The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  As for H.H. and John Ray, unless characters in a novel can be said to have miraculously fashioned their creators, someone else must be responsible for an anagram of the author’s name, and such phenomena undermine the narrative’s realistic base by pointing beyond the book to Nabokov, the stage manager, ventriloquist, and puppeteer, who might simply state, “My cue.” Because Nabokov considered publishing Lolita anonymously (see here), there was also a purely utilitarian reason for anagrammatizing his name, as proof of authorship. “Cue” is also the cognomen of Clare Quilty, who pursues H.H. throughout the novel. But who is Quilty?—a question the reader will surely ask (see the Introduction, here, and Quilty, Clare). As with H.H. and Lolita (née Dolores Haze), Quilty’s name lends itself to wordplay by turns jocose (see Ne manque … Qu’il t’y) and significant, since H.H. suggests that Clare Quilty is clearly guilty. Clare is also a town in Michigan (see town … first name), and, although Nabokov did not know it until this note came into being, Quilty is a town in County Clare, Ireland, appropriate to a verbally playful novel in which there are several apt references to James Joyce. See outspoken book.

  etiolated: to blanch or whiten a plant by exclusion of sunlight.

  outspoken book: Ulysses (1922), by James Joyce (1882–1941), Irish novelist and poet. Judge Woolsey’s historic decision paved the way for the 1934 American publication of Ulysses, and his decision, along with a statement by Morris Ernst, prefaces the Modern Library edition of the novel. Ray’s parenthetical allusion echoes and compresses its complete title: “THE MONUMENTAL DECISION OF THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT RENDERED DECEMBER 6, 1933, BY HON. JOHN M. WOOLSEY LIFTING THE BAN ON ‘ULYSSES.’ ” Ray’s Foreword in part burlesques the expert opinions which have inevitably prefaced subsequent “controversial” novels. For other allusions to Joyce, see crooner’s mug, seva ascendes … quidquam, sly quip … Rigger, Dr. Ilse Tristramson, J’ai toujours … Dublinois, children-colors … a passage in James Joyce, fountain pen … repressed undinist … water nymphs in the Styx, portrait … as a … brute, and God or Shakespeare.

  moral apotheosis: a just description of H.H.’s realization at the end of the novel: “the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.”

  12%: such “sextistics” (as H.H. or Quilty might call them) poke fun at the work of Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) and his Indiana University Institute for Sex Research.

  Blanche Schwarzmann: schwarz is German for “black”; her name is “White Blackman,” because, to Nabokov, Freudians figuratively see no colors other than black and white (see a case history). “White blackman” also describes the attire of a recently “white widowed male” (see two titles). For a similarly hued lady, see p. 302 and “Melanie Weiss.”

  a mixture of … supreme misery: an accurate description of the pain at the center of H.H.’s playfulness.

  his singing violin: another gap in the texture of Ray’s rhetoric reveals the voice of his maker. In his Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov calls the novel a “violin in a void,” and in Speak, Memory he calls the poet Boris Poplavski “a far violin among near balalaikas” (p. 287).

  a case history: among other things, Lolita parodies such studies, and Nabokov’s quarrel with psychoanalysis is well-known. No Foreword to his translated novels seems complete unless a few words are addressed to “the Viennese delegation,” who are also invoked frequently throughout the works. Asked in a 1966 National Educational Television interview why he “detest[ed] Dr. Freud,” Nabokov replied: “I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams. Or balloons” (this half-hour interview may be rented for a nominal fee from the Audio-Visual Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401; the film, notes their catalog, is “available to responsible individuals and groups both in and out of Indiana”). When I queried Nabokov about Freud (by now a trite question), just to see if he could rise to the occasion once more, he obliged me: “Oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care” (Wisconsin Studies interview).

