Stalking Nabokov (60 page)

Expectations are possible because the world and its objects and events fall into patterns. But we learn more from the surprising than from the expected since surprise signals something new and therefore potentially worth notice. Stories fall into patterns of patterns, which storytellers can play with to arouse, satisfy, defeat, or surprise expectations—and no wonder that expectation and surprise drive so much of our interest in story. When Humbert discloses that he is a murderer, certain patterns of events instantly spring to our minds, and, as we realize when we read on, our storyteller wishes to toy with storytelling expectations. The usual whodunit pattern of a murder mystery gives way to a whocoppedit pattern (see
VNAY
243), as Humbert parades one possible victim after another before us and then finds out the name of the person he wishes to kill but refuses to tell us, although he unhelpfully notes he has sprinkled clues to the victim’s identity throughout the story so far.

The most powerful patterns of all in fiction tend to be those associated with plot: with goals, obstacles, and outcomes, with expectations and surprises. Humbert’s goal of obtaining Lolita powerfully shapes expectations and ironies throughout part 1 of the novel; his goal of venting his murderous hatred on the rival who took Lolita from him shapes much of part 2. These intensely human, albeit in Humbert’s case perverse, goal patterns shape the narrative impetus of the novel. But Nabokov builds in other patterns, like those of Lolita’s relationship to the stranger pursuing Humbert and Lolita out west: on a first reading we wonder with Humbert whether these signs signal a rival, a detective on his trail, or a paranoid projection of his fears or guilt. Quilty, the stranger, weaves a different set of elusive patterns into the hotel and motel ledgers along the way for the express purpose of tantalizing and taunting Humbert and us. And Humbert in telling his story then weaves into his manuscript the patterns pointing to Quilty’s presence in order to tantalize and taunt us so that we cannot immediately identify the patterns he can now see, comprehend, and control.

In
On the Origin of Stories
, I note two examples of “early” story: one early in human history, Homer’s
Odyssey
; the other early in individual development, Dr. Seuss’s
Horton Hears a Who!
. I do not stress pattern in these two stories, but the openings of both books swarm with form. The
Odyssey
opens with the metrical pattern of dactylic hexameter, the structural pattern of the invocation to the muse and the proem, the focus on one hero amid larger events, and the verbal pattern of poly-adjectives surrounding Odysseus, even twice within the first line. In the opening four lines of
Horton Hears a Who!
we find verbal pattern play at least as intense—alliteration, anaphora, anapestic tetrameter, antithesis, assonance, consonance, end rhyme, internal rhyme—usually in multiple doses and compounded by visual and narrative patterns.

Writers of fiction, from Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare to Dickens, Joyce, Nabokov, Beckett, and Dr. Seuss, produce patterns at many levels. Others produce fewer kinds of pattern but focus intensely on those that matter most to us in human terms, character and event, plus their own particular predilections: in Austen’s case, for instance, generalizations about human conduct and character, in Tolstoy’s, the patterns of an acutely observed physical and physiological world.

As “The monkeys / They went up sky” and dragons poo-pooing and Homer and Dr. Seuss show in their different ways, pattern saturates story from the start. But
Lolita
, a sophisticated late instance of story, not only proliferates patterns but also problematizes them. It protrudes pattern but sometimes provokes by suggesting significant implications it nevertheless withholds. The hotel name, The Enchanted Hunters, obtrudes in a first reading of
Lolita
, especially as the goal of Humbert’s quest to possess Lolita, and because of the ecphrastic fresco at the hotel, whose enchanted hunters Humbert reimagines in terms of orgiastic incandescence, and because Humbert, although the hunter, feels enchanted when Lolita turns on him and suggests that they make love. A year and a half later Lolita is about to star in a school play called
The Enchanted Hunters
when she suggests to Humbert that they leave Beardsley and travel west together. In Elphinstone, a gem of a western state, as we later discover, she has an assignation with Quilty, the play’s author, who also happened to be staying at The Enchanted Hunters the night Humbert tried to possess Lolita in her sleep and
did
possess her when she awoke.

