As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now impaired, and a move or two later, with Gaston to play, I noticed through the film of my general distress that he could collect my queen; he noticed it too, but thinking it might be a trap on the part of his tricky opponent, he demurred for quite a minute, and puffed and wheezed, and shook his jowls, and even shot furtive glances at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with his pudgily bunched fingers—dying to take that juicy queen and not daring—and all of a sudden he swooped down upon it (who knows if it did not teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a dreary hour in achieving a draw. (p2.c13.1).
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.”
ALFRED APPEL, JR.
Palo Alto, California
January 31, 1968
Wilmette, Illinois
May 21, 1990
* * *
1 New York, 1941, p. 93. Henceforth, page references will be placed in parentheses in the text, and pertain to the Vintage editions of Nabokov’s novels, interviews, and autobiography, and to the hardcover editions of his other work.
2 Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Princeton, 1990), the first volume in an anticipated two-volume biography, is recommended.
3 John Updike, “Grandmaster Nabokov,” New Republic, CLI (September 26, 1964), 15. Reprinted in Updike’s Assorted Prose (New York, 1965).
4 Raymond Queneau, Le Chiendent (Paris, 1933), p. 294. The above translations are mine—A.A.
5 Ibid.
6 James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, 1961), p. 567.
7 Ibid., p. 769.
8 Ibid., p. 513.
9 J. L. Borges, “Partial Magic in the Quixote,” in Labyrinths (New York, 1964), p. 196. For an excellent analysis of involuted or self-reflexive fiction, see Robert Alter, Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975).
10 See Nabokov’s article “Lolita and Mr. Girodias,” Evergreen Review, XI (February 1967), 37–41.
11 In a manner similar to Joyce’s, Nabokov four years later paid his respects to Prescott, though not by name, by having the assassin Gradus carefully read The New York Times: “A hack reviewer of new books for tourists, reviewing his own tour through Norway, said that the fjords were too famous to need (his) description, and that all Scandinavians loved flowers” (Pale Fire, p. 275). This was actually culled from the newspaper.
12 Also pointed out by Andrew Field, in Nabokov: His Life in Art (Boston, 1967), p. 325, and Carl R. Proffer, Keys to Lolita (Bloomington, 1968), p. 3.
13 New York, 1986.
14 One should remember that the story would have been read by a Russian émigré audience, notes Andrew Field, who quoted the same two passages in his own translation, op. cit., pp. 328–329. Strongly erotic (as opposed to pornographic) themes have been used “seriously” far more frequently by Russian writers than by their English and American counterparts. Field points to Dostoevsky (the suppressed chapter of The Possessed), Leskov, Sologub, Kuzmin, Rozanov, Kuprin, Pilnyak, Babel, and Bunin (ibid., p. 332).
15 And speaking specifically of the writing of Lolita, he says, “She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.”
16 Penelope Gilliatt, “Nabokov,” Vogue, No. 2170 (December 1966), p. 280.
17 Ibid.
18 Anthony Burgess, “Poet and Pedant,” The Spectator, March 24, 1967, p. 336. Reprinted in Urgent Copy (New York, 1969).
19 A photograph of these drawings appears in Time, May 23, 1969, p. 83.
20 For several reminiscences of Nabokov, see Vladimir Nabokov: A Tribute, edited by Peter Quennell (New York, 1980).
21 In Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote spies John Shade seated in his car, “reading a tabloid newspaper which I had thought no poet would deign to touch” (p. 22).
22 The course in question is Literature 311–312, “Masterpieces of European Fiction,” MWF, 12 (first term: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dickens’s Bleak House, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich; second term: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Gogol’s The Overcoat, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Proust’s Swann’s Way, and Ulysses, in that order). The quotations are from the annotator’s class notes of 1953–1954 and can be supplemented now by Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature (New York, 1980).
23 Although published in New York in 1941, a year after Nabokov’s emigration, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was in fact written in Paris in 1938 (in English). Students of chronology should also note that Lolita precedes Pnin (1957). The date of the former’s American publication (1958) has proved misleading.
24 For Nabokov’s later description of posblost (as he then transliterated it), see his Paris Review interview, collected in Strong Opinions (New York, 1973), pp. 100–101.
25 Satirized too is the romantic myth of the child, extending from Wordsworth to Salinger. “The McCoo girl?” responds Lolita kindly. “Ginny McCoo? Oh, she’s a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio.” If the origin of modern sentimentality about the child’s innocence can be dated at 1760, with the publication of Mother Goose’s Melodies, then surely Lolita marks its death in 1955.
