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

libraries. Thus the richly variegated but sometimes crowded texture of
Bend Sinister
(1947), Nabokov’s first truly “American” novel, 23 looks forward to
Lolita
, his next novel.
Bend Sinister
’s literary pastiche is by turns broad and hermetic. Titles by Remarque and Sholokov are combined to produce
All Quiet on the Don
, and Chapter Twelve offers this “famous American poem”:
                   A curious sight—these bashful bears,
                   These timid warrior whalemen
     
                   And now the time of tide has come;
                   The ship casts off her cables
     
                   It is not shown on any map;
                   True places never are
     
                   This lovely light, it lights not me;
                   All loveliness is anguish—
     
    No poem at all, it is formed, said Nabokov, by random “iambic incidents culled from the prose of
Moby-Dick
.” Such effects receive their fullest orchestration in
Lolita
, as the Notes to this volume will suggest.
    If the
Onegin
Commentary (1964) is the culmination, then
Lolita
represents the apogee in fiction of Nabokov’s proclivities as anatomist and as such is a further reminder that the novel extends and develops themes and methods present in his work all along. Ranging from Dante to
Dick Tracy
, the allusions, puns, parodies, and pastiches in
Lolita
are controlled with a mastery unequaled by any writer since Joyce (who died in 1941). Readers should not be disarmed by the presence of so many kinds of “real” materials in a novel by a writer who believes so passionately in the primacy of the imagination; as Kinbote says in
Pale Fire
, “ ‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye” (p. 130).
    By his example, Nabokov reminded younger American writers of the fictional nature of reality. When Terry Southern in
The Magic Christian
(1960) lampoons the myth of American masculinity and its attendant deification of the athlete by having his multimillionaire trickster, Guy Grand, fix the heavyweight championship fight so that the boxers grotesquely enact in the ring a prancing and mincing charade of homosexuality, causing considerable psychic injury to the audience, his art, such as it is, is quite late in imitating life. A famous athlete of the twenties was well-known as an invert, and Humbert mentions him twice, never by his real name, though he does call him “ Ned Litam ”—a simple anagram of “Ma Tilden”—which turns out to be one of the actual pseudonyms chosen by Tilden himself, under which he wrote stories and articles. Like the literary anatomists who have preceded him, Nabokov knows that what is so extraordinary about “reality” is that too often even the blackest of imaginations could not have invented it, and by taking advantage of this fact in
Lolita
he has, along with Nathanael West, defined with absolute authority the inevitable mode, the dominant dark tonalities—if not the contents—of the American comic novel.
    Although Humbert clearly delights in many of the absurdities around him, the anatomist’s characteristic vivacity is gone from the pages which concern Charlotte Haze, and not only because she is repugnant to Humbert in terms of the “plot” but rather because to Nabokov she is the definitive artsy-craftsy suburban lady—the culture-vulture, that travesty of Woman, Love, and Sexuality.In short, she is the essence of American
poshlust
, to use the “one pitiless [Russian] word” which, writes Nabokov in
Gogol
, is able to express “the idea of a certain widespread defect for which the other three European languages I happen to know