The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Read online

  The word “game” commonly denotes frivolity and an escape from the exigencies of the world, but Nabokov confronts the void by virtue of his play-concept. His “game of worlds” (to quote John Shade in Pale Fire) proceeds within the terrifyingly immutable limits defined by the “two eternities of darkness” and is a search for order—for “some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game”—which demands the full consciousness of its players. The author and the reader are the “players,” and when in Speak, Memory Nabokov describes the composition of chess problems he is also telescoping his fictional practices. If one responds to the author’s “false scents” and “specious lines of play,” best effected by parody, and believes, say, that Humbert’s confession is “sincere” and that he exorcises his guilt, or that the narrator of Pnin is really perplexed by Pnin’s animosity toward him, or that a Nabokov book is an illusion of a reality proceeding under the natural laws of our world—then one not only has lost the game to the author but most likely is not faring too well in the “game of worlds,” one’s own unscrambling of pictures.

  Speak, Memory rehearses the major themes of Nabokov’s fiction: the confrontation of death; the withstanding of exile; the nature of the creative process; the search for complete consciousness and the “free world of timelessness.” In the first chapter he writes, “I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits.” Nabokov’s protagonists live in claustrophobic, cell-like rooms; and Humbert, Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), and Krug in Bend Sinister (1947) are all indeed imprisoned. The struggle to escape from this spherical prison (Krug is Russian for “circle”) assumes many forms throughout Nabokov; and his own desperate and sometimes ludicrous attempts, as described in Speak, Memory, are variously parodied in the poltergeist machinations of The Eye, in Hazel Shade’s involvement with “a domestic ghost” and her spirit-writing in the haunted barn in Pale Fire, and in “The Vane Sisters” (in Tyrants Destroyed [1975]), where an acrostic in the final paragraph reveals that two vivid images from the story’s opening paragraphs were dictated by the dead Vane sisters.

  Although Speak, Memory clearly illuminates the self-parodic content of Nabokov’s fiction, no one has fully recognized the aesthetic implications of these transmutations or the extent to which Nabokov consciously projected his own life in his fiction. To be sure, this is dangerous talk, easily misunderstood. Of course Nabokov did not write the kind of thinly disguised transcription of personal experience which too often passes for fiction. But it is crucial to an understanding of his art to realize how often his novels are improvisations on an autobiographic theme, and in Speak, Memory Nabokov good-naturedly anticipates his critics: “The future specialist in such dull literary lore as auto-plagiarism will like to collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel The Gift with the original event.” Further on he comments on his habit of bestowing “treasured items” from his past on his characters. But it is more than mere “items” that Nabokov has transmogrified in the “artificial world” of his novels, as a dull specialist discovers by comparing Chapters Eleven and Thirteen of Speak, Memory with The Gift, or, since it is Nabokov’s overriding subject, by comparing the attitudes toward exile expressed in Speak, Memory with the treatment it is given in his fiction. The reader of his memoir learns that Nabokov’s great-grandfather explored and mapped Nova Zembla (where Nabokov’s River is named after him), and in Pale Fire Kinbote believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla. His is both a fantastic vision of Nabokov’s opulent past as entertained by a madman and the vision of a poet’s irreparable loss, expressed otherwise by Nabokov in 1945: “Beyond the seas where I have lost a sceptre, / I hear the neighing of my dappled nouns” (“An Evening of Russian Poetry”). Nabokov’s avatars do not grieve for “lost banknotes.” Their circumstances, though exacerbated by adversity, are not exclusive to the émigré. Exile is a correlative for all human loss, and Nabokov records with infinite tenderness the constrictions the heart must suffer; even in his most parodic novels, such as Lolita, he makes audible through all the playfulness a cry of pain. “Pity,” says John Shade, “is the password.” Nabokov’s are emotional and spiritual exiles, turned back upon themselves, trapped by their obsessive memories and desires in a solipsistic “prison of mirrors” where they cannot distinguish the glass from themselves (to use another prison trope, drawn from the story “The Assistant Producer” [1943], in Nabokov’s Dozen [1958]).

  The transcendence of solipsism is a central concern in Nabokov. He recommends no escape, and there is an unmistakable moral resonance in his treatment of the theme: it is only at the outset of Lolita that Humbert can say that he had Lolita “safely solipsized.” The coldly unromantic scrutiny which his exiles endure is often overlooked by critics. In Pnin the gentle, addlepated professor is seen in a new light in the final chapter, when the narrator assumes control and makes it clear that he is inheriting Pnin’s job but not, he would hope, his existence. John Shade asks us to pity “the exile, the old man / Dying in a motel,” and we do; but in the Commentary, Kinbote says that a “king who sinks his identity in the mirror of exile is guilty of [a regicide].” “The past [is] the past,” Lolita tells Humbert toward the end of that novel, when he asks her to relive what had always been inexorably lost. As a book about the spell exerted by the past, Lolita is Nabokov’s own parodic answer to his previous book, the first edition of Speak, Memory. Mnemosyne is now seen as a black muse, nostalgia as a grotesque cul-de-sac. Lolita is the last book one would offer as “autobiographical,” but even in its totally created form it connects with the deepest reaches of Nabokov’s soul. Like the poet Fyodor in The Gift, Nabokov could say that while he keeps everything “on the very brink of parody … there must be on the other hand an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it”.

