The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (73 page)

Red Rock
: the initial rock is
here
. Nabokov told me that the image is in no way a reference to the “red rock” that appears in
The Waste Land
(l. 25)—mentioned now because several correspondents have inquired about this.

caravansary
: see
caravansaries
.

detective tale
: one of the works of Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941), who was a kind of French Conan Doyle. See
Arsène Lupin
.

persons unknown
: Quilty. For a summary of allusions to him, see
Quilty, Clare
.

sign of Pegasus
: trademark of Mobil Oil; in Greek mythology, Pegasus is the winged horse sprung from Medusa at her death. Because a blow of his hoof brought forth Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses, he is an emblem of poetic inspiration.

that bug
: according to Nabokov, “this ‘patient bug’ is not necessarily a moth—it could be some clumsy big fly or miserable beetle.” For entomological allusions, see
John Ray, Jr.
.

the Conche
: Shell Oil’s trademark; in Greek mythology, the sea demigod Triton, son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, played a trumpet made of a conch. See
Proteus of the highway
.

Chestnut Court
: throughout the novel, the smallest verbal units are undergoing a kind of metamorphosis (see
A key (342!)
). The chestnut trees below the motel are said to be “toylike,” and H.H. is indeed toying with “Chestnuts.”
Here
, “Chestnut Court” becomes “Chestnut Castle,” five lines later turns into “Chestnut Crest,” and
here
it returns to its “Chestnut Court” form; given a new context
here
, it becomes a horse. See
Chestnut Lodge
, by which time it has become “Chestnut Lodge.” As happens so often, Nabokov himself has described the process best: “The names Gogol invents are really nicknames which we surprise in the very act of turning into family names—and a metamorphosis is a thing always exciting to watch” (
Gogol
, p. 43).

an elf-like girl on an insect-like bicycle
: H.H. has just mentioned that they are near Lolita’s home town of Pisky (“pixie”; see
Pisky
); elves are
thus indigenous to the region, and Nabokov has blended the fairy-tale theme with the entomological motif.

Chestnut Castle
: see
Chestnut Court
.

“Bertoldo” … comedy
: the famous clown of Italian popular legend, who was the subject of a sixteenth-century collection of witty tales,
Vita di Bertoldo
, by Giulio Ceasare Croce. Bertoldo is planted here to show that H.H. could easily understand Quilty’s later
allusion to Italian comedy
.

red hood
: Quilty; the devil’s presence is more than fleeting; see
diabolical glow
. His appearances are summarized in
Quilty, Clare
.

cod-piece fashion
: in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a flap or bag, often ornamental, concealing an opening in the front of men’s breeches;
cod-piece
is archaic for “penis” (often used by such writers as François Rabelais [c. 1490–1553], author of
Gargantua
).

adolori … langueur
: “affected by love’s languor.” The phrase “
d’amoureuse langueur
” appears several times, with slight variations, in Ronsard’s
Amours.
“
Adolori
,” a punning tribute to Lolita (
à Dolores
), is of course H.H.’s addition. See also
Keys
, p. 137n. See
Ronsard’s “la vermeillette fente”
for another Ronsard allusion.

diabolical glow
: Quilty. She was with him at about the time H.H. was having his hair cut by the grotesque,
tragic barber
.

the shadow
: Quilty is continually identified as such.

Gros
: French; fat.

“luizetta
”
: H.H.’s invention; from
louis d’or
, the French gold coin.

the … life we all had rigged
: that “we all” (= H.H., Quilty, McFate, and Nabokov) involutes the narrative once more. See
I have only words to play with
.

burley … Krestovski
: see
Krestovski
. The punning adjective summarizes his essence:
burly
(sturdy, stout) plus
burley
(an American tobacco, used in cigarettes and plugs).

Chestnuts and Colts
: freed from all modifiers (see
Chestnut Court
), the trees, motels, and unstated brand names of the above pistols are here able to frolic together briefly as horses. “We are faced by the remarkable phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live creatures,” as Nabokov says of
Dead Souls
(
Gogol
, p. 78).

Aztec Red
: Quilty’s “red shadow” and “red beast” (
here
), characterized below as a “Red Yak.”

Jovian
: in Roman mythology, Jove (or Jupiter) is god of the sky.

donc
: French; therefore.

crepitating
: crackling.

Jutting Chin … funnies
: the comic strip
Dick Tracy
, created by Chester Gould (1900–1985) in 1931.

of my age … rosebud … mouth
: Quilty; the fact and the motif are familiar. H.H. had thought of growing such a mustache (
toothbrush mustache
), and they also own similar bathrobes (
here
).

O lente … equi
: “O slowly run, horses of the night”; H.H.’s adjacent “translation” puns on the literal Latin (night mares). Less one
lente
, this line is from
The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
(V, ii, 140), by Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593). With only one hour left before eternal damnation, Faustus hopes for more time. H.H. does not try to “outspeed” Quilty, that latter-day Mephistopheles. See also
Keys
, pp. 31–32. For a similar pun—nightmares and stallions—see
Ada
, p. 214.

viatic
: see
viatic
.

lady … lightning
: see
The Lady Who Loved Lightning
. The allusions to
The Lady Who Loved Lightning
and “Fatface” anticipate the next passage, in which H.H. and Lolita attend Quilty’s play. He and his collaborator are mentioned by name
here
and even appear on stage.

