The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

A great deal has been written about “unreliable narrators,” but too little about unreliable readers. Although editor John Ray, Jr., serves fair enough warning to those “old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of ‘real’ people beyond the ‘true story,’ ” virtually every “move” in the “true story” of Lolita seems to be structured with their predictable responses in mind; and the game-element depends on such reflexive action, for it tests the reader in so many ways. By calling out “Reader! Bruder!”, Humbert echoes Au Lecteur, the prefatory poem in Les Fleurs du mal (“Hypocrite reader!—My fellow man—My brother!”); and, indeed, the entire novel constitutes an ironic upending of Baudelaire and a good many other writers who would enlist the reader’s full participation in the work. “I want my learned readers to participate in the scene I am about to replay,” says Humbert but such illicit participation will find the reader in constant danger of check, or even rougher treatment: “As greater authors than I have put it: ‘Let readers imagine’ etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants.” Humbert addresses the reader directly no less than twenty-nine times,30 drawing him into one trap after another. In Nabokov’s hands the novel thus becomes a gameboard on which, through parody, he assaults his readers’ worst assumptions, pretensions, and intellectual conventions, realizing and formulating through game his version of Flaubert’s dream of an Encyclopédie des idées reçues, a Dictionary of Accepted Ideas.

  “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game,” says Nabokov, and although the more obvious sallies in Lolita could be called satiric (e.g., those against Headmistress Pratt), the most telling are achieved through the games implemented by parody. By creating a surface that is rich in “psychological” clues, but which finally resists and then openly mocks the interpretations of depth psychology, Nabokov is able to dispatch any Freudians who choose to “play” in the blitzkrieg game that is the novel’s first sixty-or-so pages. The traps are baited with tempting “false scents” drawn from what Nabokov in Speak, Memory calls the “police state of sexual myth.” The synthetic incest of Humbert and Lolita seems to suggest a classical Oedipal situation, but Humbert later calls it a “parody of incest.” Nabokov further implies that the story works out the “transference” theory, whereby the daughter transfers her affections to another, similar man, but not her father, thus exorcising her Oedipal tension. If Freudians have interpreted Lolita’s elopement with Quilty in this way, then they stop short in the hospital scene when Humbert says of the nurse, “I suppose Mary thought comedy father Professor Humbertoldi was interfering with the romance between Dolores and her father-substitute, roly-poly Romeo.” The boyish qualities of a nymphet tempt the reader into interpreting Humbert’s quest as essentially homosexual, but we may be less absolute in our judgment and practice of pop psychoanalysis when Humbert tells how during one of his incarcerations he trifled with psychiatrists, “teasing them with fake ‘primal scenes.’ ” “By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me ‘potentially homosexual’ .” If the clinical-minded have accepted Humbert’s explanation of the adolescent “trauma” which accounts for his pedophilia—interrupted coitus—then they should feel the force of the attack and their own form of loss when Lolita must leave Quilty’s play “a week before its natural climax.” Humbert’s “trauma” affords a further trap for the clinical mind, for the incident seems to be a sly fictive transmutation of Nabokov’s own considerably more innocent childhood infatuation with Colette (Chapter Seven, Speak, Memory); and such hints as the butterfly and the Carmen allusions shared by that chapter and Lolita only reinforce the more obvious similarities. When earnest readers, nurtured on the “standardized symbols of the psychoanalytic racket”, leap to make the association between the two episodes—as several have done—and immediately conclude that Lolita is autobiographical in the most literal sense, then the trap has been sprung: their wantonly reductive gesture justifies the need for just such a parody as Nabokov’s. With a cold literary perversity, Nabokov has demonstrated the falseness of their “truth”; the implications are considerable. Even the exe-getic act of searching for the “meaning” of Lolita by trying to unfold the butterfly pattern becomes a parody of the expectations of the most sophisticated reader, who finds he is chasing a mocking inversion of the “normal” Freudian direction of symbols which, once identified, may still remain mysterious, explain very little, or, like the game of Word Golf in Pale Fire, reveal nothing.

