Free The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

makes
Lolita
one of the few supremely original novels of the century. It is difficult to imagine, say, that
Lord Jim
could have been achieved without the example of Henry James’s narrative strategies, or that
The Sound and the Fury
would be the same novel if Faulkner had not read
Ulysses
. But like
The Castle, Remembrance of Things Past, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake
, and
Pale Fire, Lolita
is one of those transcendent works of the imagination which defy the neat continuum maintained so carefully by literary historians. At most, it is one of those works which create their own precursors, to use Jorge Luis Borges’s winning phrase.
    Because Nabokov continually parodies the conventions of “realistic” and “impressionistic” fiction, readers must accept or reject him on his own terms. Many of his novels become all but meaningless in any other terms. At the same time, however, even Nabokov’s most ardent admirers must sometimes wonder about the smaller, more hermetic components of Nabokov’s artifice—the multifarious puns, allusions, and butterfly references which proliferate in novels such as
Pale Fire
and
Lolita
. Are they organic? Do they coalesce to form any meaningful pattern? Humbert’s wide-ranging literary allusions more than “challenge [our] scholarship,” as H.H. says of Quilty’s similar performance. Several of Humbert’s allusions are woven so subtly into the texture of the narrative as to elude all but the most compulsive exegetes. Many allusions, however, are direct and available, and these are most frequently to nineteenth-century writers; an early Note will suggest that this is of considerable importance. But unlike the allusions,which are sometimes only a matter of fun, the patterned verbal cross-references are always fundamental, defining a dimension of the novel that has escaped critical notice.
    The verbal
figurae
in
Lolita
limn the novel’s involuted design and establish the basis of its artifice. As indicated in the Foreword, no total interpretation of
Lolita
will be propounded here. The following remarks on artifice and game are
not
intended to suggest that this “level” of the novel is the most important; they are offered because no one has fully recognized the magnitude of this verbal patterning, or its significance. 29 Just as Nabokov’s Afterword was read in advance of the novel, so the following pages might well be reread after the annotations, many of which they anticipate.
    Although
Lolita
is less dramatically anti-realistic than
Pale Fire
, in its own way it is as grandly labyrinthine and as much a work of artifice as that more ostentatiously tricky novel. This is not immediately apparent because Humbert is Nabokov’s most “humanized” character since Luzhin (1930), and
Lolita
the first novel since the early thirties in which “the end” remains intact. Moreover, Nabokov said that
The Enchanter
, the 1939 story containing the central idea of
Lolita
, went unpublished
not
because of its subject matter but rather because “The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly spoke. Little by little I managed to give her some semblance of reality.” It may seem anomalous for puppeteer Nabokov, creator of the sham worlds of
Invitation to a Beheading
and
Bend Sinister
, to worry this way about “reality” (with or without quotation marks); yet one extreme does not preclude the other in Nabokov, and the originality of
Lolita
derives from this very paradox. The puppet theater never collapses, but everywhere there are fissures, if not gaps, in the structure, crisscrossing in intricate patterns and visible to the discerning eye—that is, the eye trained on Nabokov fictions and thus accustomed to novelistic
trompe-l’oeil. Lolita
is a great novel to the same extent as Nabokov is able to have it both ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other engaging him in a game made possible by the interlacings of