EDNOTE. My thanks to Professor Neil
Cornwell, author of the excellent introductory volume VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1999)
as well as JAMES JOYCE AND THE RUSSIANS (1992), for allowing NABOKV-L to circulate
the article below---one especially appropriate on LOLITA’s
Fiftieth Anniversary. [A shorter
version of this essay has been published in the James Joyce Broadsheet, 71, June
2005. A fuller version again will appear in the forthcoming Festschrift for Vittorio Strada.]
ULYSSES AND
LOLITA
by Neil Cornwell
What is frequently termed 'the Lolita
phenomenon' involves – in addition to the novel itself, its controversial
reception and publishing history – increased attention to a widening assortment
of 'pre-texts' or sources. These run from anticipatory glimmerings of the Lolita theme in Nabokov's
own oeuvre to the nomination of a gamut of
predecessors and possible influences. 'Did she have a precursor?' (the opening
section of Humbert's narrative: Penguin, The Annotated Lolita 9; hereafter
Within his own works, Nabokov identified a passage from 'A Nursery Tale' (1926);
even earlier, in 1924, he had translated Lewis Carroll's Alice in
Wonderland into Russian. Incidents or scenes can be found in The Gift (written 1933-38) and other works, but The Enchanter (written 1939; published only in 1986) is
acknowledged as the genuine Nabokovian pre-text to Lolita.
From elsewhere, scenes
in Dostoevsky have frequently been indicated
(occasionally by Nabokov himself). Other suggested
works have included What Maisie
Knew (pace Nabokov's declared antipathy
to Henry James); The Confessions of Victor X (a
Ukrainian obsessive, recorded by Havelock Ellis); and, from within the text of Lolita, a number of
authors – most importantly Poe (with Annabel Lee)
and Mérimée (Carmen).
Additional suggestions have featured Mary Shelley's Frankenstein;
Edith Wharton's The Children (1928); and even
Cervantes, remembering that Nabokov prepared his
Harvard Lectures on Don Quixote in the Lolita days of 1952.
According to Guy Davenport's foreword to these, after Lilith,
Lulu, Molly, Circe, Odette and other feisty
mistresses of Decadence, Nabokov chose the 'Swinburnian' name 'Dolores' – related to a much younger
Alice, Ruskin's Rose and of course Annabel Lee – and yet 'her Grandmama was Dulcinea del Toboso'. Lolita's full name
(Dolores) means 'pains' (or 'sorrows') in Spanish, while 'Dulcinea',
indeed, comes from dulce
('sweet').
A recently suggested
possible 'source' for Lolita
is a short story of that very name (the only so-titled work preceding Nabokov's
novel?), published in 1916 by the little known German writer Heinz von Lichberg (see publicity, and English translation, in TLS, April 2-July 23 2004). The title of von Lichberg's Spanish-set story may now be its most startling
effect. Nevertheless, Michael Maar (the work's
promoter) wants to know what Dolly Haze's 'little Spanish friend' ('a pale
Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman':
Elsewhere I have drawn
attention to Thomas Hardy’s The
Well-Beloved (on ‘A Dorset Yokel’s Knuckles’: see The Nabokovian, Number 54).
However, the latest source to be brought into the limelight is one from real
life, in Alexander Dolinin’s fascinating account of
‘What Happened to Sally Horner’ (TLS, September
9 2005) – an episode researched by Nabokov in local
papers and referred to in the novel by Humbert (AL 289).
* * * *
Certainly Nabokov would not need to have
known von Lichberg's story to have arrived at the
name 'Dolores' – of which 'Lolita' (along with
'Lola', or 'Lo') is, anyway, the common Hispanic diminutive. In his reference
to 'the heroine's ... first name [which] is too closely interwound
with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to
alter it' (AL 3-4), we may safely assume that John
Ray, Jr. (the purported 'editor' of Humbert Humbert's narrative) is
thinking both of the full name and all its diminutives (stemming from 'Dolores
on the dotted line': AL 9). We have
only to return to another work which Nabokov knew
intimately, lectured on, and greatly admired: Joyce's Ulysses
(see Lectures on Literature: hereafter LL). Humbert's comment, 'J'ai toujours admiré l'oeuvre ormonde du sublime Dublinois' (AL 207), has
been duly recognised (Alfred Appel, AL 407, 207/3) as a tribute to Joyce (as well as an 'hors [de ce] monde'
pun); moreover, the (non-existent) French adjective 'ormonde' clearly points to Dublin's Ormond Hotel as
the scene of 'Sirens'.
Several other
references to 'things Ormond' have been spotted. Many more, though, apparently
unnoticed hitherto, arise from the 'trilling' of a song by Ormond barmaid and
'siren' Lydia Douce: another 'sweet' figure. Only
nine lines in, we encounter: 'Trilling, trilling: Idolores',
prefiguring the trilled line ' – O, Idolores,
queen of the eastern seas! ' (U 11.9;
11.226). This is glossed by Gifford as the refrain of the aria 'The Shade of
the Palm' ('Oh Idolores, queen of the eastern sea, /
Fair one of Eden look to the West for me, / My star will be shining, love, /
When you're in the moonlight calm, / So be waiting for me by the Eastern sea, /
In the shade of the sheltering palm'), from the 'light opera' Floradora (1899) by Leslie
Stuart. On a South-Sea island, 'Idolores, the
beautiful and flirtatious heroine, is being pursued (and spoiled) by a host of
men, including the nasty villain' (Gifford, UA 291).
