The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (58 page)

Poe is referred to more than twenty times in Lolita (echoes of “my darling” haven’t been counted), far more than any other writer (followed by Mérimée, Shakespeare, and Joyce, in that order). Not surprisingly, Poe allusions have been the most readily identifiable to readers and earlier commentators (I pointed out several in my 1967
Wisconsin Studies
article,
“Lolita
: The Springboard of Parody” [see
bibliography
]). See also the earlier articles by Elizabeth Phillips (“The Hocus-Pocus of
Lolita, “Literature and Psychology
, X [Summer 1960], 97–101) and Arthur F. DuBois (“Poe and
Lolita,” CEA Critic
, XXVI [No. 6, 1963], 1, 7). More recent is Carl R. Proffer’s thorough compilation in
Keys to Lolita
(henceforth called
Keys
), pp. 34–45.

Although my Notes seldom discuss in detail the significance of the literary allusions they limn, Poe’s conspicuous presence surely calls for a few general remarks; subsequent Notes will establish the most specific—and obvious—links between H.H. and Poe (e.g., their “child brides”; see
Virginia … Edgar
). Poe is appropriate for many reasons. He wrote the kind of
Doppelgänger
tale (“William Wilson”) which the H.H.-Quilty relationship seemingly parallels but ultimately upends, and he of course “fathered” the detective tale. Although, as a reader, Nabokov abhorred the detective story, he was not alone in recognizing that the genre’s properties are well-suited to the fictive treatment of metaphysical questions and problems of identity and perception. Thus—along with other contemporary writers such as Graham Greene (
Brighton Rock
, 1938), Raymond Queneau (
Pierrot mon ami [Pierrot]
, 1942), Jorge Luis Borges (“Death and the Compass,” “An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain,” “The Garden of Forking Paths” [first published in
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
], and “The South”), Alain Robbe-Grillet (
Les Gommes
[
The Erasers
], 1953), Michel Butor (
L’Emploi du temps
[
Passing Time
],
1956), and Thomas Pynchon (
V
., 1963)—Nabokov often transmuted or parodied the forms, techniques, and themes of the detective story, as in
Despair, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Lolita
, and, less directly, in
The Eye
, where, Nabokov said, “The texture of the tale mimics that of detective fiction.” The reader of
Lolita
is invited to wend his way through a labyrinth of clues in order to solve the mystery of Quilty’s identity, which in part makes
Lolita
a “tale of ratiocination,” to use Poe’s phrase (see
Quilty, Clare
). Early in the novel one is told that H.H. is a murderer. Has he killed Charlotte? Or Lolita? (See also
Keys
, p. 39.) The reader is led to expect both possibilities, and his various attempts at ratiocination should ultimately tell the reader as much about his own mind as about the “crimes,” “identities,” or “psychological development” of fictional characters. For allusions to detective story writers other than Poe, see
Agatha
(Agatha Christie),
Shirley Holmes
(Conan Doyle), and
detective tale
and
Arsène Lupin
(Maurice Leblanc).

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.