The pattern seems charged with significance, yet it remains elusive, unlike the overt implications of, say, the motifs in
Ulysses
, such as the outsider Throwaway, the horse that wins the Ascot Gold Cup on Bloomsday and is associated with Bloom, and the ousted favorite, Sceptre, associated with Bloom’s seemingly favored rival, Blazes Boylan.

One aspect of the Enchanted Hunters pattern I noticed many years ago was a series of covert links between the attempted rape of Lolita at the hotel and the killing of Quilty at his manor, where, as he stalks his prey, Humbert calls himself “an enchanted and very tight hunter.” Despite this arch echo, Humbert fails to realize that fate (or Nabokov) has constructed a whole system of parallels between the Enchanted Hunters episode and the episode of the murder (
VNAY
253). In
The American Years
I ask: What are we to make of this pointed pairing of ostensibly unrelated scenes?

And I answer:

Humbert carefully places after the murder that haunting and famous scene on the mountain trail overlooking the valley filled with the sound of schoolchildren at play: “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” In the position Humbert has given it, this becomes the last distinct scene of the novel. Even a fine reader like Alfred Appel, Jr., can treat this moment of epiphany for Humbert as his “moral apotheosis” (
Annotated Lolita
326), a final clarity of moral vision that almost redeems him. Humbert does indeed feel profound and sincere regret here, albeit too late, but that is only one part of a complex whole. He places this image of himself to stand in contrast to Quilty, whom he has just murdered, though the vision itself occurred not then but three years earlier, when Quilty took Lolita from him. What difference does the timing make? For two years Humbert had been lucidly aware that he was keeping Lolita a prisoner and destroying her childhood and her spirit, but he continued to hold her in his power. So long as he could extract sexual delight from her, he could remain deaf to his moral sense. Only after her disappearance, when she was no longer available as the thrice-daily outlet for his lust, did he allow his moral awareness to overwhelm him as he looked down into that valley.

But that was a very selective insight. Humbert places the scene at the end of the novel to leave the closing impression that he can be selflessly concerned for Lolita, and his rhetorical strategy persuades many readers. Nabokov assesses things differently, and although he gives Humbert complete control over his pen, he finds a way to inscribe his own judgment within and against what Humbert writes. By the covert parallels he constructs between the climaxes of the novel’s two parts, he indicates that both scenes reflect the same romantic sense of the imperious dictates of desire, the same quest for self-satisfaction even at the expense of another life.

(
VNAY
253–54)

The links between the scenes at The Enchanted Hunters and at Pavor Manor, where the murder occurs, are inconspicuous until noticed but then become insistently precise and pointed. Whether others agree with my interpretation of why Nabokov inscribed this particular covert pattern is another question. But the Enchanted Hunters pattern shows how Nabokov can continue to amplify the effects of the patterns of character and event that we register at once by planting further complementary patterns we can discover only on careful re-rereadings.

Another related pattern I noticed only recently. Ironies that ripple through the novel pervade the early scene at Hourglass Lake, where Humbert bathes with Charlotte and thinks of drowning her in what seems like ideal seclusion, but decides against it. Sunbathing with Charlotte afterward, he is surprised when Jean Farlow emerges from the bushes. The brief passage below, though funny in its own right, seems primarily preparation for other ironies:

Charlotte, who was a little jealous of Jean, wanted to know if John was coming.

He was. He was coming home for lunch today. He had dropped her on the way to Parkington and should be picking her up any time now. It was a grand morning. She always felt a traitor to Cavall and Melampus for leaving them roped on such gorgeous days. She sat down on the white sand between Charlotte and me. She wore shorts. Her long brown legs were about as attractive to me as those of a chestnut mare.

