Read Online The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated by Vladimir Nabokov - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
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novel that chronicles the effects of a debilitating love, the
Doppelgänger
tale, and, in parts, a Duncan Hines tour of America conducted by a guide with ablack imagination, a parodic case study, and, as the narrator of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
says of his half brother’s first novel,
The Prismatic Bezel
, “It is also a wicked imitation of many other … literary habit[s].” Knight’s procedures summarize Nabokov’s:
As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade,
The Prismatic Bezel
soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, (p. 91)
“But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard” (p. 92), says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for although Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary burlesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s
A Christmas Garland
(1912) does not. The description of
The Prismatic Bezel
and the remainder of Chapter Ten in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and, like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.” There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most audacious parodies:
Lolita
makes fun of Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
(1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody of the Double as a convention of modern fiction and a Double who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life.
With the possible exception of Joyce, Nabokov is alone among modern writers in his ability to make parody and pathos converge and sometimes coincide. Joyce comes closest to this in
Ulysses
(1922), not in the coldly brilliant “Oxen of the Sun” section but in the “Cyclops” episode in Barney Kiernan’s pub, which oscillates between parodic passages and a straightforward rendering of the dialogue and action; in the “Nausicäa” episode on the beach, which first projects Gerty MacDowell’s point of view in a style parodying sentimental ladies; magazine fiction, and midway shifts to Bloom’s non-parodic stream-of-consciousness; and in parts of the “Hades” Nighttown section, especially the closing apparition of Bloom’s dead son,Rudy. Nabokov has gone beyond Joyce in developing parody as a novelistic form, for in
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
, which are totally parodic in form and may be the finest comic novels since
Ulysses
, the parody and pathos are always congruent, rather than adjacent to one another—as though the entire “Nausicäa” or “Cyclops” episodes were cast as parody, without in any way diminishing our sense of Bloom’s suffering, or that Joyce had been able to express something of the humanity of Bloom or Mrs. Purefoy in the “Oxen of the Sun”
tour de force
. Nabokov has summarized in a phrase his triumph in
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
. Just before Humbert takes Lolita into their room at The Enchanted Hunters hotel in what is to be the most crucial event in his life, Humbert comments, “ Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death. ” To paraphrase Marianne Moore’s well-known line that poetry is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Nabokov’s “poem” is a parody of death with real suffering in it. With characteristic
Doppelgänger
tale, and, in parts, a Duncan Hines tour of America conducted by a guide with ablack imagination, a parodic case study, and, as the narrator of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
says of his half brother’s first novel,
The Prismatic Bezel
, “It is also a wicked imitation of many other … literary habit[s].” Knight’s procedures summarize Nabokov’s:
As often was the way with Sebastian Knight he used parody as a kind of springboard for leaping into the highest region of serious emotion. J. L. Coleman has called it “a clown developing wings, an angel mimicking a tumbler pigeon,” and the metaphor seems to me very apt. Based cunningly on a parody of certain tricks of the literary trade,
The Prismatic Bezel
soars skyward. With something akin to fanatical hate Sebastian Knight was ever hunting out the things which had once been fresh and bright but which were now worn to a thread, dead things among living ones; dead things shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud, (p. 91)
“But all this obscure fun is, I repeat, only the author’s springboard” (p. 92), says the narrator, whose tone is justifiably insistent, for although Nabokov is a virtuoso of the minor art of literary burlesque, which is at best a kind of literary criticism, he knows that the novelist who uses parody is under an obligation to engage the reader emotionally in a way that Max Beerbohm’s
A Christmas Garland
(1912) does not. The description of
The Prismatic Bezel
and the remainder of Chapter Ten in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
indicate that Nabokov is fully aware of this necessity, and, like Knight, he has succeeded in making parody a “springboard.” There is thus an important paradox implicit in Nabokov’s most audacious parodies:
Lolita
makes fun of Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
(1864), but Humbert’s pages are indeed notes from underground in their own right, and Clare Quilty is both a parody of the Double as a convention of modern fiction and a Double who formulates the horror in Humbert’s life.
With the possible exception of Joyce, Nabokov is alone among modern writers in his ability to make parody and pathos converge and sometimes coincide. Joyce comes closest to this in
Ulysses
(1922), not in the coldly brilliant “Oxen of the Sun” section but in the “Cyclops” episode in Barney Kiernan’s pub, which oscillates between parodic passages and a straightforward rendering of the dialogue and action; in the “Nausicäa” episode on the beach, which first projects Gerty MacDowell’s point of view in a style parodying sentimental ladies; magazine fiction, and midway shifts to Bloom’s non-parodic stream-of-consciousness; and in parts of the “Hades” Nighttown section, especially the closing apparition of Bloom’s dead son,Rudy. Nabokov has gone beyond Joyce in developing parody as a novelistic form, for in
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
, which are totally parodic in form and may be the finest comic novels since
Ulysses
, the parody and pathos are always congruent, rather than adjacent to one another—as though the entire “Nausicäa” or “Cyclops” episodes were cast as parody, without in any way diminishing our sense of Bloom’s suffering, or that Joyce had been able to express something of the humanity of Bloom or Mrs. Purefoy in the “Oxen of the Sun”
tour de force
. Nabokov has summarized in a phrase his triumph in
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
. Just before Humbert takes Lolita into their room at The Enchanted Hunters hotel in what is to be the most crucial event in his life, Humbert comments, “ Parody of a hotel corridor. Parody of silence and death. ” To paraphrase Marianne Moore’s well-known line that poetry is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” Nabokov’s “poem” is a parody of death with real suffering in it. With characteristic
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