  Until almost the end of Lolita, Humbert’s fullest expressions of “guilt” and “grief” are qualified, if not undercut completely, and these passages represent another series of traps in which Nabokov again parodies the reader’s expectations by having Humbert the penitent say what the reader wants to hear: “I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything.” Eagerly absorbing Humbert’s “confession,” the reader suddenly stumbles over the rare word “turpid,” and then is taken unawares by the silly catchall “and everything,” which renders absurd the whole cluster, if not the reader. It is easy to confess, but the moral vocabulary we employ so readily may go no deeper than Humbert’s parody of it.

  Humbert’s own moral vocabulary would seem to find an ideally expressive vehicle in the person of Clare Quilty. Throughout the narrative Humbert is literally and figuratively pursued by Quilty, who is by turns ludicrous and absurd, sinister and grotesque. For a while Humbert is certain that his “shadow” and nemesis is his Swiss cousin, Detective Trapp, and when Lolita agrees and says, “Perhaps he is Trapp,” she is summarizing Quilty’s role in the novel. Quilty is so ubiquitous because he formulates Humbert’s entrapment, his criminal passion, his sense of shame and self-hate. Yet Quilty embodies both “the truth and a caricature of it,” for he is at once a projection of Humbert’s guilt and a parody of the psychological Double; “Lo was playing a double game,” says Humbert punningly referring to Lolita’s tennis, the Doppelgänger parody, and the function of parody as game.

  The Double motif figures prominently throughout Nabokov, from the early thirties in Despair and Laughter in the Dark (where the Albinus-Axel Rex pairing rehearses the Humbert-Quilty doubling), to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and on through Bend Sinister, the story “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, which offers a monumental doubling (or, more properly, tripling). It is probably the most intricate and profound of all Doppelgänger novels, written at precisely the time when it seemed that the Double theme had been exhausted in modern literature, and this achievement was very likely made possible by Nabokov’s elaborate parody of the theme in Lolita, which renewed his sense of the artistic efficacy of another literary “thing which had once been fresh and bright but which was now worn to a thread” (Sebastian Knight, p. 91).

  By making Clare Quilty too clearly guilty,31 Nabokov is assaulting the convention of the good and evil “dual selves” found in the traditional Double tale. Humbert would let some of us believe that when he kills Quilty in Chapter Thirty-five, Part Two, the good poet has exorcised the bad monster, but the two are finally not to be clearly distinguished: when Humbert and Quilty wrestle, “I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.” Although the parody culminates in this “silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati”, it is sustained throughout the novel. In traditional Doppelgänger fiction the Double representing the reprehensible self is often described as an ape. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1871), Stavrogin tells Verkhovensky, “you’re my ape”; in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Hyde plays “apelike tricks,” attacks and kills with “apelike fury” and “apelike spite”; and in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1845), the criminal self is literally an ape. But “good” Humbert undermines the doubling by often calling himself an ape, rather than Quilty, and when the two face one another, Quilty also calls Humbert an ape. This transference is forcefully underscored when Humbert refers to himself as r
unning along like “Mr. Hyde,” his “talons still tingling.” In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Kurtz is Marlow’s “shadow” and “shade.” Although Humbert calls Quilty his “shadow,” the pun on Humbert’s name (ombre = shadow) suggests that he is as much a shadow as Quilty, and like the shadow self who pursues the professor in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Shadow” (1850), Humbert is dressed all in black. Quilty in fact first regards Humbert as possibly being “some familiar and innocuous hallucination” of his own; and in the novel’s closing moments the masked narrator addresses Lolita and completes this transferral: “And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations.” The book might have been told by “C.Q.,” the doubling reversed; “H.H.” is simply a better artist, more likely to possess the “secret of durable pigments.”

  If the Humbert-Quilty doubling is a conscious parody of “William Wilson” (1839), it is with good reason, for Poe’s story is unusual among Doppelgänger tales in that it presents a reversal of the conventional situation: the weak and evil self is the main character, pursued by the moral self, whom he kills. Nabokov goes further and with one vertiginous sweep stands the convention on its head: in terms of the nineteenth-century Double tale, it should not even be necessary to kill Quilty and what he represents, for Humbert has already declared his love for Lolita before he goes to Quilty’s Pavor Manor, and, in asking the no longer nymphic Lolita to go away with him, he has transcended his obsession. Although Humbert’s unqualified expression of “guilt” comes at the end of the novel, in the chronology of events it too occurs before he kills Quilty. As a “symbolic” act, the killing is gratuitous; the parodic design is complete.

  Quilty rightly balks at his symbolic role: “I’m not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd!” he tells Humbert, and his words are well taken, for in this scene Humbert is trying to make him totally responsible, and the poem which he has Quilty read aloud reinforces his effort, and again demonstrates how a Nabokov parody moves beyond the “obscure fun” of stylistic imitation to connect with the most serious region of the book. It begins as a parody of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” but ends by undercutting all the confessing in which “remorseful” Humbert has just been engaged: “because of all you did / because of all I did not / you have to die.” Since Quilty has been described as “the American Maeterlinck,” it goes without saying that his ensuing death scene should be extravagantly “symbolic.” Because one is not easily rid of an “evil” self, Quilty, indomitable as Rasputin, is almost impossible to kill; but the idea of exorcism is rendered absurd by his comically prolonged death throes, which, in the spirit of Canto V of The Rape of the Lock, burlesque the gore and rhetoric of literary death scenes ranging from the Elizabethan drama to the worst of detective novels and action films. (“Chum,” Humbert’s revolver, parodies the “phallic” pistols of “Freudian” Westerns and the American Gun Mystique at large.) Quilty returns to the scene of the crime—a bed—and it is here that Humbert finally corners him. When Humbert fires his remaining bullets at close range, Quilty “lay back, and a big pink bubble with juvenile connotations formed on his lips, grew to the size of a toy balloon, and vanished.” The last details emphasize the mock-symbolic association with Lolita; the monstrous self that has devoured Lolita, bubble gum, childhood, and all, is “symbolically” dead, but as the bubble explodes, so does the Gothic Doppelgänger convention, with all its own “juvenile connotations” about identity, and we learn shortly that Humbert is still “all covered with Quilty.” Guilt is not to be exorcised so readily—McFate is McFate, to coin a Humbertism—and the ambiguities of human experience and identity are not to be reduced to mere “dualities.” Instead of the successful integration of a neatly divisible self, we are left with “Clare Obscure” and “quilted Quilty,” the patchwork self. Quilty refuses to die, just as the recaptured nose in Gogol’s extraordinary Double story of that name (1836) would not at first stick to its owner’s face. The reader who has expected the solemn moral-ethical absolutes of a Poe, Dostoevsky, Mann, or Conrad Doppelgänger fiction instead discovers himself adrift in a fantastic, comic cosmos more akin to Gogol’s. Having hoped that Humbert would master his “secret sharer,” we find instead that his quest for his “slippery self” figuratively resembles Major Kovaliov’s frantic chase after his own nose through the spectral streets of St. Petersburg, and that Humbert’s “quest” has its mock “ending” in a final confrontation that, like the end of “The Overcoat” (1842), is not a confrontation at all.

  The parodic references to R. L. Stevenson suggest that Nabokov had in mind Henry Jekyll’s painfully earnest discovery of the “truth” that “man is not only one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines.” The “serial selves” of Pale Fire “outstrip” Stevenson and a good many other writers, and rather than undermining Humbert’s guilt, the Double parody in Lolita locks Humbert within that prison of mirrors where the “real self” and its masks blend into one another, the refracted outlines of good and evil becoming terrifyingly confused.

