It is also in part through Poe that Nabokov manages to suggest some consistently held attitudes toward language and literature. H.H. says of his artistic labors, “The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly. Why?.” The rhetorical question is coy enough, because he has answered it at the beginning of his narrative; he hasn’t failed, but neither can he ever be entirely successful, because “Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!”—an admission many Romantic and Symbolist writers would not make. Nabokov’s remark about Joyce’s giving “too much verbal body to words” (Playboy interview) succinctly defines the burden the post-Romantics placed on the word, as though it were an endlessly resonant object rather than one component in a referential system of signs (see seva ascendes … quidquam for a parody of Joycean stream-of-consciousness writing). H.H.’s acknowledgment of the limitations of language leaves many writers open to criticism, especially Romantic poets such as Poe. “When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville,” said Nabokov; “I tore apart the fantasies of Poe,” writes John Shade in Pale Fire (line 632 of the poem); the implications are clear enough. In Lolita, his choice of both subject matter and narrator parody Poe’s designation, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” of the “most poetical topic in the world”; “the death of a beautiful woman … and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover” (see also my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, op. cit., p. 236). Both Annabel Lee and Lolita “die,” the latter figuratively as well as literally, in terms of her fading nymphic qualities and escape from H.H., who seems to invoke yet another of Poe’s lost ladies when he calls Lolita “Lenore” (though the primary allusion is to Bürger’s poem, said Nabokov; see Lenore).
The speaker in Poe’s “Lenore” gropes for the right elegiac chord: “How shall the ritual, then, be read?—the requiem how be sung/By you—by yours, the evil eye,—by yours, the slanderous tongue / That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?” How shall it be “sung” is also the main question in Lolita, and Nabokov found his answer in a parodic style that seems to parody all styles, including the novel’s own. “You talk like a book, Dad,” Lolita tells H.H.; and, in order to protect his own efforts to capture her essence, he tries to exhaust the “fictional gestures,” such as Edgar Poe’s, which would reduce the nym-phet’s ineffable qualities to a convention of language or literature. “Well-read Humbert” thus toys with one writer after another, as though only through parody and caricature can he rule out the possibility of his memoir’s finally being nothing more than what the authorial voice in Invitation to a Beheading suggests to its captive creation: “Or is this all but obsolete romantic rot, Cincinnatus?” (p. 139).
four feet ten: see 58 Inchkeith Ave. for an involuted conversion to inches.
Lola: in addition to being a diminutive of “Dolores,” it is the name of the young cabaret entertainer who enchants a middle-aged professor in the German film, The Blue Angel (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg. Nabokov never saw the film (though he did see still photos from it) and doubted that he had the association in mind. Lola was played by Marlene Dietrich (1904– ), and it is worth noting that H.H. describes Lolita’s mother as having “features of a type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich” and, after he reports her death, bids “Adieu, Marlene!.” In Ada, Van Veen visits a don and his family, “a charming wife and a triplet of charming twelve-year-old daughters, Ala, Lolá and Lalage—especially Lalage” [“the age”—twelve, a nymphet’s prime (p. 353)].
Dolores: derived from the Latin, dolor: sorrow, pain (see Delectatio morosa … dolors). Traditionally an allusion to the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows, and the Seven Sorrows concerning the life of Jesus. H.H. observes a church, “Mission Dolores,” and takes advantage of the ready-made pun; “good title for book” (p. 158). Less spiritual are the sorrows detailed in “Dolores” (1866), by Algernon Swinburne (1837–1909), English poet (see also Keys, p. 28). “Our Lady of Pain” is its constant refrain, and her father is Priap, whom H.H. mentions several times (see Priap). The name Dolores is in two ways “closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book,” as John Ray says. When in the Afterword Nabokov defines the “nerves of the novel,” he concludes with “the tinkling sounds of the valley town coming up the mountain trail (on which I caught the first known female of Lycæides sublivens Nabokov)”. Diana Butler, in “Lolita Lepidoptera,” op. cit., p. 62, notes that this important capture was made at Telluride, Colorado (see here), and that in his paper on it, Nabokov identifies Telluride as a “cul-de-sac … at the end of two converging roads, one from Placerville, the other from Dolores” (The Lepidopterists’ News, VI, 1952). Dolores is in fact everywhere in that region: river, town, and county are so named. When H.H. finally confronts Quilty, he asks, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?.” “Dolly” is an appropriate diminutive (“you / took a dull doll to pieces / and threw its head away,” writes H.H. of Quilty). For the entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr.. On shipboard in Ada, Van Veen sees a film of Don Juan’s Last Fling in which Dolores the dancing girl turns out to be Ada (pp. 488–490). Ada later gives Van “a sidelong ‘Dolores’ glance” (p. 513).
