The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated (78 page)
Read The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Online
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
“Savez … de vous
?”
: French; “Do you know that, when she was ten, my little daughter was madly in love with you?”
Proustianized and Procrusteanized
: from
Procrustean
; violently forced into conformity or inflexibly adapted to a system or idea. Procrustes was the legendary robber who made his victims fit a certain bed by stretching or cutting off their legs. Proust is also alluded to
here
,
here
, and
here
. Similar wordplay occurs in
Ada
when Van Veen discusses Space and Time: “avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun” (p. 541); the latter phrase is also an allusion to Verlaine (see
souvenir … veux-tu?
).
late
: a corrected author’s error (instead of “early” in the 1958 edition).
tankard
: a tall, one-handled drinking vessel with a lid.
Never will Emma rally … timely tear
: a reference to
Madame Bovary
, Part III, Chapter Eight, where Homais the pharmacist and Emma’s two physicians, Bovary and Carnivet, frantically try to save her life. They summon the very distinguished Dr. Larivière, but he cannot do anything for her (“He was the Third Doctor,” added Nabokov, “but that fairy tale Third did not work” [see
Percy Elphinstone
]). Old Roualt, Emma’s father (“Flaubert’s father,” because the author said, “Emma Bovary?
c’est moi!
”), arrives after she has died; his subsequent tears are not too “timely” (III, Chapter Nine). See
nous connûmes
.
honeymonsoon
: a portmanteau;
honeymoon
plus
monsoon
, the periodic wind and rainy season of Southern Asia.
them
: Lolita and her kidnaper.
HAPTER
28
Pas tout à fait
: French; not quite.
handkerchief … from my sleeve
: an English fad of the twenties and thirties. Affected rarely today, even among the pseudo-sophisticated.
Ah-ah-ah
: simply the sound of a three-folding “harmonica” door.
Dick Skiller
: a phonetic rendering of the pronunciation of “Schiller,” and a blending of “Dick’s killer” and the street name.
Hunter Road
: a streamlined Enchanted Hunters; see
The Enchanted Hunters
.
HAPTER
29
Personne … Repersonne
: French; a humorous alliteration; “Nobody. I re-rang the bell. Re-nobody.”
invisible tennis racket
: he is measuring this wan young woman against his wondrous memory of the
tennis-playing nymphet
.
russet Venus
: “The Birth of Venus”; see
Botticellian pink
and
Florentine
.
Waterproof
: see
Waterproof
; Jean Farlow almost mentions Clare Quilty’s name as the chapter concludes. For further discussion, see the Introduction,
here
. For allusions to Quilty, see
Quilty, Clare
.
everything fell into order … the pattern of branches … the satisfaction of logical recognition
: this passage, and the novel’s crystalline progression, are prefigured in
The Defense
(1930) when Nabokov describes the two books with which chessplayer Luzhin
had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained. But it was not a thirst for distant peregrinations that forced him to follow on the heels of Phileas Fogg, nor was it a boyish inclination for mysterious adventures that drew him to that house on Baker Street, where the lanky detective with the hawk profile, having given himself an injection of cocaine, would dreamily play the violin. Only much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern: Phileas, the dummy in the top hat, wending his complex elegant way with its justifiable sacrifices, now on an elephant bought for a million, now on a ship of which half has to be burned for fuel; and Sherlock endowing logic with the glamour of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a
talisman progressing through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one radiant conclusion. [pp. 33–34]
For more on Holmes, see
Shirley Holmes
.
valetudinarian
: a person having a sick or weakly constitution.
visited with his uncle … Mother’s club
: see
4640 Roosevelt Blvd.… mattress
.
sidetrack … female
: see
Some old woman
.
frileux
: chilly; susceptible of cold.
Florentine
: Botticelli’s Venus (
here
).
French … Dorset yokel … Austrian tailor
: the “salad of racial genes” mentioned
here
, where a Swiss and “Danubian” dash is added. “I have carefully kept Russians out of it,” noted Nabokov, “though I think his first wife had some Russian blood mixed with Polish.” Similarly, there are very few specific allusions to Russian writers in
Lolita.
beast’s lair
: Quilty.
Viennese medicine man
: Freud. See
a case history
.
hypnotoid
: a variant of “hypnoid,” of or pertaining to hypnosis.
Streng verboten
: German; strictly forbidden.
like her mother
: “Lolita’s smoking manners were those of her mother,” emphasized Nabokov. “I remember being very pleased with that little vision when composing it.”
Cue
: Quilty’s nickname; see
“Vivian Darkbloom”
.
Curious coincidence
: “
Camp Q
.” It’s no “coincidence” at all; someone in the know has planned it this way.
Duk Duk
: an obscene Oriental word for copulation, sometimes rendered in English as
dak
or
dok
, from the Persian
dakk
(vice, evil condition) and
dokhtan
(to pierce). No less “
an amateur of sex lore
” than Quilty, H.H. gleaned this from a sixteenth-century work,
The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui, a Manual of Arabian Erotology
(1886), translated by Sir Richard Burton (1821–1800), the British explorer and Orientalist (the treatise is mentioned by name in
Ada
, pp. 351–352). Such recondite material reminds one of
Lolita
’s reputation, among non-readers, as a “pornographic novel,” and also underscores how Nabokov
has had the last laugh, in more ways than one. In
Speak, Memory
, Nabokov writes about the “delusive opening moves, false scents, [and] specious lines of play” which characterize the chess problem. The subject matter of
Lolita
is in itself a bravura and “delusive opening move”—a withdrawn promise of pornography (see
two titles
). The first one hundred or so pages of
Lolita
are often erotic—Lolita on H.H.’s lap, for instance—but starting with the seduction scene, Nabokov withholds explicit sexual descriptions, while H.H., trying to draw the reader into the vortex of the parody, exhorts us to “
Imagine me: I shall not exist if you do not imagine me
.” “
I am not concerned with so-called ‘sex’ at all
,” H.H. says; Nabokov, on the contrary, is very much concerned with it, but with the reader’s expectations rather than H.H.’s machinations.