  An autobiographic theme submitted to the imagination thus takes on a new life: frozen in art, halted in space, now timeless, it can be lived with. When the clownish Gradus assassinates John Shade by mistake, in a novel published forty years after Nabokov’s father was similarly murdered, one may remember the butterfly which the seven-year-old Nabokov caught and then lost, but which was “finally overtaken and captured, after a forty-year race, on an immigrant dandelion … near Boulder” (Speak, Memory). One recognizes how art makes life possible for Nabokov, and why he calls Invitation to a Beheading a “violin in a void.” His art records a constant process of becoming—the evolution of the artist’s self through artistic creation—and the cycle of insect metamorphosis is Nabokov’s controlling metaphor for the process, provided by a lifetime of biological investigations which established in his mind “links between butterflies and the central problems of nature.” Significantly, a butterfly or moth will often appear at the end of a Nabokov novel, when the artistic “cycle” of that book is complete.

  Speak, Memory only reinforces what is suggested by Nabokov’s visibly active participation in the life of his fiction, as in Invitation to a Beheading when Cincinnatus strains to look out of his barred window and sees on the prison wall the telling, half-erased inscription, “You cannot see anything. I tried it too”, written in the neat, recognizable hand of the “prison director”—that is, the author—whose intrusions involute the book and deny it any reality except that of “book.” The word “involution” may trouble some readers, but one has only to extend the dictionary definition. An involuted work turns in upon itself, is self-referential, conscious of its status as a fiction, and “allégorique de lui-měme”—allegorical of itself, to use Mallarmé’s description of one of his own poems. An ideally involuted sentence would simply read, “I am a sentence,” and John Barth’s short stories “Title,” “Life-Story,” and “Menelaiad” (in Lost in the Funhouse, 1968) come as close to this dubious ideal as any fiction possibly can. The components of “Title,” for exam
ple, sustain a miraculous discussion among themselves, sometimes even addressing the author: “Once upon a time you were satisfied with incidental felicities and niceties of technique.”

  Characters in involuted works often recognize that their authenticity is more than suspect. In Raymond Queneau’s Les Enfants du Limon (1938), Chambernac is a lycée headmaster who has been collecting material for a monumental work on “literary madmen,” L’Encyclopédie des sciences inexactes. By the last chapter he has abandoned hope of getting it published, but he then is approached in a café by “un type” (Queneau, as it turns out, who identifies himself by name) and offers to turn the manuscript over for use in a novel Queneau is writing, one of whose characters is a headmaster, and so forth. A similar infinite regress exists in Chapter Four of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872), the creator’s (and Creator’s) role now played by the sleeping Red King. When Alice moves to waken the King, Tweedledee stops her:

  “He’s dreaming now,” said Tweedledee: “and what do you think he’s dreaming about?”

  Alice said, “Nobody can guess that.”

  “Why, about you!” Tweedledee exclaimed, clapping his hands triumphantly. “And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?”

  “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice.

  “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously. “You’d be nowhere. Why you’re only a sort of thing in his dream!”

  “If that there King was to wake,” added Tweedledum, “you’d go out—bang!—just like a candle!”

  “I shouldn’t!” Alice exclaimed indignantly. “Besides, if I’m only a sort of thing in his dream, what are you, I should like to know?”

  “Ditto,” said Tweedledum.

  “Ditto, ditto!” cried Tweedledee.

  He shouted this so loud that Alice couldn’t help saying “Hush! You’ll be waking him, I’m afraid, if you make so much noise.”

  “Well, it’s no use your talking about waking him,” said Tweedledum, “when you’re only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you’re not real.”

  “I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.

  A similar discussion occurs in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957). “What is there to keep me here?” asks Clov. “The dialogue,” answers Hamm. More like the Tweedles than Alice are the three aging characters in Queneau’s Le Chiendent (1933). Having survived the long destructive Franco-Etruscan war, by the final pages they are ready for anything. When the queen is complimented, she says, “It wasn’t I who said that.… It’s in the book.” Asked “What book?” she replies, “Well, this one. The one we’re in now, which repeats what we say as we say it and which follows us and tells about us, a genuine blotter which has been stuck on our lives.”4 They then discuss the novel of which they are a part and agree to try to annihilate time and begin all over again. They go back to Paris, back in time. The last two sentences of the book are the first two sentences.

