The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (7 page)

Nabokov was making expressive use of unlikely bits and pieces in his novels as early as
The Defense
(1930), as when Luzhin’s means of suicide is suggested by a movie still, lying on The Veritas film company’s display table, showing “a white-faced man with his lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his hands from the ledge of a skyscraper—just about to fall off into the abyss”—a famous scene from Harold Lloyd’s 1923 silent film,
Safety Last
. Although present throughout his work of the thirties, and culminating logically in
The Gift
, his last novel in Russian, Nabokov’s penchant for literary anatomy was not fully realized until after he had been exposed to the polar extremes of American culture and American university libraries. Thus the richly variegated but sometimes crowded texture of
Bend Sinister
(1947), Nabokov’s first truly “American” novel,
²³
looks forward to
Lolita
, his next novel.
Bend Sinister
’s literary pastiche is by turns broad and hermetic. Titles by Remarque and Sholokov are combined to produce
All Quiet on the Don
, and Chapter Twelve offers this “famous American poem”:

No poem at all, it is formed, said Nabokov, by random “iambic incidents culled from the prose of
Moby-Dick
.” Such effects receive their fullest orchestration in
Lolita
, as the Notes to this volume will suggest.

If the
Onegin
Commentary (1964) is the culmination, then
Lolita
represents the apogee in fiction of Nabokov’s proclivities as anatomist and as such is a further reminder that the novel extends and develops themes and methods present in his work all along. Ranging from Dante to
Dick Tracy
, the allusions, puns, parodies, and pastiches in
Lolita
are controlled with a mastery unequaled by any writer since Joyce (who died in 1941). Readers should not be disarmed by the presence of so many kinds of “real” materials in a novel by a writer who believes so passionately in the primacy of the imagination; as Kinbote says in
Pale Fire
, “ ‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye” (p. 130).

By his example, Nabokov reminded younger American writers of the fictional nature of reality. When Terry Southern in
The Magic Christian
(1960) lampoons the myth of American masculinity and its attendant deification of the athlete by having his multimillionaire trickster, Guy Grand, fix the heavyweight championship fight so that the boxers grotesquely enact in the ring a prancing and mincing charade of homosexuality, causing considerable psychic injury to the audience, his art, such as it is, is quite late in imitating life. A famous athlete of the twenties was well-known as an invert, and Humbert mentions him twice, never by his real name, though he does call him “
Ned Litam
”—a simple anagram of “Ma Tilden”—which turns out to be one of the actual pseudonyms chosen by Tilden himself, under which he wrote stories and articles. Like the literary anatomists who have preceded him, Nabokov knows that what is so extraordinary about “reality” is that too often even the blackest of imaginations could not have invented it, and by taking advantage of this fact in
Lolita
he has, along with Nathanael West, defined with absolute authority the inevitable mode, the dominant dark tonalities—if not the contents—of the American comic novel.

Although Humbert clearly delights in many of the absurdities around him, the anatomist’s characteristic vivacity is gone from the pages which concern Charlotte Haze, and not only because she is repugnant to Humbert in terms of the “plot” but rather because to Nabokov she is the definitive artsy-craftsy suburban lady—the culture-vulture, that travesty of Woman, Love, and Sexuality.
In short, she is the essence of American
poshlust
, to use the “one pitiless [Russian] word” which, writes Nabokov in
Gogol
, is able to express “the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know possess no special term.”
Poshlust
: “the sound of the ‘o’ is as big as the plop of an
elephant falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a bathing beauty on a German picture postcard” (p. 63). More precisely, it “is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (p. 70).
²⁴
It is an amalgam of pretentiousness and philistine vulgarity. In the spirit of Mark Twain describing the contents of the Grangerford household in
Huckleberry Finn
(earlier American
poshlust
), Humbert eviscerates the muddlecrass (to wax Joycean) world of Charlotte and her friends, reminding us that Humbert’s long view of America is not an altogether genial one.

