The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (4 page)

P
ATTERNING
. Nabokov’s passion for chess, language, and lepidoptery has inspired the most elaborately involuted patterning in his work. Like the games implemented by parody, the puns, anagrams, and spoonerisms all reveal the controlling hand of the logomachist; thematically, they are appropriate to the prison of mirrors. Chess motifs are woven into several narratives, and even in
The Defense
(1930), a most naturalistically ordered early novel, the chess patterning points to forces beyond Grandmaster Luzhin’s comprehension (“Thus toward the end of Chapter Four an unexpected move is made by me in a corner of the board,” writes Nabokov in the Foreword). The importance of the lepidopteral motif has already been suggested, and it spirals freely in and out of Nabokov’s books: in
Invitation
to a Beheading
, just before he is scheduled to die, Cincinnatus gently strokes a giant moth; in
Pale Fire
a butterfly alights on John Shade’s arm the minute before he is killed; in
Ada
, when Van Veen arrives for a duel, a transparent white butterfly floats past and Van is certain he has only minutes to live; in the final chapter of
Speak, Memory
Nabokov recalls seeing in Paris, just before the war, a live butterfly being promenaded on a leash of thread; at the end of
Bend Sinister
the masked author intrudes and suspends the “obvious plot,” and as the book closes he looks out of the window and decides, as a moth twangs against the screen, that it is “A good night for mothing.”
Bend Sinister
was published in 1947, and it is no accident that in Nabokov’s next novel (1955) Humbert meets Lolita back in 1947, thus sustaining the author’s “fictive time” without interruption and enabling him to pursue that moth’s lovely diurnal Double through the substratum of the new novel in the most fantastic butterfly hunt of his career. “I confess I do not believe in time,” writes Nabokov at the end of the ecstatic butterfly chapter in
Speak, Memory
. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.”

A
LLUSION
. Humbert’s references to art and literature are consistent with his mind and education, but in other novels and stories such cultural allusions point to Nabokov. In
Invitation to a Beheading
, for instance, Cincinnatus, imprisoned by the State, cannot identify the bits and pieces from Baudelaire’s poem
L’Invitation au voyage
(1855) that echo in his consciousness, inform the novel’s garden motif, and sound in the book’s title. They’re emanating from the mind of his maker, who especially cherishes Baudelaire’s utopia of the spirit as he writes the book at hand in Nazi Germany, in 1934—Hitler’s voice echoing across nocturnal Berlin from rooftop loudspeakers at the very moment that Nabokov defies dystopia by writing the farcical, and finally joyous,
Invitation to a Beheading
.

T
HE
W
ORK
-W
ITHIN-THE
-W
ORK
. The self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles, are clearly of the author’s making, since no point of view within the fiction could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they create. The course of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, which purports to be an attempt to gather material for a proposed literary biography of the narrator’s half brother but ends by obfuscating even the narrator’s identity, is refracted in Knight’s first novel,
The Prismatic Bezel
, “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale.” Like an Elizabethan play-within-a-play, Quilty’s play within
Lolita, The Enchanted Hunters
, offers a “message” that can be taken seriously as a commentary on the progression of the entire novel; and
Who’s Who in the Limelight
and the class list of the Ramsdale school magically mirror the action taking place around them, including, by implication, the writing of
Lolita
. The a-novelistic components of
Pale Fire
—Foreword, Poem, Commentary, and Index—create a mirror-lined labyrinth of involuted cross-references, a closed cosmos that can only be of the author’s making, rather than the product of an “unreliable” narrator.
Pale Fire
realizes the ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twenty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the fourth chapter of
The Gift
. If it is disturbing to discover that the characters in
The Gift
are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within
Hamlet
, “that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.”
⁹