in point of fact: the childhood “trauma” which H.H. will soon offer as the psychological explanation of his condition (see p. 13). H.H.’s first chapter is so extraordinarily short in order to mock the traditional novel’s expository opening. How reassuring, by comparison, are the initial paragraphs of those conventional novels—so anachronistic to Nabokov—which prepare the reader for the story about to unfold by supplying him with the complete psychological, social, and moral pre-histories of the characters. Anticipating such needs, H.H. poses the reader’s questions (“Did she have a precursor?”; “Oh when?”), and parodies more than that kind of reader dependence on such exposition. It may seem surprising in a supposedly “confessional” novel that this should be the narrator’s initial concern; but it is by way of a challenge to play, like the good-humored cry of “Avanti” with which Luzhin greets Turati in The Defense, before they begin their great match game. H.H.’s “point of fact” mocks the “scientific” certitude of psychiatrists who have turned intensely private myths and symbols—in short, fictions—into hard fact. The H.H. who is the subject of a case study immediately undercuts the persuasiveness of his own specific “trauma” by projecting it in fragments of another man’s verse; literary allusions, after all, point away from the unique, inviolable, formative “inner reality” of a neurotic or psychotic consciousness. Annabel Leigh, the object of H.H.’s unconsummated love, has no reality other than literary. See also Keys, p. 45.
princedom by the sea: a variant of the most famous line in “Annabel Lee.” Poe’s “kingdom” has been changed to accommodate the fact that H.H. is always an aspirant, never an absolute monarch. He calls Lolita “My Frigid Princess.”
noble-winged seraphs, envied: a pastiche composed of a phrase from line 11 of “Annabel Lee” and a verb from line 22. “Seraphs” are the highest of the nine orders of angels; in the Bible they have six wings, as well as hands and feet, and a human voice (Isaiah 6:2). “The seraph with his six flamingo wings” is invoked by John Shade in Pale Fire (line 225 of the poem).
tangle of thorns: another H.H., the penitent, confessor, and martyr to love, calls attention to his thorns, the immodest reference to so sacred an image suggesting that the reader would do well to judge H.H.’s tone rather than his deeds. When H.H. addresses the “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” as he will do so often, he summarizes the judicial proclivities of those literal-minded and moralistic readers who, having soberly considered what John Ray, Jr., has said, already hate “Humbert the Horrible.” H.H. calls Lolita “crucified”—a verb that sincerely projects his “moral apotheosis.”
CHAPTER 2
Jerome Dunn, the alpinist: in a novel so allusive as L
olita it is only natural to be suspicious of the most innocuous references, and to search for allusions under every bush. Anticipating the efforts of future exegetes, I will occasionally offer non-notes—“anti-annotations” which simply state that Nabokov intended no allusion whatsoever. Thus, “Jerome Dunn” is non-allusive, as are “Clarence Choate Clark,” H.H.’s lawyer, and John Ray’s residence of “Widworth, Mass..” For important caveats in Nabokov’s own words, see Aubrey McFate … devil of mine and Orange … and Emerald.
paleopedology and Aeolian harps: respectively, the branch of pedology concerned with the soils of past geological ages, and a box-shaped musical instrument on which the wind produces varying harmonies (after Aeolus, Greek god of the winds). A favorite romantic metaphor for the poet’s sensibility.
midge: a gnat-like insect. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..
