The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (10 page)

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,

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 tale 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:

In their respective ways, all the players want to capture “that juicy queen”: poor homosexual Gaston, quite literally; pornographer Quilty, for only one purpose; pervert and poet Humbert, in two ways, first carnally but then artistically, out of love; and the common reader, who would either rescue Lolita by judging and condemning Humbert, or else participate vicariously, which would make him of Quilty’s party—though there is every reason to think that the attentive reader will sooner or later share Humbert’s perspective: “
In my chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud.
”

Humbert is being too modest at the outset of
Lolita
when he says “
it is only a game
,” for it is one in which everything on the board “breath[es] with life,” as Nabokov writes of the match between Luzhin and Turati in
The Defense
. Radical and dizzying shifts in focus are created in the reader’s mind as he oscillates between a sense that he is by turns confronting characters in a novel and pieces in a game—as if a telescope were being spun 360 degrees on its axis, allowing one to look alternately through one
end and then the other. The various “levels” of
Lolita
are of course not the New Criticism’s “levels of meaning,” for the telescopic and global views of the “plaything” should enable one to perceive these levels or dimensions as instantaneous—as though, to adapt freely an image used by Mary McCarthy to describe
Pale Fire
, one were looking down on three or more games being played simultaneously by two chess masters on several separate glass boards, each arranged successively above the other.
³⁴
A first reading of
Lolita
rarely affords this limpid, multiform view, and for many reasons, the initially disarming and distractive quality of its ostensible subject being foremost. But the uniquely exhilarating experience of rereading it on its own terms derives from the discovery of a totally new book in place of the old, and the recognition that its habit of metamorphosis has happily described the course of one’s own perceptions. What Jorge Luis Borges says of Pierre Menard, author of the
Quixote
, surely holds for Vladimir Nabokov, the author of
Lolita
: he “has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading.”

A
LFRED
A
PPEL
, J
R
.

Palo Alto, California
January 31, 1968

Wilmette, Illinois
May 21, 1990