T
HE
S
TAGING OF THE
N
OVEL
. Nabokov wrote the screenplay of
Lolita
, as well as nine plays in Russian, including one of his several forays into science fiction,
The Waltz Invention
(1938), which was translated and published in 1966. It is not surprising, then, that his novels should proliferate with “theatrical” effects that serve his play-spirit exceedingly well. Problems of identity can be investigated poetically by trying on and discarding a series of masks. And, too, what better way to demonstrate that everything in a book is being manipulated than by seeming to
stage
it? In
Invitation to a Beheading
, “A Summer thunderstorm, simply yet tastefully staged, was performed outside.” When Quilty finally dies in
Lolita
, Humbert says, “This was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”; and in
Laughter in the Dark
(1932), “The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple, self-reflecting Proteus.” Nabokov the protean impersonator is always a masked presence in his fiction: as impresario, scenarist, director, warden, dictator, landlord, and even as bit player (the seventh Hunter in Quilty’s play within
Lolita
, a Young Poet who insists that everything in the play is his invention)—to name only a
few of the disguises he has donned as a secret agent who moves among his own creations like Prospero in
The Tempest
. Shakespeare is very much an ancestor (he and Nabokov even share a birthday), and the creaking, splintering noise made by the stage setting as it disintegrates at the end of
Invitation to a Beheading
is Nabokov’s version of the snapping of Prospero’s wand and his speech to the players (“Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air”; IV.i).

A
UTHORIAL
V
OICE
. All the involuted effects spiral into the authorial voice—“an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me,” Nabokov calls it—which intrudes continually in all of his novels after
Despair
, most strikingly at the end, when it completely takes over the book (
Lolita
is a notable exception). It is this “deity” who is responsible for everything: who begins a narrative only to stop and retell the passage differently; halts a scene to “rerun” it on the chapter’s screen, or turns a reversed lantern slide around to project it properly; intrudes to give stage directions, to compliment or exhort the actors, to have a prop moved; who reveals that the characters have “cotton-padded bodies” and are the author’s puppets, that all is a fiction; and who widens the “gaps” and “holes” in the narrative until it breaks apart at “the end,” when the vectors are removed, the cast of characters is dismissed, and even the fiction fades away—at most leaving behind an imprint on space in the form of a précis of “an old-fashioned [stage] melodrama” the “deity” may one day write, and which describes (as in the case of
Pale Fire
) the book we’ve just finished reading.

The vertiginous conclusion of a Nabokov novel calls for a complicated response which many readers, after a lifetime of realistic novels, are incapable of making. Children, however, are aware of other possibilities, as their art reveals. My own children, then three and six years old, reminded me of this one summer when they inadvertently demonstrated that, unless they change, they will be among Nabokov’s ideal readers. One afternoon my wife and I built them a puppet theater. After propping the theater on the top edge of the living room couch, I crouched down behind it and began manipulating the two hand puppets in the stage above me. The couch and the theater’s scenery provided good cover, enabling me to peer over the edge and watch the children immediately become engrossed in the show, and then virtually mesmerized by my improvised little story that ended with a patient father spanking an impossible child. But the puppeteer, carried away by his story’s violent climax, knocked over the entire
theater, which clattered onto the floor, collapsing into a heap of cardboard, wood, and cloth—leaving me crouched, peeking out at the room, my head now visible over the couch’s rim, my puppeted hands, with their naked wrists, poised in mid-air. For several moments my children remained in their open-mouthed trance, still in the story, staring at the space where the theater had been, not seeing me at all. Then they did the kind of double take that a comedian might take a lifetime to perfect, and began to laugh uncontrollably, in a way I had never seen before—and not so much at my clumsiness, which was nothing new, but rather at those moments of total involvement in a nonexistent world, and at what its collapse implied to them about the authenticity of the larger world, and about their daily efforts to order it and their own fabricated illusions. They were laughing, too, over their sense of what the vigorous performance had meant to me; but they saw how easily they could be tricked and their trust belied, and the shrillness of their laughter finally suggested that they recognized the frightening implications of what had happened, and that only laughter could steel them in their new awareness.

When in 1966 I visited Vladimir Nabokov for four days in Montreux, to interview him for
Wisconsin Studies
and in regard to my critical study of his work, I told him about this incident, and how for me it defined literary involution and the response which he hoped to elicit from his readers at “the end” of a novel. “Exactly, exactly,” he said as I finished. “You must put that in your book.”