“Anybody can imagine those elements of animality,” he said, and yet a great many readers wished that he had done it for them—enough to have kept
Lolita
at the top of the best-seller list for almost a year, although librarians reported that many readers never finished the novel. The critics and remedial readers who complain that the second half of
Lolita
is less interesting are not aware of the possible significance of their admission. Their desire for highbrow pornography is “doubled” in Clare Quilty, whose main hobby is making pornographic films. When Lolita tells H.H. that Quilty forced her to star in one of his unspeakable “sexcapades,” more than one voyeuristic reader has unconsciously wished that Quilty had been the narrator, his unseen movie the novel. But the novel’s “habit of metamorphosis” is consistent, for the erotica which seemed to be there and turned out not to be was in fact present all along, most modestly; and it is Nabokov’s final joke on the subject, achieved at the expense of the very common reader. Although the requisite “
copulation of clichés
” doesn’t occur in the novel proper, its substratum reveals some racy stuff indeed: “Duk Duk”; “Undinist” (
fountain pen … repressed undinist … water nymphs in the Styx
); “Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.” (
Dr. Kitzler, Eryx, Miss.
); the quotations in French from Ronsard and Belleau (
Ronsard’s “la vermeillette fente
and
Remy Belleau’s “un petit … escarlatte”
); anagrammatic obscenities (
Miss Horn … Miss Cole
); foreign disguises (
souffler
,
souffler
); and so forth—erotica under lock and key, buried deep in dictionaries and the library stacks. Until now, only a few furtive “amateur[s] of sex lore,” law-abiding linguists, and quiet scholars—good family men, all—have had exclusive access to this realm. The “incidental Dick” and “hole” of
this passage
are in the open—democratic, available references—on the junior-high level.
redhaired guy
: see
here
.
Sade’s … start
:
Justine, or, The Misfortunes of Virtue
(1791), by the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), “French soldier and pervert” (as
Webster’s Second
defines him). Like
Lolita, Justine
is prefaced by a Foreword resolutely “moral” in tone (in some editions, however, these initial paragraphs are not formally identified as a “Foreword”). The title character is an extraordinarily resilient young girl who exists solely for the pleasures of an infinite succession of sadistic libertines. She undergoes an array of rapes, beatings, and tortures as monstrously imaginative as they are frequent. Quilty has done a screenplay of
Justine
(
Justine
).
souffler
: to “blow.”
my Lolita
: the “Latin” tag (see
the writer’s ancient lust
and
my Lolita
) appropriately concludes this
important paragraph
, as it will the entire novel (
do not pity C.Q.…. aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments … my Lolita
).
dreaming … of … 2020
A.D.
: “2020” because he has perfect prevision; also a numerical reflection of the doubling that occurs throughout the novel (see
Beale
).
mon … radieux
: “my great radiant sin,” a line from Verlaine’s
Lunes
(“Moons”), part of the sequence titled
Laeti et errabundi
, in which the poet celebrates his liaison and travels with Rimbaud. Again, H.H. identifies with Verlaine, the abandoned lover, and casts Lo as the deceitful Carmen. For Rimbaud, see
Peacock, Rainbow
,
ramparts of ancient Europe
, and
touché, reader!
; for more on Verlaine,
souvenir … veux-tu?
.
Changeons … séparés
: “Let’s change [our] life, my Carmen, let us go live in some place where we shall never be separated”; from Mérimée (see
Est-ce que … Carmen
)—José and Carmen’s next-to-last interview. He has romantically offered America as the place where they will be able “to lead a quiet life.” H.H. is more specific in matters of geography. The Mérimée phrase “
quelque part
” mirrors “Quelquepart Island” (
Aubrey Beardsley, Quelquepart Island
), another “coincidence” that allows the author to reveal his presence at the center of a crucial scene, a verbal plant akin to the appearance of McFate’s “face” in the mirrorlike Ramsdale
class list
. For Mérimée, see
Little Carmen
.
And we shall live happily ever after
: H.H. holds out to Lolita the possibility of a stereotyped fairy-tale ending, even though the tale seems already to have ended in “Elphinstone” (
Elphinstone
). For more on the fairy tale, see
Percy Elphinstone
.
Carmen … moi
: “Carmen, do you want to come with me?” A quotation from Mérimée; a most dramatic moment at the end of the novella (see also
Keys
, p. 51). Carmen
does
go with José, but after they ride off she says that she will never live with him again, and will only follow him to death. A tearful imploration fails, and he kills her.
“you got it all wrong … your incidental Dick, and this awful bole
: obscene double entendres on his name and home, which may have been missed by speed-readers. More subtle is H.H.’s use of one last colloquialism, “got,” as though this common touch would help him communicate with Lolita. Her adult coarseness is telescoped by the “
bucks
” and “honey”
here
.
mon petit cadeau
: French; my little gift, the little something. His “4000 bucks” in 1952 meant a great deal more than in today’s money. “For some odd reason,” said Nabokov, “this paragraph, top of p. 279, is the most pathetic in the whole book; stings the canthus, or should sting it.”