  In Speak, Memory, Nabokov recalls having seen from a Biarritz window “a huge custard-colored balloon … being inflated by Sigismond Lejoyeux, a local aeronaut” (p. 156); and “the police state of sexual myth” (p. 300) is in Ada called “psykitsch” (p. 29). The good doctor’s paronomastic avatars are “Dr. Sig Heiler” (p. 28), and “A Dr. Froid … who may have been an émigré brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr. Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu” (p. 27). Since no parodist could improve on Erich Fromm’s realization that “The little cap of red velvet in the German version of Little Red Riding Hood is a symbol of menstruation” (from The Forgotten Language, 1951, p. 240), or Dr. Oskar Pfister’s felicitously expressed thought that “When a youth is all the time sticking his finger through his buttonhole … the analytic teacher knows that the appetite of the lustful one knows no limit in his phantasies” (from The Psychoanalytical Method, 1917, p. 79), Nabokov the literary anatomist simply includes these treasures in Pale Fire (p. 271). See Lolita, [PART ONE] c9.1, [PART TWO] c3.1, c11.1, c23.1, and c32.1; and patients … had witnessed their own conception, King Sigmund, auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, and Viennese medicine man.

  John Ray, Jr.: the first John Ray (1627–1705) was an English naturalist famous for his systems of natural classification. His system of plant classification greatly influenced the development of systematic botany (Historia plantarium, 1686–1704). He was the first to attempt a definition of what constitutes a species. His system of insects, as set forth in Methodus insectorum (1705) and Historia insectorum (1713), is based on the concept of metamorphosis (see not human, but nymphic). The reference to Ray is no coincidence (it was first pointed out by Diana Butler, in “Lolita Lepidoptera,” New World Writing 16 [1960], p. 63). Nabokov was a distinguished lepi-dopterist, worked in Lepidoptera as a Research Fellow in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard (1942–1948), and published some twenty papers on the subject. While I was visiting him in 1966, he took from the shelf his copy of Alexander B. Klots’s standard work, A Field Guide to the Butterflies (1951), and, opening it, pointed to the first sentence of the section on “Genus Lycæides Scudder: The Orange Margined Blues,” which reads: “The recent work of Nabokov has entirely rearranged the classification of this genus” (p. 164). “That’s real fame,” said the author of Lolita. “That means more than anything a literary critic could say.” In Speak, Memory (Chapter Six), he writes evocatively of his entomological forays, of the fleeting moments of ecstasy he experiences in catching exquisite and rare butterflies. These emotions are perhaps best summarized in his poem “A Discovery” (1943; from Poems, p. 15), its twentieth line echoing what he said to me more than two decades later:

  I found it in a legendary land

  all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,

  where it was settled on some sodden sand

  hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.

  The features it combines mark it as new

  to science: shape and shade—the special tinge,

  akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,

  the dingy underside, the checquered fringe.

  My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;

  corroded tissues could no longer hide

  that priceless mote now dimpling the convex

  and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

  Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist

  two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,

  or scales like battledores of amethyst

  cross the charmed circle of the microscope.

&
nbsp; I found it and I named it, being versed

  in taxonomic Latin; thus became

  godfather to an insect and its first

  describer—and I want no other fame.

  Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),

  and safe from creeping relatives and rust,

  in the secluded stronghold where we keep

  type specimens it will transcend its dust.

  Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,

  poems that take a thousand years to die

  but ape the immortality of this

  red label on a little butterfly.

  There are many references to butterflies in Lolita, but it must be remembered that it is Nabokov, and not H.H., who is the expert. As Nabokov said, “H.H. knows nothing about Lepidoptera. In fact, I went out of my way to indicate [here and here] that he confuses the hawk-moths visiting flowers at dusk with ‘gray hummingbirds.’ ” The author has implored the unscientific annotator to omit references to Lepidoptera, “a tricky subject.” Only the most specific lepidopterological allusions will be noted, though even this modest trove will make it clear how the butterfly motif enables Nabokov to leave behind on H.H.’s pages a trail of his own phosphorescent fingerprints. For entomological allusions, see Dolores, midge, powdered Mrs. Leigh … Vanessa van Ness, not human, but nymphic, predator … prey, Pisky, Miss Phalen, moth or butterfly, Lepingville … nineteenth century, powdered bugs, gay … Lepingville, lousy with … flies, hundreds of … hummingbirds, Avis Chapman, Edusa Gold, Felis tigris goldsmithi, that bug, Melmoth, Electra, butterfly, burning … Tigermoth, mulberry moth, 58 Inchkeith Ave., Schmetterling, Palearctic … Nearctic, and tinkling sounds … Lycaeides sublivens Nabokov.