In parodying the reader’s complete, self-indulgent identification with a character, which in its mindlessness limits consciousness, Nabokov is able to create the detachment necessary for a multiform, spatial view of his novels. The “two plots” in Nabokov’s puppet show are thus made plainly visible as a description of the total design of his work, which reveals that in novel after novel his characters try to escape from Nabokov’s prison of mirrors, struggling toward a self-awareness that only their creator has achieved by creating them—an involuted process which connects Nabokov’s art with his life, and clearly indicates that the author himself is not in this prison. He is its creator, and is
above
it, in control of a book, as in one of those Saul Steinberg drawings (greatly admired by Nabokov) that show a man drawing the very line that gives him “life,” in the fullest sense. But the process of Nabokov’s involution, the global perspective which he invites us to share with him, is best described in
Speak, Memory
, Chapter Fifteen, when he comments on the disinclination of

The ultimate detachment of an “outside” view of a novel inspires our wonder and enlarges our potential for compassion because, “in the spiral unwinding of things,” such compassion is extended to include the mind of an author whose deeply humanistic art affirms man’s ability to confront and order chaos.

Critics too often treat Nabokov’s twelfth novel as a special case quite apart from the rest of his work, when actually it concerns, profoundly and in their darkest and yet most comic form, the themes which have always occupied him. Although
Lolita
may still be a shocking novel to several aging non-readers, the exact circumstances of its troubled publication and reception may not be familiar to younger readers. After four American publishers refused it, Madame Ergaz, of Bureau Littéraire Clairouin, Paris, submitted
Lolita
to Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris.
¹⁰
Although Girodias must be credited with the publication of several estimable if controversial works by writers such as Jean Genet, his main fare was the infamous Travellers Companion series, the green-backed books once so familiar and dear to the eagle-eyed inspectors of the U.S. Customs. But Nabokov did not know this and, because of one of Girodias’ previous publishing ventures, the “Editions du Chěne,” thought him a publisher of “fine editions.” Cast in two volumes and bound in the requisite green,
Lolita
was quietly published in Paris in September 1955.

Because it seemed to confirm the judgment of those nervous American publishers, the Girodias imprimatur became one more obstacle for
Lolita
to overcome, though the problem of its alleged pornography indeed seems
remote today, and was definitively settled in France not long after its publication. I was Nabokov’s student at Cornell in 1953–1954, at a time when most undergraduates did not know he was a writer. Drafted into the army a year later, I was sent overseas to France. On my first pass to Paris I naturally went browsing in a Left Bank bookstore. An array of Olympia Press books, daringly displayed above the counter, seemed most inviting—and there, between copies of
Until She Screams
and
The Sexual Life of Robinson Crusoe
, I found
Lolita
. Although I thought I knew all of Nabokov’s works in English (and had searched through out-of-print stores to buy each of them), this title was new to me; and its context and format were more than surprising, even if in those innocent pre-Grove Press days the semi-literate wags on fraternity row had dubbed Nabokov’s Literature 311–312 lecture course “Dirty Lit” because of such readings as
Ulysses
and
Madame Bovary
(the keenest campus wits invariably dropped the
B
when mentioning the latter). I brought
Lolita
back to my base, which was situated out in the woods. Passes were hard to get and new Olympia titles were always in demand in the barracks. The appearance of a new girl in town thus caused a minor clamor. “Hey, lemme read your dirty book, man!” insisted “Stockade Clyde” Carr, who had justly earned his sobriquet, and to whose request I acceded at once. “Read it aloud, Stockade,” someone called, and skipping the Foreword, Stockade Clyde began to make his remedial way through the opening paragraph. “ ‘Lo … lita, light … of my life, fire of my … loins. My sin, my soul … Lo-lee-ta: The … tip of the … tongue … taking … a trip …’—
Damn!
” yelled Stockade, throwing the book against the wall. “
It’s God-damn Litachure!!
” Thus the Instant Pornography Test, known in psychological-testing circles as the “IPT.” Although infallible, it has never to my knowledge been used in any court case.