  Although the philosophical implications are somewhat less interesting, the most patent examples of involution are found in comic books, comic strips, and animated cartoons. The creatures in cartoons used to be brought to life before one’s eyes: first, the tabula rasa of an empty screen, which is then seen to be a drawing board, over which the artist’s brush sweeps, a few strokes creating the characters, who only then begin to move. Or the convention of the magical ink bottle, framing the action fore and aft. The characters are sucked back into the bottle at the end, just as they had spilled out of it at the start. These devices describe the process of Le Chiendent, where one sees a silhouette from the first page fleshed-out more and more as the novel progresses, or Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le labyrinthe (In the Labyrinth, 1959), where in the stillness of his room the narrator contemplates several objects, including a steel engraving, which is then “animated,” a fiction spinning out of it. “We create ourselves in time,” says one of the characters at the end of Le Chiendent, “and the old book snatches us up right away with its funny little scrawl [handwriting].”5

  In involuted works, characters readily communicate with their creators, though the relationship is not always ideal. One may recall an early Bugs Bunny animated cartoon (c. 1943) in which there is a wild running battle between the rabbit and the artist, whose visible hand alternately wields an eraser and a drawing pencil, terrible weapons which at one moment remove the rabbit’s feet so that he cannot escape, and at another give him a duck’s bill so that he cannot talk back, not unlike the lot of the characters in Invitation to a Beheading, who are taken apart, rearranged, and reassembled at will. But characters are not always as uncomplaining as Cincinnatus. In the next-to-last box of a 1936 daily strip, Chester Gould pictured his hero trapped horribly in a mine shaft, its entrance blocked by a huge boulder. The balloon above Dick Tracy’s stricken face said, “Gould, you have gone too far.” The concluding box was to have shown a kindly eraser-bearing hand, descending to remove the boulder; but The Chicago Tribune’s Captain Patterson, no doubt a disciple of Dr. Leavis, thought Gould had indeed gone too far, and rejected that strip. Considerably less desperate is Shakespeare’s direct address to Joyce in Nighttown: “How my Oldfellow chokit his Thursdaymomun,” that moment being Bloomsday, this book, and Joyce’s stab at greatness.6 “O Jamesy let me up out of this,” pleads Molly Bloom to Joyce,7 and in the hallucinated Nighttown section the shade of Virag says, “That suits your book, eh?” When in acknowledgment his throat is made to twitch, Virag says, “Slapbang! There he goes again.”8 Virga is quite right to speak directly to Joyce, because the phantasmagoria of Nighttown are the artist’s. Virag accepts the truth that he is another’s creation, and does so far more gracefully than Alice or poor Krug in Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, who is instantaneously rendered insane by the realization. On the other hand, this perception steels Cincinnatus, who is waiting to be beheaded, since it means he cannot really “die.”

  Nabokov’s remarks on Gogol help to underscore this analogical definition of involution. “All reality is a mask,” he writes (p. 148), and Nabokov’s narratives are masques, stagings of his own inventions rather than recreations of the naturalistic world. But, since the latter is what most readers expect and demand of fiction, many still do not understand what Nabokov is doing. They are not accustomed to “the allusions to something else behind the crudely painted screens” (p. 142), where the “real plots behind the obvious ones are taking place.” There are thus at least two “plots” in all of Nabokov’s fiction: the characters in the book, and the consciousness of the creator above it—the “real plot” which is visible in the “gaps” and “holes” in the narrative. These are best described in Chapter Fourteen of Speak, Memory, when Nabokov discusses “the loneliest and most arrogant” of the émigré writers, Sirin (his émigré pen name): “The real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech, which one critic [Nabokov?] has compared to windows giving upon a contiguous world … a rolling corollary, the shadow of a train of thought.” The contiguous world is the mind and spirit of the author, whose identity, psychic survival, and “manifold awareness” are ultimately both the subject and the product of the book. In whatever way they are opened, the “windows” always reveal that “the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus” of everything.

  From its birth in King, Queen, Knave (1928), to its full maturation in Invitation to a Beheading (1936), to its apotheosis in the “involute abode” of Pale Fire (1962), the strategy of involution has determined the structure and meaning of Nabokov’s novels. One must always be aware of the imprint of “that master thumb,” to quote Frank Lane in Pale Fire, “that made the whole involuted boggling thing one beautiful straight line,” for only then does it become possible to see how the “obvious plots” spiral in and out of the “real” ones. Although other writers have created involuted works, Nabokov’s self-consciousness is supreme; and the range and scale of his effects, his mastery and control, make him unique. Not including autobiographic themes, the involutio
n is achieved in seven basic ways, all closely interrelated, but schematized here for the sake of clarity:

  PARODY. As willful artifice, parody provides the main basis for Nabokov’s involution, the “springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion,” as the narrator of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight says of Knight’s novels. Because its referents are either other works of art or itself, parody denies the possibility of a naturalistic fiction. Only an authorial sensibility can be responsible for the texture of parody and self-parody; it is a verbal vaudeville, a series of literary impersonations performed by the author. When Nabokov calls a character or even a window shade “a parody,” it is in the sense that his creation can possess no other “reality.” In a novel such as Lolita, which has the fewest “gaps” of any novel after Despair (1934), and is seemingly his most realistic, the involution is sustained by the parody and the verbal patterning.