The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (67 page)

A
Dryad
is a wood nymph (see
dryads and trees
). For nymph, see
not human, but nymphic
. For Browning, see
Pim … Pippa
,
Clowns and Columbines … Tennis
, and
a saint
.

cocker spaniel
: the old lady’s
dog
. See
Mr. Gustave … spaniel pup
and
spaniel … baptized
.

porcine
: swinelike; the pig image is introduced in the first sentence of the previous paragraph.

not Humberg
: H.H. corrects the desk clerk, who has coldly bestowed on him a Jewish-sounding name. The hotel is euphemistically restrictive (see
spaniel … baptized
). “Professor Hamburg” finds them “
full up
.”

Dr. Edgar H. Humbert and daughter
: H.H.’s
nom de registration
is in deference to Edgar A. Poe and
his
child bride (see
Virginia … Edgar
). H.H. also uses the “Edgar” elsewhere (see
“Edgar”… “writer and explorer”
and
Edgar
). For the Poe allusions, see
Lo-lee-ta
.

A key (342!)
: although H.H. is trying not to lose control of the language, as he did
here
, he (or
someone else
) is here managing to tell how H.H. was served by Mr. Swine, who is assisted by Mr. Potts, who can’t find any cots, because Swine has dispatched them to the Swoons (see
Chestnut Court
). A “key” to the meaning of this extraordinary verbal control is immediately provided by another “coincidence”: the room number is the same as the Haze house number. H.H. will shortly offer a figurative key by placing the number within quotation marks, which
is of course the only proper way to treat a fiction (
here
). “McFate” produces “342” once more; see
342
. Such coincidences serve a two-fold purpose: they at once point to the authorial consciousness that has plotted them, and can also be imagined as coordinates situated in time and space, marking the labyrinth from which a character cannot escape.

Parody of a hotel corridor … and death
:
parody
to H.H. because nothing seems “real” to him on this most crucial of nights;
parody
to Nabokov because the world within a work of art
is
“unreal” (see Introduction). But to repeat Marianne Moore’s well-known line, poetry is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and Nabokov’s novel is a parody of death with real suffering in it—H.H.’s and Lolita’s.

a mirror
: the room is a little prison of mirrors, a metaphor for his solipsism and circumscribing obsession. “ ‘So that’s the dead end’ (the mirror you break your nose against),” an overwrought H.H. tells Lolita after catching her in a lie (
here
). See
Beale
and
deep mirrors
. “In our earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors,” writes Nabokov in
The Gift
(p. 322). His characters continually confront mirrors where they had hoped to find windows, and the attempt to transcend solipsism is one of Nabokov’s major themes. As a literal image and overriding metaphor, the mirror is central to the form and content of Nabokov’s novels; in
Ada
, it describes the universe, for Antiterra’s sibling planet Terra is imagined as a “distortive glass of our distorted glebe” (p. 18). If one perceives
Pale Fire
spatially, with John Shade’s poem on the “left” and Charles Kinbote’s Commentary on the “right,” the poem is seen as an object to be perceived, and the Commentary becomes the world seen through the distorting prism of a mind—a monstrous concave mirror held up to an objective “reality.” The narrator of
Despair
loathes mirrors, avoids them, and comments on those “monsters of mirrors,” the “crooked ones,” in which a man is stripped, squashed, or “pulled out like dough and then torn in two” (p. 21). Nabokov has placed these crooked reflectors everywhere in his fiction: Doubles and mock-Doubles, parodies and self-parodies (literature trapped in a prison of amusement-park mirrors), works within works, worlds refracting worlds, and words distorting words—that is, translations (art’s “crazy-mirror,” said Nabokov) and language games (see
kremlin
).
Pale Fire
’s invented language is “the tongue of the mirror,” and the portmantoid pun is the principal mirror-language of
Lolita.
See
“Humbert Humbert”
.

Enfin seuls
: French for “alone at last,” the trite phrase of the honeymooner.

lentor
:
archaic
; slowness.

spoonerette
: a
spoonerism
is the accidental transposition of sounds in two or more words (“wight ray”). By acknowledging his spoonerism, H.H. reminds us what a wordsmith he is (in
Pale Fire
John Shade teaches at Wordsmith University). The affectionate suffix
-ette
may recall
majorette
, as well as the slang meaning of
spooner
, one who “necks” (or, as one dictionary archly puts it, “act[s] with silly and demonstrative fondness”). The suffix also parodies a recognizable and overused
préciosité
of Ronsard’s, who in fact employed “
nymphette
” in one of his poems. See “
vermeillette
” (
Ronsard’s “la vermeillette fente”
) and Quilty’s “
barroomette
.”

kitzelans
: lusting; from the German
kitzel
, “inordinate desire,” and
kitzler
, “clitoris.” See
Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.
.