South Sea allusions venture into the latter part of Lolita: 'Polynesian' (AL 246), 'Oh the balmy days and the palmy
bays' (AL 256), 'far far away, in the coves of
evoked islands' (AL 257); Dolly Schiller (later
married name of Lolita, or Dolores Haze) makes
'familiar Javanese gestures' (AL 270); Quilty refers to non-existent distant islands (AL 302). This may compare with 'the plash of waves' from the
shell held by the Joycean sirens (U 11.936) and the (siren-like, from a 'romantic soul')
'torrent of Italian music' coming from what had been the Haze house, 'where no
piano had plunged and plashed on that bewitched Sunday', to which Humbert fondly looks back towards the end of the novel (AL 288). It might also be noted that the
'Fair one of
As Bloom listens to the musical trillings
and performances, the lyrics turn his thoughts back to Molly (even now about to
betray him with Blazes Boylan: 'the conquering hero')
and her Spanish (Gibraltarian,
Molly Bloom (née Marion Tweedy), having assumed these dolorous and floral
qualities, reveals herself to have been a precocious teenager ('Fifteen she
told me', muses Bloom: U 13.890; and
this is duly noted by Nabokov: LL
348), the daughter of a mysterious mother, 'whoever she was', named Lunita (U 18.846-8). We
might also notice the presence within 'Sirens' of the phrase 'a pin cuts lo'
(11.297). This refers back (to 8.630): 'Women won't pick up pins. Say it cuts
lo', said to allude to a superstition that this would 'cut love' (UA 176) and remarked in his lecture by Nabokov:
'The ve in love has been cut off to show what happens' (LL 322). One may note 'the black ready-made bow and bobby
pins holding [Lo's] hair in place', imitating 'a lady-writer's pen!' (
There is also the
exhortation by poster to: 'Smoke mermaids, coolest whiff of all' (U 11.300-01; cf. the 'colored ad'
for Dromes in Lo's room:
Julian Moynahan has commented that Humbert's
characterisation owes something to Leopold Bloom, just as that of Dolores Haze
owes something to Joyce's Gerty. Bloom's interest in
the physical development of his fifteen-year-old daughter Milly
may appear a trifle over-zealous ('Little paps to
begin with. Left one is more sensitive, I think': U
13.1200). In 'Nausicaa', on Sandymount
strand that evening, Bloom takes full advantage ('love at a distance [Bloomism]': Nabokov, LL 348) of Gerty's provocative display of her underclothed
nether regions, in a sequence much admired by Nabokov:
'the frilly novelette parodies in the Masturbation scene are highly successful;
and the sudden junction of its clichés with the fireworks and tender sky of
real poetry is a feat of genius' (Strong Opinions
76-7).
Humbert's
'salad of racial genes' included an element of 'Austrian descent' (
Gerty,
'the girlwoman' (U 13.430 –
'though Gerty would never see seventeen again':
13.172-3), as she limps away ('She's lame!'; 'that little limping devil':
13.771; 13.851-2), is conflated with Milly, and
Molly, and (through thoughts on menstruation) 'Molly and Milly
together' (13.785; 'Devils they are when that's coming on them': 13.822) – 'The
Curse of the Irish' is one of Humbert's names for it
(AL 47). According to Appel
at least, this is what 'the Mystery of the Menarche', 'the initial menstrual
period', is called in
Humbert
in
While Dolly Haze's
characterisation may owe something to Gerty, there
would seem also to be at least a couple of further nods in the latter's
direction. 'Move your bottom, you', Lo brazenly orders Humbert,
scrambling uninvited into her mother's car (
The characterisation
of Dolly Haze would seem to owe something too to Milly
(who had also lost a young brother), together with (the younger) Molly, and
even (shared, appropriately enough, with her own mother) Lydia Douce. The appellation la gitanilla
derives, of course, from Mérimée's Carmen, but it could still be indebted as well to the young
Molly Bloom, daughter of Lunita. The dreamed Lolita can also appear 'in strange and ludicrous disguises
as Valeria or
If some semblance of an Irish sub-theme can be detected
by now in Lolita
(at times duly connected with the Spanish), it applies also to Dolly Haze
herself; and we should remember that '"Haze" only rhymes with the
heroine's real surname' (
* * * *
These proto-tales, pre-texts, and putative ur-texts notwithstanding (and this survey is by no
means exhaustive – more will undoubtedly surface[1]), Lolita, it goes without
saying, took on an overwhelming novelistic momentum of its own: a switch from
third-person to first-person narration, a new tone in a new world – that of the
post-war America which Nabokov had experienced
through the 1940s and was now to re-create in fictional form at the age of
fifty: what he called 'inventing America' (AL 312).
Neil Cornwell is
Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at the
[1] See, for
instance, the present author's '"A Dorset Yokel's Knuckles": Thomas
Hardy and Lolita'
(The Nabokovian,
forthcoming). The first thing Nabokov (or for that
matter Joyce) would have noticed, on approaching Hardy's
novel The Well-Beloved, is the presence of the
phrase 'that Gibraltar of Wessex' in its very first sentence (a designation
applied to 'The Isle of Slingers', as Hardy calls Portland Bill - area of the
novel's primary setting).