Stalking Nabokov (76 page)

2
.   “ ‘And there happening through the whole kingdom of Bohemia, to be no seaport town whatever’

“ ‘How the deuce could there—Trim?’ cried my uncle Toby; ‘for Bohemia being totally inland, it could have happened no otherwise.’

“ ‘—It might,’ said Trim, ‘if it had pleased God’ ” (Sterne,
Tristram Shandy
, book 8, chap. 19).

3
.   There were a couple of occasions when Bohemia had a brief toe hold on the Adriatic, in the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Shakespeare’s source for
The Winter’s Tale
, Robert Greene’s
Pandosto
(1588), did once mention the coast of Bohemia. But Greene does not make it a turning point of the plot, as Johnson observes Shakespeare has made it.

4
.   Ably exposed by Richard Levin in
New Readings vs. Old Plays
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) and many subsequent articles, most collected in
Looking for an Argument: Critical Encounters with the New Approaches to the Criticism of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
(Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003).

5
.   Elizabeth Bruss,
Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 145–46; Christina Tekiner, “Time in
Lolita
,”
Modern Fiction Studies
25 (1979): 463–69; Leona Toker,
Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 198–227, esp. 208–11, quotation at 209; Alexander Dolinin, “Dvoinoe vremia u Nabokova: ot
Dara
k
Lolite
,” revised in “Nabokov’s Time Doubling: From
The Gift
to
Lolita
,”
Nabokov Studies
2 (1995): 3–40 (see his n. 1); Julian Connolly, “ ‘Nature’s Reality’ or Humbert’s ‘Fancy’? Scenes of Reunion and Murder in
Lolita
,”
Nabokov Studies
2 (1995): 41–61; Dieter Zimmer, in a forthcoming limited edition, to be published in Switzerland, of the German
Lolita
(personal communication); Barbara Wyllie, “ ‘Guilty of Killing Quilty’: The Central Dilemma of Nabokov’s
Lolita
,” NABOKV-L, November 21, 1994.

6
.   Note in
Conclusive Evidence
MS, VNA, cited
VNAY
147.

7
.   VN to Morris Bishop, October 12, 1947 (marked “46”), VNA.

8
.   Nabokov,
A Russian Beauty and Other Stories
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 220.

9
.   Interview of June 28, 1979.

10
.   Cf. Maurice Couturier,
Textual Communication: A Print-Based Theory of the Novel
(London: Routledge, 1991), 89.

11
.   Nabokov,
Ada oder Das Verlangen
, trans. Uwe Friesel and Marianne Therstappen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1974).

12
.   Nabokov,
Ada ou l’ardeur
, trans. Gilles Chahine with Jean-Bernard Blandenier (Paris: Fayard, 1975).

13
.   Cf. my “Annotations to
Ada
, 2: Part 1 Chapter 2,”
Nabokovian
31 (1993): 39, and
Ada
Online.

14
.   MSS, VNA.

15
.   Tekiner, “Time in
Lolita
,” 468, writes however that “the chronology implies that Humbert is in jail for his actions toward Lolita, rather than Quilty,” but does not explain how or why Humbert has been tracked down or at what point before the supposed arrest for his treatment of Lolita (an arrest, of course, entirely without textual foundation) he began, as this conjecture would require, to suppress what was really happening to him, or why the conjecture does not square with the foreword (see below). Toker,
Nabokov: The Mystery
, 218, suggests as one possibility (though she seems to prefer another) that “Humbert may have been arrested on the same day, almost immediately after reading Dolly’s letter, and placed in a psychiatric ward ‘for observation’ . . . prior to being scheduled for trial,” but though she rules out the murder of Quilty she does not suggest why he is being tried.

16
.   Nabokov,
Lolita
, trans. into French by Eric Kahane (Paris: Gallimard, 1959).

17
.   Nabokov,
Lolita
, trans. Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Phaedra, 1967), p. 245.

18
.   Gennady Barabtarlo,
Aerial View: Essays on Nabokov’s Art and Metaphysics
(New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 135–38. The dates become more specific for several reasons: Nabokov’s style evolved consistently towards greater chronological detail; he felt he needed to identify for Russian readers in the late 1960s a period that was more self-evident to the Americans for whom he was writing in the early 1950s; and to correct inconsistencies he had noticed.

19
.   Dolinin, “Dvoinoe vremia u Nabokova,” 39.

20
.   Tekiner, “Time in
Lolita
,” 468. Nabokov’s reason for having Ray not mention murder, of course, is to avoid spoiling the sublime surprise of Humbert’s first page: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style” (11).

21
.   Connolly, “ ‘Nature’s Reality,’ ” 45.

22
.   Toker,
Nabokov: The Mystery
, 210, realizes the awkwardness of the screenplay to her case, but rules it out as “a totally new work. . . . The screenplay, therefore, cannot be used to settle moot points in the novel.” It is indeed, as Nabokov says, “a vivacious variant” (
LAS
xiii) on the novel, not a bland transposition, but as the examples will make clear, the screenplay strives even in its changes to be true to the novel.

23
.   Toker is particularly confused. According to her version, Humbert does not plan ahead; his slightly reformed feelings for Lolita develop only as he suddenly begins to fantasize, from the point he writes about receiving Lolita’s letter to the end of his composing the narrative (
Nabokov: The Mystery
, 211, 217, 218). But in that case Humbert does not discover who Quilty is until he writes the Coalmont scene, yet at the very moment she tells him who her abductor was, he comments: “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” (
Lolita
274). In other words, he has planned Quilty’s peek-a-boo presence from the first.