Soda, pop. 1001
: there is in California a Lake Soda, pop. unknown. The magical “1001” is well chosen. It is simultaneously a numerical mirroring (see
Beale
) and an allusion to the fairy-tale theme (see
Percy Elphinstone
) via another vertiginously involuted work,
The Thousand and One Nights.

flatus
: gas generated in the bowels or stomach.

kurortish
:
Kurort
is German for “health resort” (see
here
); the usage is H.H.’s own.

children-colors … a passage in James Joyce
: the colors of the spectrum; the “living rainbow” mimed by the “
seven little graces
.” It is from
Finnegans Wake.
The theme of the diversity and unity of all things is central to the constantly metamorphosing dream world of
Finnegans Wake.
The seven colors of the spectrum represent diversity and are most frequently personified by seven “rainbow girls” who oppose the archetypal mother, Anna Livia Plurabelle. The book opens with a reversed rainbow; the seven clauses in the second paragraph each contain a color, shifting from violet to red. Although not wrong, H.H.’s mention of a single “passage” is misleading because the motif is sustained throughout the
Wake.
To have the hateful Quilty “lift” from
Finnegans Wake
rather than
Ulysses
constitutes a rather private and thus thoroughly Joycean joke, based on Nabokov’s low opinion of the book he calls
Punnigans Wake
, or, in
Bend Sinister
, keeping its vast liquidity in mind, “
Winnipeg Lake
, ripple 585, Vico Press edition” (p. 114). “
Ulysses
towers over the rest of Joyce’s writings,” said Nabokov, “and in comparison to its noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style the unfortunate
Finnegans Wake
is nothing but a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snore in the next room, most aggravating to the insomniac I am.…
Finnegans Wake
’s façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity. I know I am going to be excommunicated for this pronouncement” (
Wisconsin Studies
interview). Charles Kinbote sustains his maker’s negative opinion: “it would have been unseemly for a monarch to appear in the robes of learning at a university lectern and present to rosy youths
Finnigan’s
[
sic
—A.A.]
Wake
as a monstrous extension of Angus MacDiarmid’s ‘incoherent transactions’ and of Southey’s Lingo-Grande (‘Dear Stumparumper,’ etc.) …” (
Pale Fire
, p. 76).

Joyce himself helped to introduce Nabokov to
Finnegans Wake.
In Paris in 1937 or 1938, he gave Nabokov
Haveth Childers Everywhere
(1930), one of the fragments published before the
Wake
was completed. Future commentators will no doubt find several echoes of
Finnegans Wake
in
Lolita
; but it could hardly be otherwise, since Joyce’s book is so inclusive, so monstrously allusive (Phineas Quimby appears on p. 536 of the
Wake
[standard American edition], and
here
in
Lolita
—but who
doesn’t
appear in
Finnegans Wake?
). Moreover, Joyce’s punning mutations
anticipate and echo sentences which are yet to be written. The hero of
Finnegans Wake
is HCE—Here Comes Everybody, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, usually just Humphrey (with a humped back). Since he is “Everyman,” there are some forty humming variations of his name, and, “influences” aside, there is statistically reason enough for some of Nabokov’s humorously distorted forms of “Humbert” to coincide with a few of Joyce’s punning phonetic variants. Thus Nabokov’s sartorially splendid “Homburg” (
here
) complements Joyce’s “Humborg” (p. 72, standard American edition), and Joyce’s “Humfries” (p. 97) should surely be served with Nabokov’s “Hamburg[s]” (
here
and
here
)—but these are all coincidences, said Nabokov, for, “Generally speaking,
FW
is a very small and blurry smudge on the mirror of my memory.” The only persistent “smudge” is a trace of Anna Livia Plurabelle. In
Bend Sinister
, Ophelia is imagined “wrestling—or, as another rivermaid’s father would have said, ‘wrustling’—with the willow” (p. 113); and in
Ada
, the title character alludes to the music of the self-contained A.L.P. section: “Did he know Joyce’s poem about the two washerwomen?” she wonders (p. 54). The “children-colors,” however, constitute the only intentional allusion to
Finnegans Wake
in
Lolita.
For a summary of Joyce allusions, see
outspoken book: Ulysses
.

Orange … and Emerald
: when I asked Nabokov if he chose these particular colors because they are also the common names of a butterfly and a moth, respectively, Nabokov responded: “The Dubliner’s rainbow of children on p. 221 would have been a meaningless muddying of metaphors had I tried to smuggle in a Pierid of the Southern States and a European moth. My only purpose here was to render a prismatic effect. May I point out (at the risk of being pretentious) that I do not see the colors of lepidoptera as I do those of less familiar things—girls, gardens, garbage (similarly, a chessplayer does not see white and black as white and black), and that, for instance, if I use ‘morpho blue’ I am thinking not of one of the many species of variously blue
Morpho
butterflies of South America, but of the ornaments made of bits of the showy wings of the commoner species. When a lepidopterist uses ‘Blues,’ a slangy but handy term, for a certain group of Lycaenids, he does not see that word in any color connection because he knows that the diagnostic undersides of their wings are not blue but dun, tan, grayish, etc., and that many Blues, especially in the female, are brown, not blue. In my case, the differentiation in artistic and scientific vision is particularly strong because I was really born a landscape painter, not a landless
escape novelist as some think.” For more on “blue,” see
Why blue
; for a more generalized discussion of color, see
Aubrey McFate … devil of mine
.

P.O. Wace and P.O. Elphinstone
: = P.O.W. and Poe, and the imprisonment theme.

Ne manque … Qu’il t’y
: an allusion to Quilty and a parody of the classical alexandrine verse of seventeenth-century France, specifically of
Le Cid
(1636), by Pierre Corneille (1606–1684): “Do not fail to tell your suitor, Chimène, how beautiful the lake is, because he should take you there.” Chimène is from
Le Cid
, but the line itself is invented. See also
Keys
, p. 71. For an index to Quilty references, see
Quilty, Clare
.

the mysterious nastiness
: Mona knew all about Quilty and injected his name. H.H. is not supposed to understand, at the time, the planted “
qu ’il t’y
,” though he suspects some nasty trick.