In the course of showing us our landscape in all its natural beauty, Humber satirizes American songs, ads, movies, magazines, brand names, tourist attractions, summer camps, Dude Ranches, hotels, and motels, as well as the Good-Housekeeping Syndrome (
Your Home Is You
is one of Charlotte Haze’s essential volumes) and the cant of progressive educationist and child-guidance pontificators.
²⁵
Nabokov offers us a grotesque parody of a “good relationship,” for Humbert and Lo are “pals” with a vengeance;
Know Your Own Daughter
is one of the books which Humbert consults (the title exists). Yet Humbert’s terrible demands notwithstanding, she is as insensitive as children are to their parents; sexuality aside, she demands anxious parental placation in a too typically American way, and, since it is Lolita “
to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster
” she affords Nabokov an ideal opportunity to comment on the Teen and Sub-teen Tyranny. “
Tristram in Movielove
,” remarks Humbert, and Nabokov has responded to those various travesties of behavior which too many Americans recognize as tenable examples of reality. A gloss on this aspect of
Lolita
is provided by “Ode to a Model,” a poem which Nabokov published the same year as the Olympia Press edition of
Lolita
(1955):

Although Nabokov called attention to the elements of parody in his work, he repeatedly denied the relevance of satire. One can understand why he said, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist” (
Playboy
interview), for he eschewed the overtly moral stance of the satirist who offers “to mend the world.” Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,” but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” Moreover, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, real and imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each is captive of the other, imprisoned together in
a succession of bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can share nothing of what they see—making Humbert seem as alone during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has left him and the car is an empty cell.

Nabokov’s denials notwithstanding, many of Humbert’s observations of American morals and mores
are
satiric, the product of his maker’s moral sensibility; but the novel’s greatness does not depend on the profundity or extent of its “satire,” which is over-emphasized by readers who fail to recognize the extent of the parody, its full implications, or the operative distinction made by Nabokov: “satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Like Joyce, Nabokov shows how parody may inform a high literary art, and parody figures in the design of each of his novels.
The Eye
parodies the nineteenth-century Romantic tale, such as V. F. Odoevsky’s “The Brigadier” (1844), which is narrated by a ghost who has awakened after death to view his old life with new clarity, while
Laughter in the Dark
is a mercilessly cold mocking of the convention of the love triangle;
Despair
is cast as the kind of “cheap mystery” story the narrator’s banal wife reads, though it evolves into something quite different; and
The Gift
parodies the major nineteenth-century Russian writers.
Invitation to a Beheading
is cast as a mock anti-utopian novel, as though Zamiatin’s
We
(1920) had been restaged by the Marx Brothers.
Pnin
masquerades as an “academic novel” and turns out to parody the possibility of a novel’s having a “reliable” narrator. Pnin’s departure at the end mimics Chichikov’s orbital exit from
Dead Souls
(1842), just as the last paragraph of
The Gift
conceals a parody of a Pushkin stanza. The texture of Nabokov’s parody is unique because, in addition to being a master parodist of literary styles, he is able to make brief references to another writer’s themes or devices which are so telling in effect that Nabokov need not burlesque that writer’s style. He parodies not only narrative clichés and outworn subject matter but genres and prototypes of the novel;
Ada
parodically surveys nothing less than the novel’s evolution. Because Chapter Four of
The Gift
is a mock literary biography, it anticipates the themes of Nabokov’s major achievements, for he is continuously parodying the search for a verifiable truth—the autobiography, the biography, the exegesis, the detective story—and these generic “quests” will coalesce in one work, especially when the entire novel is conceptually a parody, as in
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
.

In form,
Pale Fire
is a grotesque scholarly edition, while
Lolita
is a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Romantic novel that chronicles the effects of a debilitating love, the
Doppelgänger
tale, and, in parts, a Duncan Hines tour of America conducted by a guide with a
black imagination, a parodic case study, and, as the narrator of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
says of his half brother’s first novel,
The Prismatic Bezel
, “It is also a wicked imitation of many other … literary habit[s].” Knight’s procedures summarize Nabokov’s: