Well played, Nabokov, well played
At the end of Lolita, I felt kind of regretful that I did not borrow/purchase the annotated version because of all the references and word plays I am bound to have missed. I appreciate that this novel was split up into two classes: after our initial discussion, I approached reading part two differently than part one. I approached part one primarily as plot-driven – just determined to see how Humbert Humbert’s, Dolores Haze’s, and Charlotte Haze’s relationship plays out. For part two, I was more up to catching the word plays up to a point where it almost became an obsessive game of my own and taking in Nabokov’s “love affair” with the English language (316).
With the heads-up about the doppelganger/ Clare Quilty, I was maddeningly looking for anything I thought that fit the bill in the writing while I was reading. For one thing, the narrator decided on a double name as a pseudonym (his other choices were “Otto Otto,” “Mesmer Mesmer,” and “Lambert Lambert”) (308). Also, the pseudonym’s initials, “H.H.” are the same as Harold Haze’s, Dolores’ biological father, which in some parts of the narrative, Humbert presumes to be (someone who has a doppelganger being a doppelganger of someone else?)…a (slightly creepy) nice touch.
After finding out about some of the events that happened between Dolores and Quilty, I had to go back to the first time Quilty’s name was mentioned in the narrative, which was when Humbert copies a page out of Who’s Who in the Limelight, where Dolores’ name appears. Above that certain Dolores’s entry is Clare Quilty who is a playwright of plays including “The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning (in collaboration with Vivian Darkbloom), Dark Age, The Strange Mushroom, Fatherly Love” (31). As pointed out in class, The Little Nymph, The Lady Who Loved Lightning, and Fatherly Love are pretty direct parallels to Humbert’s life with Lolita, his mother’s death, and the sometimes-strange presumption of being Dolores’ father that Humbert takes up, respectively. Dark Age and The Strange Mushroom are probably more open to interpretation. Can the Dark Age be a nod to the internal turmoil Humbert experiences or the dark two years after Dolores successfully escapes? My gut thought for The Strange Mushroom parallel is hallucinatory drugs or experiences (ha!), which I think I can tweak to the bizarre narration of the trip Humbert and Dolores takes after spending sometime at Beardsley in part two where Humbert’s unreliability as a narrator is very apparent. Quilty’s hobbies were listed as “cars, photography, pets,” which I suppose, means all the changing cars pursuing Humbert and Dolores, pornographic movie pictures, and human pets with odd traits like three breasts (31, 301). After this passage, there is Humbert’s own imagination of Dolores becoming an actress and appearing in The Murdered Playwright and a confession of “Guilty of killing Quilty,” another cherry on top (32). I look forward to a discussion of Quilty’s bizarre death in class…
And then there is Vivian Darkbloom. I admit I cheated a bit and skimmed the Wikipedia article about Lolita after I was done reading and discovered that “Vivian Darkbloom” is an anagram of “Vladimir Nabokov.” From the very telling Forward that seemed a bit useless in the initial reading, is the outcome of this particular Vivian Darkbloom character: “’Vivian Darkbloom’ has written a biography, ‘My Cue,’ to be published shortly” (4). “Cue” is what Quilty is also known as and from the little blurb on Quilty’s plays, we know that Darkbloom and Quilty know each other (and yes, I appreciate that “Cue” sounds exactly like “Q,” Quilty’s initial). Running with the doppelganger, this line can be read as Darkbloom/ Nabokov writing a biography on Cue a.k.a. Quilty/ Humbert…or the very novel we are reading, Lolita.
To make a long post short, I really enjoyed this novel (if it wasn’t apparent).
Tags: Humbert Humbert, Lolita, Nabokov, Obsession, Quilty
