creative process.28 Khodasevich died in 1939, and until the 1960s, his criticism remained untranslated. If it had been available earlier, Nabokov’s English and American readers would have recognized his deep seriousness at a much earlier date. This is especially true of Lolita, where Nabokov’s constant theme is masked, but not obscured, by the novel’s ostensible subject, sexual perversion. But what may have been a brilliant formulation in the thirties should be evident enough by now, and not because so many other critics have said it of Nabokov, but rather because it has become a commonplace of recent criticism to note that a work of art is about itself (Wordsworth, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Queneau, Borges, Barth, Claude Mauriac, Robbe-Grillet, Picasso, Saul Steinberg, and Fellini’s film 8½—to name but a baker’s dozen). What is not so clear is how Nabokov’s artifice and strategies of involution reveal the “second plot” in his fiction, the “contiguous world” of the author’s mind; what it has meant to that mind to have created a fictional world; and what the effect of those strategies is upon the reader, whose illicit involvement with that fiction constitutes a “third plot,” and who is manipulated by Nabokov’s dizzying illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations.
3. THE ARTIFICE OF LOLITA
Although Lolita has received much serious attention (see this edition’s Selected Bibliography), the criticism which it has elicited usually forces a thesis which does not and in fact cannot accommodate the total design of the novel. That intricate design, described in the Notes to this edition, makes Lolita one of the few supremely original novels of the century. It is difficult to imagine, say, that Lord Jim could have been achieved without the example of Henry James’s narrative strategies, or that The Sound and the Fury would be the same novel if Faulkner had not read Ulysses. But like The Castle, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and Pale Fire, Lolita is one of those transcendent works of the imagination which defy the neat continuum maintained so carefully by literary historians. At most, it is one of those works which create their own precursors, to use Jorge Luis Borges’s winning phrase.
Because Nabokov continually parodies the conventions of “realistic” and “impressionistic” fiction, readers must accept or reject him on his own terms. Many of his novels become all but meaningless in any other terms. At the same time, however, even Nabokov’s most ardent admirers must sometimes wonder about the smaller, more hermetic components of Nabokov’s artifice—the multifarious puns, allusions, and butterfly references which proliferate in novels such as Pale Fire and Lolita. Are they organic? Do they coalesce to form any meaningful pattern? Humbert’s wide-ranging literary allusions more than “challenge [our] scholarship,” as H.H. says of Quilty’s similar performance. Several of Humbert’s allusions are woven so subtly into the texture of the narrative as to elude all but the most compulsive exegetes. Many allusions, however, are direct and available, and these are most frequently to nineteenth-century writers; an early Note will suggest that this is of considerable importance. But unlike the allusions, which are sometimes only a matter of fun, the patterned verbal cross-references are always fundamental, defining a dimension of the novel that has escaped critical notice.
The verbal figurae in Lolita limn the novel’s involuted design and establish the basis of its artifice. As indicated in the Foreword, no total interpretation of Lolita will be propounded here. The following remarks on artifice and game are not intended to suggest that this “level” of the novel is the most important; they are offered because no one has fully recognized the magnitude of this verbal patterning, or its significance.29 Just as Nabokov’s Afterword was read in advance of the novel, so the following pages might well be reread after the annotations, many of which they anticipate.
Although Lolita is less dramatically anti-realistic than Pale Fire, in its own way it is as grandly labyrinthine and as much a work of artifice as that more ostentatiously tricky novel. This is not immediately apparent because Humbert is Nabokov’s most “humanized” character since Luzhin (1930), and Lolita the first novel since the early thirties in which “the end” remains intact. Moreover, Nabokov said that The Enchanter, the 1939 story containing the central idea of Lolita, went unpublished not because of its subject matter but rather because “The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly spoke. Little by little I managed to give her some semblance of reality.” It may seem anomalous for puppeteer Nabokov, creator of the sham worlds of Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, to worry this way about “reality” (with or without quotation marks); yet one extreme does not preclude the other in Nabokov, and the originality of Lolita derives from this very paradox. The puppet theater never collapses, but everywhere there are fissures, if not gaps, in the structure, crisscrossing in intricate patterns and visible to the discerning eye—that is, the eye trained on Nabokov fictions and thus accustomed to novelistic trompe-l’oeil. Lolita is a great novel to the same extent as Nabokov is able to have it both ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other engaging him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal figurations which undermine the novel’s realistic base and distance the reader from its dappled surface, which then assumes the aspect of a gameboard (the figurations are detailed in the Notes).
As a lecturer, Nabokov was a considerable Thespian, able to manipulate audiences in a similar manner. His rehearsal of Gogol’s death agonies remains in one’s mind: how the hack doctors alternately bled him and purged him and plunged him into icy baths, Gogol so frail that his spine could be felt through his stomach, the six fat white bloodletting leeches clinging to his nose, Gogol begging to have them removed—“Please lift them, lift them, keep them away!”— and, sinking behind the lectern, now a tub, Nabokov for several moments was Gogol, shuddering and shivering, his hands held down by a husky attendant, his head thrown back in pain and terror, nostrils distended, eyes shut, his beseechments filling the large lecture hall. Even the sea of C-minuses in the back of the room could not help being moved. And then, after a pause, Nabokov would very quietly say, in a sentence taken word-for-word from his Gogol, “Although the scene is unpleasant and has a human appeal which I deplore, it is necessary to dwell upon it a little longer in order to bring out the curiously physical side of Gogol’s genius.”
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