(
Lolita
88–89)

Notice the names of Jean Farlow’s dogs, casually dropped in here, referred to once earlier as “two boxer dogs” but never mentioned again after the lines above. Cavall was not only King Arthur’s favorite hound but the first of his hounds to turn the stag in a hunting episode in
The Mabinogion
.
¹¹
Melampus is the name of the first hound of Actaeon, in Ovid’s telling of the story of Diana and Actaeon in his
Metamorphoses
.
¹²

The precision of these allusions startles: two hounds from different literary traditions that are the first to chase or turn a stag. Actaeon, remember, is the hunter who spies Diana, the virgin goddess of hunting, naked. Diana, enraged, transforms him into a stag, and his hounds pursue him, Melampus leading, and tear him to pieces. He still feels as a man, but he can express himself only as a deer, so his own hounds and his fellow hunters cannot respond to his strangled voice pleading for them to stop tearing him apart.

This leads us back to the Enchanted Hunters motif and the idea of the hunter hunted and of sex and chastity as linked with hunting and pursuit. Humbert, stalking Lolita, finds himself hunted by Charlotte and “captured” in marriage. Wanting to end Charlotte’s life, but not daring to, he finds her suddenly killed, after a dog chases a car that swerves and kills her, as if his deadly plans have met with enchanted success. Stalking Lolita at The Enchanted Hunters, Humbert finds himself “hunted” by her when she proposes they try out what she discovered at camp. But Quilty, already at the hotel, witnesses Humbert and recognizes his designs on Lolita. This recognition inspires him to write the play
The Enchanted Hunters
, revolving around a character called Diana, whose role Lolita will take. The play itself turns out to be an enchanted device for Quilty’s hunting down Lolita and then for stalking and hounding Humbert, now very much the hunted rather than the hunter, all the way across America. Just after Humbert gives up his hunt for Lolita’s “kidnapper,” he passes through Briceland (echoing Brocéliande, the home of Merlin the Enchanter) and The Enchanted Hunters Hotel, before writing a poem about Diana and the Enchanted Hunters. When he hears from Lolita about her marriage to a young American, Humbert resumes the hunt but finds himself chasing the wrong prey, and when at last Lolita gives him the scent he needs, he heads straight off to kill the man who had hunted and hounded him.

Nabokov was a scientist and had spent most of the decade before writing
Lolita
in charge of butterflies and moths at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was fascinated by pattern in nature, like the patterns of butterfly wings, the patterns of matching patterns in natural mimicry, and the complex patterns of relationships a scientist has to disentangle to work out the taxonomic relatedness within a genus or a family of butterflies. As a novelist he was also a shrewd intuitive psychologist, aware of how the mind processes pattern. He realized that the profusion of patterns in nature may obscure or distract us from other significant patterns. Beside Hourglass Lake, the character patterns of Charlotte’s jealousy (of Lolita, of Jean) and of Humbert’s scornfulness toward adult women, and the wry verbal patterns of free indirect speech, here ironically maximizing the mental distance between Humbert and Jean—all seem much more prominent than the incidental Cavall and Melampus.

Even if we track down Cavall and Melampus and link them to the Enchanted Hunters, and through Cavall as King Arthur’s dog link to the Arthurian pattern that Nabokov seems to have attached from the first to the Lolita theme, I am not satisfied with what we can interpret of either the Enchanted Hunters or the Arthurian (and Merlinesque) pattern. Nabokov’s patterns have powerful implications, once we trace them far enough, and in the case of
Lolita
I don’t think I or anyone else has yet reached that point.

What do these examples from
Lolita
suggest? A writer can capture our attention before, in some cases long before, we reach what academic critics would accept as the “meaning” or “meanings” of works. The high density of multiple patterns holds our attention and elicits our response—especially through patterns of biological importance, like those surrounding character and event, which arouse attention and emotion and feed powerful, dedicated, evolved information-processing subroutines in the mind.

Patterns in fiction, as in life, may proliferate and obscure other patterns. They can yield rich but sometimes far from evident implications. They may be open-ended: they and their implications often do not come preannounced and predigested. Sometimes they feed into efficient, evolved pattern-detection systems, but often they have to be discovered through attention and curiosity, and sometimes in ways that neither audiences nor authors fully anticipate.