Read Online The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
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Kill your past, make you real, raise a family,
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from back numbers of Sham?
Although Nabokov called attention to the elements of parody in his work, he repeatedly denied the relevance of satire. One can understand why he said, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist” (
Playboy
interview), for he eschewed the overtly moral stance of the satirist who offers “to mend the world.” Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,” but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” Moreover, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, real and imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each is captive of the other, imprisoned together ina succession of bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can share nothing of what they see—making Humbert seem as alone during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has left him and the car is an empty cell.
Nabokov’s denials notwithstanding, many of Humbert’s observations of American morals and mores
are
satiric, the product of his maker’s moral sensibility; but the novel’s greatness does not depend on the profundity or extent of its “satire,” which is over-emphasized by readers who fail to recognize the extent of the parody, its full implications, or the operative distinction made by Nabokov: “satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Like Joyce, Nabokov shows how parody may inform a high literary art, and parody figures in the design of each of his novels.
The Eye
parodies the nineteenth-century Romantic tale, such as V. F. Odoevsky’s “The Brigadier” (1844), which is narrated by a ghost who has awakened after death to view his old life with new clarity, while
Laughter in the Dark
is a mercilessly cold mocking of the convention of the love triangle;
Despair
is cast as the kind of “cheap mystery” story the narrator’s banal wife reads, though it evolves into something quite different; and
The Gift
parodies the major nineteenth-century Russian writers.
Invitation to a Beheading
is cast as a mock anti-utopian novel, as though Zamiatin’s
We
(1920) had been restaged by the Marx Brothers.
Pnin
masquerades as an “academic novel” and turns out to parody the possibility of a novel’s having a “reliable” narrator. Pnin’s departure at the end mimics Chichikov’s orbital exit from
Dead Souls
(1842), just as the last paragraph of
The Gift
conceals a parody of a Pushkin stanza. The texture of Nabokov’s parody is unique because, in addition to being a master parodist of literary styles, he is able to make brief references to another writer’s themes or devices which are so telling in effect that Nabokov need not burlesque that writer’s style. He parodies not only narrative clichés and outworn subject matter but genres and prototypes of the novel;
Ada
parodically surveys nothing less than the novel’s evolution. Because Chapter Four of
The Gift
is a mock literary biography, it anticipates the themes of Nabokov’s major achievements, for he is continuously parodying the search for a verifiable truth—the autobiography, the biography, the exegesis, the detective story—and these generic “quests” will coalesce in one work, especially when the entire novel is conceptually a parody, as in
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
.
In form,
Pale Fire
is a grotesque scholarly edition, while
Lolita
is a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Romantic
Kill your past, make you real, raise a family,
by removing you bodily
from back numbers of Sham?
Although Nabokov called attention to the elements of parody in his work, he repeatedly denied the relevance of satire. One can understand why he said, “I have neither the intent nor the temperament of a moral or social satirist” (
Playboy
interview), for he eschewed the overtly moral stance of the satirist who offers “to mend the world.” Humbert’s “satires” are too often effected with an almost loving care. Lolita is indeed an “ideal consumer,” but she herself is consumed, pitifully, and there is, as Nabokov said, “a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet.” Moreover, since Humbert’s desperate tourism is undertaken in order to distract and amuse Lolita and to outdistance his enemies, real and imagined, the “invented” American landscape also serves a quite functional thematic purpose in helping to dramatize Humbert’s total and terrible isolation. Humbert and Lolita, each is captive of the other, imprisoned together ina succession of bedrooms and cars, but so distant from one another that they can share nothing of what they see—making Humbert seem as alone during the first trip West as he will be on the second, when she has left him and the car is an empty cell.
Nabokov’s denials notwithstanding, many of Humbert’s observations of American morals and mores
are
satiric, the product of his maker’s moral sensibility; but the novel’s greatness does not depend on the profundity or extent of its “satire,” which is over-emphasized by readers who fail to recognize the extent of the parody, its full implications, or the operative distinction made by Nabokov: “satire is a lesson, parody is a game.” Like Joyce, Nabokov shows how parody may inform a high literary art, and parody figures in the design of each of his novels.
The Eye
parodies the nineteenth-century Romantic tale, such as V. F. Odoevsky’s “The Brigadier” (1844), which is narrated by a ghost who has awakened after death to view his old life with new clarity, while
Laughter in the Dark
is a mercilessly cold mocking of the convention of the love triangle;
Despair
is cast as the kind of “cheap mystery” story the narrator’s banal wife reads, though it evolves into something quite different; and
The Gift
parodies the major nineteenth-century Russian writers.
Invitation to a Beheading
is cast as a mock anti-utopian novel, as though Zamiatin’s
We
(1920) had been restaged by the Marx Brothers.
Pnin
masquerades as an “academic novel” and turns out to parody the possibility of a novel’s having a “reliable” narrator. Pnin’s departure at the end mimics Chichikov’s orbital exit from
Dead Souls
(1842), just as the last paragraph of
The Gift
conceals a parody of a Pushkin stanza. The texture of Nabokov’s parody is unique because, in addition to being a master parodist of literary styles, he is able to make brief references to another writer’s themes or devices which are so telling in effect that Nabokov need not burlesque that writer’s style. He parodies not only narrative clichés and outworn subject matter but genres and prototypes of the novel;
Ada
parodically surveys nothing less than the novel’s evolution. Because Chapter Four of
The Gift
is a mock literary biography, it anticipates the themes of Nabokov’s major achievements, for he is continuously parodying the search for a verifiable truth—the autobiography, the biography, the exegesis, the detective story—and these generic “quests” will coalesce in one work, especially when the entire novel is conceptually a parody, as in
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
.
In form,
Pale Fire
is a grotesque scholarly edition, while
Lolita
is a burlesque of the confessional mode, the literary diary, the Romantic
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