24
.   Tekiner, “Time in
Lolita
,” 466 (followed by Connolly, “ ‘Nature’s Reality,’ ” 51–52), suggests that Humbert identifies Quilty from
Who’s Who in the Limelight
in the psychiatric institution where—according to her—Humbert writes up his manuscript. (Rejecting the murder, Tekiner, “Time in
Lolita
,” 468, rules out prison but does not explain why Humbert suddenly finds himself in a psychiatric institution, when his life with Rita seems perfectly stable; Dolinin is convinced that Humbert is happily sitting in his study, hoodwinking the reader.) Why Humbert should have read through the thousands of entries in
Who’s Who in the Limelight
and realized the relevance of the brief Quilty entry, when he has for years come nowhere near to suspecting Quilty, seems anything but clear. True, Lolita did lie that “Quilty” was the “gal author” (
Lolita
223), but why would Humbert persist in reading through a fat biographical tome until he found this one clue when he had never made any connection between Lolita’s disappearance and the playwright of the play in which she was to star?

25
.   Dolinin, “Dvoinoe vremia u Nabokova,” 37.

26
.   Quilty, of course, has posed as Lolita’s uncle in taking her from the Elphinstone hospital.

27
.   He has: and that description on p. 243 confirms the equation between Elphinstone and the vista of the moral apotheosis.

23. LITERATURE, PATTERN,
LOLITA
; OR, ART, LITERATURE, SCIENCE

1
.   William Deresiewicz, “Professing Literature in 2008,”
The Nation
, March 24, 2008,
http://www.thenation.com/article/professing-literature-2008;
also see Critical Inquiry Symposium Special Issue,
Critical Inquiry
30 (2004); Louis Menand, “Dangers Within and Without,”
Profession
(2005): 10–17.

2
.   See, for instance, Patrick Colm Hogan,
The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Joseph Carroll,
Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature
(New York: Routledge, 2004); Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds.,
The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005); Marcus Nordlund,
Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, and Evolution
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007); David Bordwell,
Poetics of Cinema
(New York: Routledge, 2008); Jonathan Gottschall,
The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gottschall,
Literature, Science, and a New Humanities
(New York: Palgrave, 2008); Edward Slingerland,
What Science Has to Offer the Humanities
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Denis Dutton,
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Evolution
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2009); Brian Boyd,
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); Harold Fromm,
The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Blakey Vermeule
, Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, and Jonathan Gottschall, eds.,
Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

3
.   The term was coined by John Tooby and Irwin DeVore, “The Reconstruction of Hominid Behavioral Evolution Through Strategic Modelling,” in
The Evolution of Human Behavior: Primate Models
, ed. W. G. Kinzey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 183–237.

4
.   Daniel Goleman,
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
(New York: Bantam, 2006), 361; Ellen Dissanayake,
Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 29.

5
.   Stephen Jay Gould,
The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History
(New York: Norton, 1985), 199; Gould,
Bully for Brontosaurus: Further Reflections in Natural History
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 268, also supplies the Purcell quotation.

6
.   Robert Solso,
Cognition and the Visual Arts
(Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT, 1994), 52.

7
.   John Sloboda, “Power of Music,”
New Scientist
, November 29, 2003, 38.

8
.   Brian Sutton-Smith,
The Folk-Stories of Children
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 53–54.

9
.   Sutton-Smith,
The Folk-Stories of Children
, 110–11.

10
.   See, for instance, Lisa Aziz-Zadeh et al., “Congruent Embodied Representations for Visually Presented Actions and Linguistic Phrases Describing Actions,”
Current Biology
16 (2006): 1818–23.

11
.   See Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “The Marriage of Geraint” (1857), ll. 184–86: “And while they listened for the distant hunt, / And chiefly for the baying of Cavall, / King Arthur’s hound of deepest mouth” (
The Poems of Tennyson
, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd ed. [London: Longman, 1987], 3:330). Although the detail derives ultimately from the tale of “Geraint the Son of Erbin” in the
Mabinogion
, Nabokov may have encountered it in Thomas Bulfinch,
The Age of Chivalry and The Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages
(1858; New York: New American Library, 1962), 229: “Now this is how Arthur hunted the stag. The men and the dogs were divided into hunting-parties, and the dogs were let loose upon the stag. And the last dog that was let loose was the favorite dog of Arthur; Cavall was his name. And he left all the other dogs behind him and turned the stag.”

12
.   Ovid,
Metamorphoses
, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1921), 3.206–8.

13
.   James R. Flynn,
What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

24. “PALE FIRE”: POEM AND PATTERN

1
.   Ron Rosenbaum to Mo Cohen, June 7, 2010.

2
.   Alvin Kernan, “Reading Zemblan: The Audience Disappears in Nabokov’s
Pale Fire”
(1982), in
Vladimir Nabokov: Modern Critical Views
, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 106. Shade’s image strikingly recalls an even more extended image that the narrator Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev paraphrases from a
Discourse on Shades
by the invented French thinker Pierre Delalande, in Nabokov’s last Russian novel,
The Gift
: “I know that death in itself is in no way connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a hill. One has to get out somehow, ‘but I refuse to see in a door more than a hole, and a carpenter’s job’ (
Delalande
,
Discours sur les ombres
, p. 45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a ‘road’ to which the human mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion: we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks” (
Gift
, 321–22).