  Humbert’s search for the whereabouts and identity of Detective Trapp (Quilty) invites the reader to wend his way through a labyrinth of clues in order to solve this mystery, a process which both parallels and parodies the Poe “tale of ratiocination.” When Humbert finds Lolita and presses her for her abductor’s name,

  She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all—“Do you really want to know who it was? Well it was—”

  And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago.

  Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of rendering—she was talking but I sat melting in my golden peace—of rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now. (p2.c29.1.)

  Even here Humbert withholds Quilty’s identity, though the “astute reader” may recognize that “Waterproof” is a clue which leads back to an early scene at the lake, in which Charlotte had said that Humbert’s watch was waterproof and Jean Farlow had alluded to Quilty’s Uncle Ivor (by his first name only), and then had almost mentioned Clare Quilty by name: Ivor “told me a completely indecent story about his nephew. It appears—” But she is interrupted and the chapter ends. This teasing exercise in ratiocination—“peace” indeed!—is the detective trap, another parody of the reader’s assumptions and expectations, as though even the most astute reader could ever fully discover the identity of Quilty, Humbert, or of himself.

  Provided with Quilty’s name, Humbert now makes his way to Pavor Manor, that latter-day House of Usher on Grimm Road, where the extended and variegated parodies of Poe are laid to rest. All the novel’s parodic themes are concluded in this chapter. Its importance is telescoped by Humbert’s conclusion: “This, I said to myself, was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty.” In form, of course, this bravura set piece is not a play; but, as a summary parodic commentary on the main action, it does function in the manner of an Elizabethan play-within-the-play, and its “staging” underscores once more the game-element central to the book.

  Simultaneous with these games is a fully novelistic process that shows Humbert traveling much further than the 27,000 miles he and Lolita literally traverse. Foolish John Ray describes Humbert’s as “a tragic tal
e tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis” and, amazingly enough, he turns out to be right. The reader sees Humbert move beyond his obsessional passion to a not altogether straightforward declaration of genuine love (here) and, finally, to a realization of the loss suffered not by him but by Lolita (here). It is expressed on the next to the last page in a long and eloquent passage that, for the first time in the novel, is in no way undercut by parody or qualified by irony. Midway through this “last mirage of wonder and hopelessness,” the reader is invoked again, because Humbert’s moral apotheosis, so uniquely straightforward, constitutes the end game and Nabokov’s final trompe-l’oeil. If the reader has long since decided that there is no “moral reality” in the novel, and in his sophisticated way has accepted that, he may well miss this unexpected move in the farthest corner of the board and lose the game after all. It is the last time the reader will be addressed directly, for the game is about over, as is the novel.

  In addition to sustaining the game-element, the authorial patterning reminds us that Lolita is but one part of that universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of Nabokov, who would join Humbert in his lament that words do indeed have their limitations, and that “the past is the past”; to live in it, as Humbert tried, is to die. That the author of Speak, Memory should suggest this surely establishes the moral dimension of Lolita; and in the light of Johan Huizinga’s remark that “play is outside the range of good and bad,”32 Lolita becomes an even more extraordinary achievement.

  When in The Gift Nabokov writes of Fyodor’s poem, “At the same time he had to take great pains not to lose either his control of the game, or the viewpoint of the plaything,” he is defining the difficulties he faced in writing novels whose full meaning depends on the reader’s having a spatial view of the book. It should be evident by now how the parody and patterning create the distance necessary for a clear view of the “plaything,” and Nabokov reinforces one’s sense of the novel-as-gameboard by having an actual game in progress within Lolita: the seemingly continuous match between Humbert and Gaston Godin—a localized, foreground action which in turn telescopes both the Humbert-Quilty “Double game” being played back and forth across the gameboard of America and the overriding contest waged above the novel, between the author and the reader.33 Humbert and Gaston play chess “two or three times weekly” in Humbert’s study, and several times Nabokov carefully links Lolita with the Queen in their game (here). One evening while they are playing, Humbert gets a telephone call from Lolita’s music teacher informing him that Lolita has again missed her lesson, the boldest lie he has caught her in, indicating that he is soon to lose her: