Read Online The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov - Free Book Online

possess no special term.”
Poshlust
: “the sound of the ‘o’ is as big as the plop of anelephant falling into a muddy pond and as round as the bosom of a bathing beauty on a German picture postcard” (p. 63). More precisely, it “is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive” (p. 70). 24 It is an amalgam of pretentiousness and philistine vulgarity. In the spirit of Mark Twain describing the contents of the Grangerford household in
Huckleberry Finn
(earlier American
poshlust
), Humbert eviscerates the muddlecrass (to wax Joycean) world of Charlotte and her friends, reminding us that Humbert’s long view of America is not an altogether genial one.
    In the course of showing us our landscape in all its natural beauty, Humber satirizes American songs, ads, movies, magazines, brand names, tourist attractions, summer camps, Dude Ranches, hotels, and motels, as well as the Good-Housekeeping Syndrome (
Your Home Is You
is one of Charlotte Haze’s essential volumes) and the cant of progressive educationist and child-guidance pontificators. 25 Nabokov offers us a grotesque parody of a “good relationship,” for Humbert and Lo are “pals” with a vengeance;
Know Your Own Daughter
is one of the books which Humbert consults (the title exists). Yet Humbert’s terrible demands notwithstanding, she is as insensitive as children are to their parents; sexuality aside, she demands anxious parental placation in a too typically American way, and, since it is Lolita “ to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster ” she affords Nabokov an ideal opportunity to comment on the Teen and Sub-teen Tyranny. “ Tristram in Movielove ,” remarks Humbert, and Nabokov has responded to those various travesties of behavior which too many Americans recognize as tenable examples of reality. A gloss on this aspect of
Lolita
is provided by “Ode to a Model,” a poem which Nabokov published the same year as the Olympia Press edition of
Lolita
(1955):
                   I have followed you, model,
                   in magazine ads through all seasons,
                   from dead leaf on the sod
                   to red leaf on the breeze,
     
                   from your lily-white armpit
                   to the tip of your butterfly eyelash,
                   charming and pitiful,
                   silly and stylish.
     
                   Or in kneesocks and tartan
                   standing there like some fabulous symbol,
                   parted feet pointed outward
                   —pedal form of akimbo.
     
                   On a lawn, in a parody
                   of Spring and its cherry-tree,
                   near a vase and a parapet,
                   virgin practising archery.
     
                   Ballerina, black-masked,
                   near a parapet of alabaster.
                   “Can one”—somebody asked—
                   “rhyme ‘star’ and ‘disaster’?”
     
                   Can one picture a blackbird
                   as the negative of a small firebird?
                   Can a record, run backward,
                   turn ‘repaid’ into ‘diaper’?
     
                   Can one