“Histoire … anglaise”: French; “A Short History of English Poetry.”
not human, but nymphic: like Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” (Babbitt, 1922), Nabokov’s “nymphet” has entered the language, though the latest dictionary entries which Lolita has inspired are as inelegant as they are inaccurate: nymph: “a woman of loose morals” (Webster’s Third New International, echoed by the Random House Dictionary). The Penguin English Dictionary, G. N. Garmonsway, ed., gives under nymphet: “(coll.) very young but sexually attractive girl” (H.H., who strives so desperately to expropriate idiomatic English, would appreciate that “colloquial”). “Nymphet” continues to be loosely used. Witness People magazine: “She plays Kelly Bundy, the shopping-mall nymphet, on Fox’s comedy hit Married … with Children, but Christina Applegate says she—” reports the columnist, though the lovely eighteen-year-old actress in the photo could pass for twenty-five (September 24, 1990, p. 108). As for nymph, the mythological and zoological definitions are primary. In Greek and Roman mythology, a nymph is “One of the inferior divinities of nature represented as beautiful maidens dwelling in the mountains, waters, forests, etc.” Nympholepsy, H.H.’s malady (hence, “nympholept”), is “a species of demoniac enthusiasm supposed to seize one bewitched by a nymph; a frenzy of emotion, as for some unattainable ideal” (more specifically, in Blakiston’s New Gould Medical Dictionary, it is defined as “ecstasy of an erotic type”). Under the entry for “The Nymphs” in The Book of Imaginary Beings (1969), Jorge Luis Borges notes that “Paracelsus limited their dominion to water, but the ancients thought the world was full of Nymphs… [some] Nymphs were held to be immortal or, as Plutarch obscurely intimates, lived for above 9,720 years … The exact number of the Nymphs is unknown; Hesiod gives us the figure three thousand … Glimpsing them could cause blindness and, if they were naked, death. A line of Propertius affirms this.” H.H. echoes these definitions. Here and on the following pages he alludes to “spells,” “magic,” “fantastic powers,” and “deadly demons” (for various enchantments, see Mirana [Fata Morgana], it was Lilith [Lilith], Percy Elphinstone [elves], Little Carmen [Carmen], incubus [an incubus], and heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit [king of the elves]). Lolita’s “inhuman” and “bewitching charms” suggest that she is Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819) in bobby socks (Nabokov translated the poem into Russian in The Empyrean Path, 1923), and that the novel is in part a unique variant of the archetypal tale of a mortal destroyed by his love for a supernatural femme fatale, “The Lovely Lady Without Pity” of ballad, folk tale, and fairy tale. Nabokov calls Lolita a “fairy tale,” and his nymph a “fairy princess”; see Percy Elphinstone.
One of Nabokov’s lepidopterological finds is known as “Nabokov’s Wood-Nymph” (belonging to the family Nymphalidae; see powdered Mrs. Leigh … Vanessa van Ness), and he is not unaware that a “nymph” is also defined as “a pupa,” or “the young of an insect undergoing incomplete metamorphosis.” Crucial to an understanding of Lolita is some sense of the various but simultaneous metamorphoses undergone by Lolita, H.H., the book, the author, and the reader, who is manipulated by the novel’s game-element and illusionistic devices to such an extent that he too can be said to become, at certain moments, another of Vladimir Nabokov’s creations—an experience which is bound to change him. The butterfly is thus a controlling metaphor that enriches Lolita in a more fundamental and organic manner than, say, the Odyssey does Joyce’s Ulysses. Just as the nymph undergoes a metamorphosis in becoming the butterfly, so everything in Lolita is constantly in the process of metamorphosis, including the novel itself—a set of “notes” being compiled by an imprisoned man during a fifty-six-day period for possible use at his trial, emerging as a book after his death, and then only after it has passed through yet another stage, the nominal “editorship” of John Ray, Jr. As Lolita turns from a girl into a woman, so H.H.’s lust becomes love. His sense of a “safely solipsized” Lolita is replaced by his awareness that she was his “own creation” with “no will, no consciousness—indeed, no life of her own”, that he did not know her (here), and that their sexual intimacy only isolated him more completely from the helpless girl. These “metamorphoses” enable H.H. to transform a “crime” into a redeeming work of art, and the reader watches the chrysalis come to life. “And a metamorphosis is a thing always exciting to watch,” says Nabokov in Gogol (p. 43), referring to etymological rather than entomological phenomena (see A key (342!) and Chestnut Court; also follow the multifarious permutations of “Humbert”).
