The Annotated Lolita: Revised and Updated Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lolita back in 1947, thus sustaining the author’s “fictive time” without interruption and enabling him to pursue that moth’s lovely diurnal Double through the substratum of the new novel in the most fantastic butterfly hunt of his career. “I confess I do not believe in time,” writes Nabokov at the end of the ecstatic butterfly chapter in
Speak, Memory
. “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.”
    A LLUSION . Humbert’s references to art and literature are consistent with his mind and education, but in other novels and stories such cultural allusions point to Nabokov. In
Invitation to a Beheading
, for instance, Cincinnatus, imprisoned by the State, cannot identify the bits and pieces from Baudelaire’s poem
L’Invitation au voyage
(1855) that echo in his consciousness, inform the novel’s garden motif, and sound in the book’s title. They’re emanating from the mind of his maker, who especially cherishes Baudelaire’s utopia of the spirit as he writes the book at hand in Nazi Germany, in 1934—Hitler’s voice echoing across nocturnal Berlin from rooftop loudspeakers at the very moment that Nabokov defies dystopia by writing the farcical, and finally joyous,
Invitation to a Beheading
.
    T HE W ORK -W ITHIN-THE -W ORK . The self-referential devices in Nabokov, mirrors inserted into the books at oblique angles, are clearly of the author’s making, since no point of view within the fiction could possibly account for the dizzying inversions they create. The course of
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, which purports to be an attempt to gather material for a proposed literary biography of the narrator’s half brother but ends by obfuscating even the narrator’s identity, is refracted in Knight’s first novel,
The Prismatic Bezel
, “a rollicking parody of the setting of a detective tale.” Like an Elizabethan play-within-a-play, Quilty’s play within
Lolita, The Enchanted Hunters
, offers a “message” that can be taken seriously as a commentary on the progression of the entire novel; and
Who’s Who in the Limelight
and the class list of the Ramsdale school magically mirror the action taking place around them, including, by implication, the writing of
Lolita
. The a-novelistic components of
Pale Fire
—Foreword, Poem, Commentary, and Index—create a mirror-lined labyrinth of involuted cross-references, a closed cosmos that can only be of the author’s making, rather than the product of an “unreliable” narrator.
Pale Fire
realizes the ultimate possibilities of works within works, already present twenty-four years earlier in the literary biography that serves as the fourth chapter of
The Gift
. If it is disturbing to discover that the characters in
The Gift
are also the readers of Chapter Four, this is because it suggests, as Jorge Luis Borges says of the play within
Hamlet
, “that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.” 9
    T HE S TAGING OF THE N OVEL . Nabokov wrote the screenplay of
Lolita
, as well as nine plays in Russian, including one of his several forays into science fiction,
The Waltz Invention
(1938), which was translated and published in 1966. It is not surprising, then, that his novels should proliferate with “theatrical” effects that serve his play-spirit exceedingly well. Problems of identity can be investigated poetically by trying on and discarding a series of masks. And, too, what better way to demonstrate that everything in a book is being manipulated than by seeming to
stage
it? In
Invitation to a Beheading
, “A Summer thunderstorm, simply yet tastefully staged, was performed outside.” When Quilty finally dies in
Lolita
, Humbert says, “This was the end of the ingenious play staged for me by Quilty”; and in
Laughter in the Dark
(1932), “The stage manager whom Rex had in view was an elusive, double, triple,