  1955: a corrected author’s error (the date was not included in the 1958 edition).

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  Lolita, light of my life: her name is the first word in the Foreword, as well as the first and last words of the novel. Such symmetries and carefully effected alliterations and rhythms undermine the credibility of H.H.’s “point of view,” since the narrative is presented as an unrevised first draft, mistakes intact, started in a psychiatric ward and completed in a prison cell, the product of the fifty-six frenzied final days of H.H.’s life (see his reminder and I have only words to play with and The reader will regret to learn … I had another bout with insanity). When asked how her name occurred to him, Nabokov replied, “For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is ‘L.’ The suffix ‘-ita’ has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as … most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy ‘L’ and a long ‘O.’ No, the first syllable should be as in ‘lollipop,’ the ‘L’ liquid and delicate, the ‘lee’ not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in ‘Dolores’ [see Dolores]. My little girl’s heart-rending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname ‘Haze,’ where Irish mists blend with a German bunny—I mean a small German hare [= base]” (Playboy interview). Since most everything is in a name, Nabokov both memorializes and instructs in Ada: “For the big picnic on Ada’s twelfth birthday … the child was permitted to wear her lolita (thus dubbed after the little Andalusian gipsy [see Carmen note, gitanilla—A.A.] of that name in Osberg’s novel and pronounced, incidentally, with a Spanish ‘t,’ not a thick English one) …” (p. 77). Lolita’s name is lovingly celebrated by Anthony Burgess in his poem, “To Vladimir Nabokov on His Seventieth Birthday,” in TriQuarterly, of. 17 (Winter 1970):

  That nymphet’s beauty lay less on her bones

  Than in her name’s proclaimed two allophones.

  A boned veracity slow to be found

  In all the channels of recorded sound.

  Lo-lee-ta: the middle syllable alludes to “Annabel Lee” (1849), by Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). H.H. will lead one to believe that “Annabel Leigh” is the cause of his misery: “Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Loleeta,” he says. References to Poe are noted in Pym, Roland, Virginia … Edgar, “Edgar”… “writer and explorer”, Vee … and Bea, Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter, Edgar, and Favor; while “Annabel Lee” is variously invoked here, here, and here, and otherwise as noted princedom by the sea, noble-winged seraphs, envied, powdered Mrs. Leigh … Vanessa van Ness, point of possessing, Riviera love … over dark glasses, phocine, of my darling … my bride, ribald sea monsters, and Frigid Queen … Princess. But rather than identify every “Annabel Lee” echo occurring in the first chapter and elsewhere, the text of the poem is provided:

  It was many and many a year ago,

  In a kingdom by the sea,

  That a maiden there lived whom you may know

  By the name of Annabel Lee;—

  And this maiden she lived with no other thought

  Than to love and be loved by me.

  She was a child and I was a child,

  In this kingdom by the sea,

  But we loved with a love that was more than love—

  I and my Annabel Lee—

  With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven

  Coveted her and me.

  And this was the reason that, long ago,

  In this kingdom by the sea,

  A wind blew out of a cloud by night

  Chilling my Annabel Lee;

  So that her high-born kinsmen came

  And bore her away from me,

  To shut her up in a sepulchre

  In this kingdom by the sea.

  The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

  Went envying her and me:—

  Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,

  In this kingdom by the sea)

  That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling

  And killing my Annabel Lee.

  But our love it was stronger by far than the love

  Of those who were older than we—

  Of many far wiser than we—

  And neither the angels in Heaven above

  Nor the demons down under the sea

  Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:—

  For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

  And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes

  Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

  Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride

  In her sepulchre there by the sea—

  In her tomb by the sounding sea.

  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”) whi
ch 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).