26 From the annotator’s class notes, 1953–1954.
27 Translated and quoted by Andrew Field, op. cit., p. 79.
28 Vladislav Khodasevich, “On Sirin” (1937), translated by Michael H. Walker, edited by Simon Karlinsky and Robert P. Hughes, TriQuarterly, No. 17 (Winter 1970).
29 I have elsewhere discussed the novel as a novel, as well as an artifice; see my article “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, VIII (Spring 1967), 204–241. Reprinted in L. S. Dembo, ed., Nabokov: The M
an and His Work (Madison, 1967).
30 See frw.1, p1.c9.1, p1.c11.1, p1.c13.1, p1.c15.1, p1.c20.1, p1.c22.1, p1.c24.1, p1.c29.1, p1.c32.1, p1.c32.1, p2.c1.1, p2.c2.1, p2.c2.2, p2.c2.3, p2.c3.1, p2.c7.1, p2.c9.1, p2.c14.1, p2.c16.1, p2.c17.1, p2.c19.1, p2.c22.1, p2.c23.1, p2.c24.1, p2.c25.1, p2.c26.1, p2.c36.1, and p2.c36.1—not to mention Humbert’s several interjections to the jury (p1.c29.1 is typical), to mankind in general (“Human beings, attend!”), and to his car (“Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow”). One waxes statistical here because H.H.’s direct address is an important part of the narrative, and important too in the way that it demonstrates a paradoxically new technique. In regard to literary forms and devices, there is almost nothing new under the sun (to paraphrase a poet); it is contexts and combinations that are continually being made new. One epoch’s realism is another’s surrealism. To the Elizabethan playgoer or the reader of Cervantes, the work-within-the-work was a convention; to an audience accustomed to nineteenth-century realism, it is fantastic, perplexing, and strangely affecting. The same can be said of the reintroduction of “old-fashioned” direct address, revived and transmogrified at a moment in literary history when the post-Jamesian novelists seemed to have forever ruled out such self-conscious devices by refining the newer “impressionistic” conventions (the effaced narrator, the “central intelligence,” the consistent if “unreliable” narrative persona, and so forth). “This new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism,” writes J. L. Borges in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” an essential text on the subject (Labyrinths, p. 44); and cinematic equivalents are readily available in the work of the directors who reintroduced silent film techniques (notably François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Richard Lester) in the 1950s and 1960s.
31 The pun is also pointed out by Page Stegner in Escape into Aesthetics: The Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York, 1966), p. 104.
32 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, 1955 [1st ed. 1944]), p. 11. An excellent introduction to Nabokov, even if he is not mentioned.
33 This aspect of Lolita is nicely visualized in Tenniel’s drawing of a landscaped chessboard (or chessbored landscape) for Chapter Two of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, in which a chess game is literally woven into the narrative. For more on Carroll and Nabokov, see Note A breeze from wonderland.
34 Mary McCarthy, “Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire,” Encounter, XIX (October 1962), p. 76.
Selected Bibliography
1. CHECKLIST OF NABOKOV’S WRITING
*Denotes a Russian work that has been translated; date following a title of a novel indicates year of magazine serialization; parentheses contain date of translation into English.
**Denotes work written in English.
No asterisk indicates work is in Russian. Not included below are most of Nabokov’s major entomological papers in English, nor the vast amount of writing that remains untranslated and uncollected from the twenties and thirties, including approximately 100 poems, several plays and short stories, fifty literary reviews and essays, and numerous translations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Yeats, Brooke, Shakespeare, Musset, and others. Michael Juliar’s Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography (New York, 1986) is the standard bibliography of Nabokov’s published work. All seventeen of Nabokov’s novels, along with Speak, Memory and Strong Opinion, are available in Vintage International editions.
Carroll. Alice in Wonderland. Berlin, 1923. Translation.
*Mary. Berlin, 1926 (New York, 1970). A novel.
*King, Queen, Knave. Berlin, 1928 (New York, 1968). A novel.
*The Defense. 1929. Berlin, 1930 (New York, 1964). A novel.
*The Eye. 1930. (New York, 1965). A short novel.
*Glory. 1931. Paris, 1932 (New York, 1971). A novel.
*Camera Obscura. Paris and Berlin, 1932 (London, 1936; rev., New York, 1938, as Laughter in the Dark). A novel.
*Despair. 1934. Berlin, 1936 (London, 1937; rev., New York, 1966). A novel.
*Invitation to a Beheading. 1935–1936. Berlin and Paris, 1938 (New York, 1959). A novel.
*The Gift. 1937–1938. New York, 1952, in Russian (New York, 1963). A novel.
*The Waltz Invention. 1938 (New York, 1966). Drama in 3 acts.
**The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Norfolk, Conn., 1941. A novel.
**Three Russian Poets: Translations of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tiutchev. Norfolk, Conn., 1944.
**Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, Conn., 1944. A critical study.
**Bend Sinister. New York, 1947. A novel.
**Conclusive Evidence. New York, 1951. A memoir.
Other Shores. New York, 1954. A Russian version of Conclusive Evidence, rewritten and expanded rather than translated.
**Lolita. Paris, 1955 (New York, 1958). A novel.
**Pnin. New York, 1957. A novel.
** Lermontov. A Hero of Our Time. New York, 1958. A translation.
**Nabokov’s Dozen. New York, 1958. 13 stories, 3 translated from Russian, 1 from French.
**The Song of Igor’s Campaign. New York, 1960. A translation of the twelfth-century epic.
**Pale Fire. New York, 1962. A novel.
** Pushkin, Eugene Onegin. New York, 1964. Translation and Commentary in 4 volumes.
**Speak, Memory. New York, 1966. Definitive version of memoir originally published as Conclusive Evidence, including Other Shores and new material.
**Ada. New York, 1969. A novel.
*Poems and Problems. New York, 1971. 53 poems, 39 in both Russian and English, 18 chess problems.
**Transparent Things. New York, 1972. A novel.
*A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. 1924–1940. New York, 1973. 13 stories.
**Strong Opinions. New York, 1973. 22 interviews, 11 letters, 9 articles, and 5 lepidoptera papers.
**Lolita: A Screenplay. New York, 1974.
**Look at the Harlequins! New York, 1974. A novel.
*Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories. New York, 1975. 13 stories, 12 translated from the Russian.
*Details of a Sunset and Other Stories. New York, 1976. 13 stories.
** Karlinsky, Simon, ed. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: Correspondence Between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, 1940–1971. New York, 1979.
Bowers, Fredson, ed. Lectures on Literature. New York, 1980.
——. Lectures on Russian Literature. New York, 1981.
——. Lectures on Don Quixote. New York, 1983.
*The Man from the USSR and Other Plays. New York, 1984. 4 plays.
*The Enchanter. New York, 1986. A novella.
Bruccoli, Matthew, and Dmitri Nabokov, eds. Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977. New York, 1989.
2. CRITICISM OF LOLITA
Included below are most of the studies of Lolita published during Nabokov’s lifetime.
Aldridge, A. Owen, “Lolita and Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, II (Fall 1961), 20–26.
Amis, Kingsley, “She Was a Child and I Was a Child,” The Spectator, No. 6854 (November 6, 1959), 635–636.
Appel, Alfred, Jr., “The Art of Nabokov’s Artifice,” Denver Quarterly, III (Summer 1968), 25–37.
—–, “An Interview with Vladimir Nabokov,” in the Special all-Nabokov number, Wisconsin Studies, VIII (Spring 1967), 127–152. Reprinted in L. S. Dembo, ed., Nabokov: The Man and His Work. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Pp. 19–44. Reprinted in Nabokov, Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage International, 1989, pp. 62–92.
—–, “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody,” Wisconsin Studies, op. cit., 204–241. Reprinted in Dembo, op. cit. Pp. 106–143.
—–, Nabokov’s Dark Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Pp. 61–151.
Brenner, Conrad, “Nabokov: The Art of the Perverse,” New Republic, CXXXVIII (June 23, 1958), 18–21.
Bryer, Jackson R, and Thomas J. Bergin, Jr., “Vladimir Nabokov’s Critical Reputation in English: A Note and a Checklist,” Wisconsin Studies, op. cit., 312–3
64. Reprinted in Dembo, op. cit. Pp. 225–274.
Butler, Diana, “Lolita Lepidoptera,” New World Writing, No. 16 (1960), 58–84.
Dupee, F. W., “Lolita in America,” Encounter, XII (February 1959), 30–35.
Reprinted in Columbia University Forum, II (Winter 1959), 35–39.
—–, “A Preface to Lolita,” Anchor Review, No. 2 (1957), 1–13. Reprinted in his “The King of the Cats” and Other Remarks on Writers and Writing. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. Pp. 117–141. Includes review of The Gift.
Fiedler, Leslie A., “The Profanation of the Child,” New Leader, XLI (June 23, 1958), 26–29.
Field, Andrew, Nabokov: His Life in Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967. Pp. 323–351.
Girodias, Maurice, “Lolita, Nabokov, and I,” Evergreen Review, IX (September 1965), 44–47, 89–91. Account of first publication of Lolita; for Nabokov’s rejoinder, see “Lolita and Mr. Girodias,” Evergreen Review, XI (February 1967), 37–41.
Gold, Herbert, “The Art of Fiction XL: Vladimir Nabokov, An Interview,” Paris Review, No. 41 (Summer-Fall 1967), 92–111.
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