On his first night with Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters hotel, H.H. experiences “a confusion of perception metamorphosing her into eyes-pots of moonlight or a fluffy flowering bush”, and, anticipating the design and progression of Lolita, the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) mentions the readers who “felt baffled by [The Prismatic Bezel’s] habit of metamorphosis” (p. 93; for the complete passage, see the epigraph to the Introduction). When Nabokov in his lectures at Cornell discussed “the theme of transformation” in R. L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Gogol’s The Overcoat, and Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, he said that Stevenson’s tale is a “thriller and mystery only in respect to artistic creativity. It is a phenomenon of style, a transformation through the art of writing.” He likened the Jekyll-Hyde transformation to the metamorphosis of the larva into the pupa into the butterfly, and imagined Jekyll’s final emergence from the melting and blackened features of the evil Hyde as “the rush of panic” which must accompany “the feeling of hatching.” Once again, as in his book on Gogol, Nabokov described his own performance by defining the art of another. As a metaphor for the artistic process, the nymph’s cycle suggests a transcendent design. See Introduction, here. For entomological allusions, see John Ray, Jr..
bubble of hot poison: see pink bubble; the bubble breaks.
faunlet: in mythology, the faun is a woodland deity represented as a man having the ears, horns, tail, and hind legs of a goat; a satyr. The diminutive form is H.H.’s coinage. See Nabokov’s letter in New Statesman, Nov. 17, 1967, p. 680.
fateful elf: see Percy Elphinstone for a summary of elves and the novel as fairy-tale.
pollutive: H.H.’s variant of pollution; the less common meaning, “emission of semen at other times than in coitus.”
pseudolibidoes: H.H.’s usage (see here for “libidream”) of libido: the sexual impulse; to Freud, the instinctual drive behind all human activities.
Children … 1933: the Act actually reads: “ ‘Child’ means a person under the age of fourteen years … ‘Young Person’ means a person who has attained the age of fourteen years and is under the age of seventeen years.” From Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 23 & 24 Geo. 5, c. 12, §107 (1). No specific definition of girl-child is given; but, even if H.H.’s quotation is wrong, he is a sound legal scholar, for a child must be eight years old to incur criminal liability. See here.
Massachusetts… “a wayward child”… immoral persons: an accurate transcription; the parenthetical phrase is also a direct quotation from Mass. Anno. Laws ch. 119 §52 (1957).
Hugh Broughton: controversial Puritan divine and pamphleteer (1549–1612). The allusion is to his A Consent of Scripture (1588), an eccentric discourse on Biblical chronology.
Rahab: the Canaanite prostitute of Joshua 2: 1–21.
Virgil … perineum: the Latin poet (70–19 B.C.). The perineum includes the urinogenital passages and the rectum. In the 1958 edition it read peritonium (the double serous membrane which lines the cavity of the abdomen). Although H.H.’s grotesque error is intentional on Nabokov’s part, he decided to correct it here because the mistake, if discerned, might be taken for the author’s, or remain ambiguous.
King Akhnaten’s … Nile daughters: Akhnaten of Egypt (reigned 1375–1358 B.C.) and Nefertiti had a total of seven daughters. On his monuments, the king is shown with six. H.H. also loses a “daughter.”
fascinum: Latin; a penis of ivory used in certain ancient erotic rit
es.
East Indian provinces: the Lepchas are a Mongoloid people of Sikkim and the Darjeeling district of India. What H.H. says is true, and Nabokov thought H.H. may have got it from somewhere in Havelock Ellis’s monumental, many-volumed Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1891).
Dante … month of May: Dante was born between May 15 and June 15, 1265. He was therefore nine years old when he met Beatrice in 1274, and she was supposedly eight. There was no romance.
Petrarch … Laureen: Petrarch was born July 20, 1304. He was therefore twenty-three when he met Laura on April 6, 1327. She remains unknown to this day, and all attempts to identify her with historical persons are purely speculative. Her age therefore cannot be determined.
hills of Vaucluse: an area in Southeastern France, the capital of which is Avignon. It was Petrarch’s favorite home, but he found that natural beauty there only added to the sense of his loss of Laura.
“enfant … fourbe”: French; “sly and lovely child.”
it was Lilith: in Jewish legend, Lilith was Adam’s wife before Eve. Also a female demon who attacked children and a famous witch in the demonology of the Middle Ages. In Pale Fire, a Zemblan “society sculptor” finds in Charles the Beloved’s sister “what he sought and … used her breasts and feet for his Lilith Calling Back Adam” (p. 108). See not human, but nymphic for more on enchantments.
tiddles: H.H. here completes his reference to a game of tiddlywinks on the previous page: “I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup.” A player “winks” the tiddle (a small piece) into the cup in tiddlywinks, so these “tiddles” are a metaphor for H.H.’s collected thoughts about nymphets. Tiddles also means “trifles”; from tiddle, an obsolete verb except in dialect or slang; to fondle, to fuss or trifle.
this is only a game: in the Wisconsin Studies interview, Nabokov said, “Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” The pun on H.H.’s name includes the game of ombre (see “Humbert Humbert”), which is played in Canto III of Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714); see lines 87–100. Also see the games H.H. plays here, here, and here.
métro: the Paris subway.
CHAPTER 6
voluptas: Latin; sensual pleasures.
the Madeleine: a church in Paris (a very prominent landmark), and the fact that H.H. encounters a streetwalker here slyly alludes to the fact that the church is named after Mary Magdelene, the repentant prostitute.
frétillement: French; a wiggle.
“Cent”: French; one hundred (francs).
“Tant pis”: French; “Too bad!”
petit cadeau: French; small gift.
“dix-huit”: French; “eighteen” (years old).
“Oui, ce n’est pas bien”: French; “Yes, that is not nice.”
grues: French; slang word for prostitutes.
“Il était malin … truc-là”: French; “The man who invented this trick was a smart one.”
poser un lapin: French; to stand someone up.
“Tu es … de dire ça”: French; “You are very nice to say that.”
avant qu’on se couche: French; before we go to bed.
“Je vais m’acheter des bas”: French; “I am going to buy myself some stockings.”
“Regardez-moi … brune”: French; “Take a look at this beautiful brunette.” The 1958 edition omitted the period after the parenthesis.
qui pourrait arranger la chose: French; who could fix it.
son argent: French; her money.
lui: French; himself (pronoun which is redundant and serves to emphasize a noun).
Marie … stellar name: derived from the Virgin’s name; to Biblical commentators, it means stellamaris, star of the sea. H.H. has more fun with “stellar” later (see Murphy-Fantasia).
CHAPTER 7
tachycardia: a term from pathology; abnormal rapidity of the heart’s action.
mes malheurs: French; my misfortunes.
français moyen: French; the average Frenchman, the man in the street.
CHAPTER 8
pot-au-feu: French; a common stew, containing meat, vegetables, and almost anything else.
merkin: an artificial female pudendum, or its false hair.
á la gamine: French; in imitation of a cute young girl.
mairie: French; town hall.
melanic: pigmented; hence, black or dark.
baba: although it is Franco-Russian for a ring-shaped pastry imbued with rum, Nabokov intends it otherwise: “ ‘Baba’ colloquially means in Russian any female on the common side; a blousy, vulgar woman. It is also used metaphorically for certain thick, sturdy, columellar, menhirlike, compact things, such as the pastry romovaya baba (but this has nothing to do with its meaning here). Originally, baba meant a peasant woman.”
I felt like Marat … stab me: Jean-Paul Marat (1743–1793), French revolutionist stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday; the subject of a famous painting by Jacques-Louis David, Marat assassiné (1793). The “original” tub can be seen at both Madame Tussaud’s Wax Works in London and at Paris’s wax museum, Musée Grevin. In Pale Fire, John Shade imagines how his biographer would describe him shaving in his bath: “… he’d / Sit like a king there, and like Marat bleed” (lines 893–894). On his travels, student Van Veen is shown “the peasant-bare footprint of Tolstoy preserved in the clay of a motor court in Utah where he had written the tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general’s bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool” (Ada, p. 171)—a combination of Murad (from Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad), General Murat (Napoleon’s brother-in-law and king of Naples), and Marat.
Paris-Soir: a sensationalistic daily newspaper; now France-Soir, and an excellent example of how a small quotidian detail can telescope a character’s sensibility. In Nabokov’s story “The Assistant Producer” (1943), set in émigré Paris of the thirties, General Golubkov, head of the vicious, vulgar, Ur-Hitleristic right-wing White Warriors Union, “escorts[s] his wife to her dressmaker, [and] sat there for a while reading the Paris-Soir” (Nabokov’s Dozen, p. 87).
Estampe: a print or engraving. H.H.’s “moral apotheosis” at the end of the book parallels the way the landscape evolves from this flat, unpeopled, clichéd scene to the rich landscape depicted here. The reader is reminded that a landscape is a construct, a symbolic unit—while “nature” is random phenomena.
mon oncle d’Amérique: French; the proverbial rich American uncle who dies, leaving one a fortune; a curtain line in many old-fashioned melodramas.
Nansen … passport: the special passport issued to émigrés in Europe before World War II; the document figures prominently in the story, “ ‘That in Aleppo Once …’ ” in Nabokov’s Dozen (1958).
préfecture: French; police headquarters.
“Mais qui est-ce?”: French; “But who is it?”
quite a scholar: the ten-volume Jean Christophe (1904–1912), by the Frenchman Romain Rolland (1866–1944), is a panoramic novel of society, admired no more by Nabokov than by H.H. (see Pnin, p. 142).
j’ai demannde pardonne: French; “I beg your pardon.” The tense is incorrect (should be “je”); and the wrong spelling—an extra n in both words—indicates a Russian accent.
gredin: French; scoundrel, villain.
Maximovich … taxies back to me: see here.
fructuate: rare; to bear fruit, to fructify.
Agatha Christie: A Murder Is Announced is the actual title of a 1950 novel by Agatha Christie (1891–1976), the well-known English mystery writer. A murder is announced on the next page (Clare Quilty’s; see The Murdered Playwright).
Percy Elphinstone: Elphinstone and his books are also genuine, according to Nabokov, though it has been impossible to document this. Nabokov recalled finding A Vagabond in Italy “in a hospital library, the nearest thing to a prison library.” But the town of Elphinstone is invented. H.H. calls Annabel “the initial fateful elf in my life” (p. 18); and Lolita’s original home town in the Midwest was “Pisky,” another form of pixie or elf. H.H. allows how �
��elfish chance offered me the sight of a delightful child of Lolita’s age.” When H.H. deposits Lolita in the Elphinstone Hospital, it is the last time he will see the nymphic incarnation of his initial “elf”; for him, the “fairy tale” (and he imagines himself a “fairy-tale nurse”) ends in Elph’s Stone just as it had begun in the town of “elf.” Quilty in pursuit is seen as the “Erlkönig,” the king of the elves in Goethe’s poem of that name (see heterosexual Erlkönig in pursuit). At The Enchanted Hunters hotel, on the night that H.H. first possesses Lolita, he notes, “Nothing could have been more childish than … the purplish spot on her naked neck where a fairy tale vampire had feasted.” Quilty’s Pavor [Latin: fear, panic] Manor turns out to be on Grimm Road (p. 291), and when H.H. goes to kill him, the door “swung open as in a medieval fairy tale.” As a birthday present, H.H. gives Lolita a de luxe edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (The Little Mermaid); and allusions are made to Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, The Sleeping Beauty, The Emperor’s New Clothes (Hansel and Gretel), and Bluebeard (sister Ann). “What a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming I was!” declares H.H. The simplicity of Lolita’s “story,” such as it is—“plot,” in the conventional sense, may be paraphrased in three sentences—and the themes of deception, enchantment, and metamorphosis are akin to the fairy tale (see not human, but nymphic); while the recurrence of places and motifs and the presence of three principal characters recall the formalistic design and symmetry of those archetypal tales (see Never will Emma rally … timely tear). But the fate of Nabokov’s “fairy princess” and the novel’s denouement reverse the fairy-tale process, even though H.H. offers Lolita the opportunity of a formulaic fairy-tale ending: “we shall live happily ever after.”
The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Page 46