Sybil: or sibyl, from the Greek; any of several prophetesses credited to widely separate parts of the ancient world. H.H.’s aunt is well-named, since she predicts her own death.
Mirana: a heat-shimmer blend of “mirage,” “se mirer” (French; to look at oneself; admire oneself), “Mirabella,” and “Fata Morgana” (a kind of mirage most frequently seen in the Strait of Messina, and formerly considered the work of fairies who would thus lure sailors aground). Bewitching Lolita is often characterized as a fairy (see Percy Elphinstone); the latter word is derived from the Latin word fatum (fate, destiny), and H.H. is pursued by bedeviling “Aubrey McFate” (see Aubrey McFate … devil of mine).
Mon … papa: French; my dear little Daddy.
Don Quixote: the famous novel (1605, 1615) by Miguel Cervantes (1547–1616); see Donald Quix. Les Misérables (1862) is by Victor Hugo (1802–1885), French novelist, playwright, and poet; see L’autre soir … de ta vie?.
rose garden: see bodyguard of roses and Aubrey McFate … devil of mine for more school-house roses.
La Beauté Humaine: French; “The Human Beauty.” The book is invented, as is its author, whose name is a play on “nichon,” a French (slang) epithet for the female breast.
lycée: the basic institution of French secondary education; a student attends a lycée for seven years (from age eleven to eighteen).
CHAPTER 3
powdered Mrs. Leigh … Vanessa van Ness: Poe’s “Annabel Lee”; here it is spelled Lee. The Red Admirable (or Admiral) butterfly, which figures throughout Nabokov, is Vanessa atalanta, family Nymphalidae (for more on “nymph,” see not human, but nymphic); and butterflies, as well as women, are “powdered.” H.H. is also alluding to Jonathan Swift’s (1667–1745) “Vanessa,” as he called the young woman whose passion he awakened (for the Swift allusion, see also Keys, p. 96). Nabokov expands the dual allusion in Pale Fire. John Shade addresses “My dark Vanessa, Crimson-barred, my blest / My Admirable butterfly!…” (lines 270–271); and, in his note to these lines, Charles Kinbote quotes from Swift’s “Cadenus and Vanessa,” though he doesn’t identify it by name: “When, lo! Vanessa in her bloom / Advanced like Atalanta’s star.” He also alludes to “Vanessa” ’s actual name thusly: “Van homrigh, Esther!” (p. 172)—thereby underscoring at least the alphabetical arrangement of Swift’s anagramour (let me laugh a little, too, gentlemen, as H.H. says here). But in his succinct way, H.H. has already anticipated Kinbote (“van Ness”). A Red Admirable lands on Shade’s arm the minute before he is killed (see lines 993–995 and Kinbote’s note for them) and the insect appears in King, Queen, Knave just after Nabokov has withdrawn his omniscience (p. 44). In the final chapter of Speak, Memory Nabokov recalls having seen in a Paris park, just before the war, a live Red Admirable being promenaded on a leash of thread by a little girl; “there was some vaguely repulsive symbolism about her sullen sport,” he writes (p. 306). When Van Veen casually mentions Ada’s having pointed out “some accursed insect,” the offended heroine parenthetically and angrily adds, “Accursed? Accursed? It was the newly described, fantastically rare vanessian, Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of Babylon College, Nebraska, realized, not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch’s best known imitators” (p. 158). See John Ray, Jr..
solipsism: a central word in Lolita. An epistemological theory that the self knows only its present state and is the only existent thing, and that “reality” is subjective; concern with the self at the expense of social relationships. See safely solipsized.
plage: French; beach.
chocolat glacé: French; in those days, an iced chocolate drink with whipped cream (today it means “chocolate ice cream”).
red rocks: see Roches Roses and Aubrey McFate … devil of mine.
lost pair of sunglasses: the sunglasses image connects Annabel and Lolita. H.H. first perceives her as his “Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses” (see Riviera love … over dark glasses). See also Keys, p. 43 and p. 143n.
point of possessing: for a comment on the “traumatic” nature of this experience, see natural climax. “My darling” echoes line 39 of “Annabel Lee” (see of my darling … my bride for the entire line, and Lo-lee-ta for the poem itself).
