The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (3 page)

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 example, 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:

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 involution is achieved in seven basic ways, all closely interrelated, but schematized here for the sake of clarity:

P
ARODY
. 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.

C
OINCIDENCE
.
Speak, Memory
is filled with examples of Nabokov’s love of coincidence. Because they are drawn from his life, these incidents demonstrate how Nabokov’s imagination responds to coincidence, using it in his fiction to trace the pattern of a life’s design, to achieve shattering interpenetrations of space and time. “Some law of logic,” writes Nabokov in
Ada
(1969), “should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living
organism of a new truth” (p. 361). Humbert goes to live in Charlotte Haze’s house at 342 Lawn Street; he and Lolita inaugurate their illicit crosscountry tour in room 342 of The Enchanted Hunters hotel; and in one year on the road they register in 342 motels and hotels. Given the endless mathematical combinations possible, the numbers seem to signal his entrapment by McFate (to use Humbert’s personification). But they are also a patent, purposeful contrivance, like the copy of the 1946
Who’s Who in the Limelight
which Humbert would have us believe he found in the prison library on the night previous to his writing the chapter we are now reading. The yearbook not only prefigures the novel’s action, but under Lolita’s mock-entry of “Dolores Quine” we are informed that she “Made New York debut in 1904 in
Never Talk to Strangers
”—and in the closing paragraph of the novel, almost three hundred pages later, Humbert advises the absent Lolita, “Do not talk to strangers,” a detail that exhibits extraordinary narrative control for an allegedly unrevised, first-draft confessional, written during fifty-six chaotic days. Clearly, “Someone else is in the know,” to quote a mysterious voice that interrupts the narration of
Bend Sinister
. It is no coincidence when coincidences extend from book to book. Creations from one “reality” continually turn up in another: the imaginary writer Pierre Delalande is quoted in
The Gift
and provides the epigraph for
Invitation to a Beheading
; Pnin and another character mention “Vladimir Vladimirovich” and dismiss his entomology as an affectation; “Hurricane Lolita” is mentioned in
Pale Fire
, and Pnin is glimpsed in the university library. Mythic or prosaic names and certain fatidic numbers recur with slight variation in many books, carrying no burden of meaning whatsoever other than the fact that someone beyond the work is repeating them, that they are all part of one master pattern.