seva ascendes … quidquam
: the language of Horace, Catullus, et al. (see
the writer’s ancient lust
) is appropriate to this modern, if hysterical, elegiast, whose “Latin” here turns out to be a curious mishmash of Latin, English, French, German, and Italian: “The sap ascendeth, pulsates, burning [
brulans
, from the French
brûler
, “to burn”], itching, most insane, elevator clattering, pausing, clattering, people in the corridor. No one but death would take this one [Lolita] away from me! Slender little girl, I thought most fondly, observing nothing at all.” At moments of extreme crisis, H.H. croaks incomprehensibly, losing more than his expropriated English; for his attempts “
to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets
” almost resist language altogether, carrying him close to the edge of non-language and a figurative silence. Thus H.H. significantly announces this scene as a “
Parody of silence
,” and, far from being nonsensical, the ensuing “Latin” is a parodic stream-of-consciousness affording a brief critical comment on a technique Nabokov found unsatisfactory, even in the novels of Joyce, whom he revered (“poor Stream of Consciousness,
marée noire
by now,” writes Nabokov toward the end of a similar parody in
Ada
[p. 300]). “We think not in words but in shadows of words,” Nabokov said. “James Joyce’s mistake in those otherwise marvelous mental soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts” (
Playboy
interview). To Nabokov, the unconnected impressions and associations that impinge on the mind were irrational until they were consciously ordered and to order them in art is to fulfill virtually a moral obligation, for without rational language man has “grown a very / landfish, languageless, / a monster,”
as Thersites says of Ajax in Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida.
Even the imprisoned Cincinnatus, under sentence of death, is “already thinking of how to set up an alphabet” which might humanize the dystopian world of
Invitation to a Beheading
(p. 139). See the second half of
Lo-lee-ta
.

nota bene
: Latin; mark well. The 1958 edition incorrectly ran the two words together.

dryads and trees
: see
frock-fold … Browning
.

writer fellow … ad
: Clare Quilty (see
Morell … “conquering hero”
). “Dromes” is a corrected misprint (“Droms” in the 1958 edition). For allusions to Quilty, see
Quilty, Clare
.

Femina
: Latin; woman.

Purpills
: a contraction of “Papa’s Purple Pills” from the previous paragraph.

le grand moment
: French; the great moment.

hot hairy fist
: Quilty also has conspicuously
hairy hands
.

sicher ist sicher
: German; sure is sure.

my uncle Gustave
: Gustave Trapp, sometimes a “cousin,” whom H.H. mistakes for Quilty (see
here
). A cousin of one’s mother is both one’s cousin and, in a sense, uncle.

Jean-Jacques Humbert
: after Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), Swiss-born French philosopher and author of the famous
Confessions.

one’s dungeon … some rival devil
: Quilty, H.H.’s “rival devil,” is staying at The Enchanted Hunters, and appears on the next page. The lust figuratively emanating from H.H.’s “dungeon” is objectified much later: “I had been keeping Clare Quilty’s face masked in my dark dungeon” (see
Réveillez-vous … mourir
).

comme on dit
: French; as they say.

King Sigmund
: Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), founder of psychoanalysis. See
a case history
and
patients … had witnessed their own conception
.

antiphony
: a musical response; a musical piece alternately sung by a choir divided into two parts.

powdered bugs
: Nabokov said, “The ‘powdered bugs’ wheeling around the lamps are noctuids and other moths which look floury on the wing (hence ‘millers,’ which, however, may also come from the verb), as they mill in the electric light against the damp night’s blackground. ‘Bugs’ is an Americanism for
any
insect. In England, it means generally bedbugs.” For entomological allusions, see
John Ray, Jr.
.

somebody sitting … porch
: Quilty. Their
verbal sparring
telescopes their pursuit of one another and prefigures the
physical struggle
. The allusions to Quilty are summarized in
Quilty, Clare
.

a rose, as the Persians say
: the fatidic flower and an allusion to
The Rubáiyát
(see
Wine, wine … for roses
).

a blinding flash … can be deemed immortal
: for the photograph in question, see
nothing of myself
. H.H. was
not
immortalized.

entre nous soit dit
: French; just between you and me.

grand Dieu
: French; good God!

La Petite … Ridicule
:
The Sleeping Maiden or the Ridiculous Lover.
There is no picture by this name. The mock-title and subject matter parody eighteenth-century genre engravings.

someone … beyond our bathroom
: Clare Quilty (see
a few paces from Lolita’s pillow
). Quilty also creates a “waterfall” on
brief waterfall
. For a summary of his appearances, see
Quilty, Clare
.

A breeze from wonderland
: there are several references to
Alice in Wonderland
(1865) by Lewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles L. Dodgson (1832–1898), English writer, mathematician, and nympholept (see
Alice-in-Wonderland
). “I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll,” said Nabokov, “because he was the first Humbert Humbert.” Nabokov translated
Alice
into Russian (Berlin, 1923). “I got five dollars (quite a sum during the inflation in Germany),” he recalls (
Speak, Memory
, p. 283). In
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, a character speaks “in the elenctic tones of Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar” (p. 123), while in
Ada
, “Ada in Wonderland” (p. 129), “Ada’s adventures in Adaland” (p. 568), and the “titles”
Palace in Wonderland
(p. 53) and
Alice in the Camera Obscura
(p. 547) are variously invoked (the latter a play on the original title of
Laughter in
the Dark
). “In common with many other English children (I was an English child) I have been always very fond of Carroll,” he said in the
Wisconsin Studies
interview. “No, I do not think his invented language shares any roots with mine [in
Bend Sinister
and
Pale Fire
]. He has a pathetic affinity with H.H. but some odd scruple prevented me from alluding in
Lolita
to his wretched perversion and to those ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little nymphets, bedraggled and half-undressed, or rather semi-undraped, as if participating in some dusty and dreadful charade.” But it might seem as though Nabokov
did
allude to Carroll in
Lolita
, through what might be called “the photography theme”: H.H. cherishes his worn old photograph of Annabel, has in a sense been living with this “still,” tries to make Lolita conform to it, and often laments his failure to capture her on film. Quilty’s hobby is announced as “photography,” and the unspeakable films he produces at the Duk Duk Ranch would seem to answer Carroll’s wildest needs. Asked about this, Nabokov replied, “I did not consciously think of Carroll’s hobby when I referred to the use of photography in
Lolita.
”