Corfu: Greek island.
CHAPTER 4
haze of stars: see Gray Star. In one sense, the novel begins and ends in “Gray Star.”
her spell: “spells” and “enchantments” are fundamental in Lolita. See not human, but nymphic, Little Carmen, and Cantrip … Mimir.
CHAPTER 5
manqué: French; unfulfilled.
uranists: H.H.’s own variant of the uncommon English word, uranism, derived from a Greek word for “spiritual” and meaning “homosexual.” Havelock Ellis uses it in Chapter Five of Psychology of Sex (1938), and claims the term was invented by the nineteenth-century legal official Karl Ulrichs.
Deux Magots: the famous Left Bank café in Paris, where intellectuals congregate. Magot is a kind of monkey, but “magots de Saxe” means “statuettes of saxe [porcelain]” (eighteenth-century). Nabokov purposely seats his uranists in this particular café, because he wants to invoke the simian association and the image of the grotesque Chinese porcelain figures.
pastiches: the “quotation” is an assemblage including bits and pieces of “Gerontion” (1920), by T. S. Eliot, the Anglo-American poet (1888–1965): “… Fräulein von Kulp / Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door” (lines 27–28); “… De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled …” (line 66); “… Gull against the wind, in the windy straits / Of Belle Isle …” (lines 69–70). See depraved May and Because … a sinner for other allusions to Eliot. Having small sympathy with some of Eliot’s social prejudices, Nabokov ironically describes in Ada a “Mr. Eliot, a Jewish businessman” (p. 5), who later meets the late-blooming banker (Eliot’s early vocation) Kithar Sween (= Eliot’s “Sweeney”), author of “The Waistline, a satire in free verse on Anglo-American feeding habits, and Cardinal Grishkin [= Eliot’s “Whispers of Immortality”], an overtly subtle yarn extolling the Roman faith” (p. 506). For The Four Quartets, see Pale Fire, lines 368–379. Nabokov said, “I was never exposed in the ’twenties and ’thirties, as so many of my coevals have been, to the poetry of Eliot and Pound. I read them late in the season, around 1945, in the guest room of an American friend’s house, and not only remained completely indifferent to them, but could not understand why anybody should bother about them. But I suppose that they preserve some sentimental value for such readers as discovered them at an earlier age than I did” (Playboy interview).
“Proustian theme … Bailey”: the letters of the English poet John Keats (1795–1821) to his close friend Benjamin Bailey (1791–1853) are among the important statements of Keats’s poetic theory. In Pale Fire, Kinbote measures the progress of poetry “from the caveman to Keats” (p. 289). H.H.’s “Proustian theme” is no doubt on the nature of time and memory. Marcel Proust (1871–1922)—the great French novelist, the first half of whose À la Recherche du temps perdu (Remembra
nce of Things Past, 1913–1927) was to Nabokov one of the four “greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century prose” (see J’ai toujours … Dublinois)—is also mentioned on here and here, and as noted Dolorès Disparue and Proustianized and Procrusteanized. He appears too in Pale Fire, pp. 87, 161–163, and 248, as well as in line 224 of Shade’s poem (p. 41), where he envisions eternity, and “… talks / With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks.” In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Knight’s hack biographer, Mr. Goodman, mentions “the French author M. Proust, whom Knight consciously or subconsciously copied” (p. 114); and Knight himself parenthetically remarks in a letter, “I am [not] apologizing for that Proustian parenthesis” (p. 52)—a device H.H. consciously indulges, as when he parenthetically “prolong[s] these Proustian intonations.” There are also many allusions to Proust in Ada (see pp. 9, 55–56, 66, 73, 168–169, 254, and 541).
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Page 45