Speak, Memory: The Elation and Participation of Observation

          In the last half of chapter seven, Nabokov describes his memories of his trips to and from Paris from Russia on the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens:

          "It was at night, however, that the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens lived up to the magic of its name. From my bed under my brother's bunk (Was he asleep? Was he there at all?), in the semidarkness of our compartment, I watched things, and parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows cautiously moving about and getting nowhere. The woodwork gently creaked and crackled. Near the door that led to the toilet, a dim garment on a peg and, higher up, the tassel of a blue, bivalved nightlight swung rhythmically. It was hard to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth, with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible." (SM 144-145)

          This passage (along with various others) points to Nabokov's aesthete like nature, and a firsthand account of his incessant, childlike fascination in observation. For in his twilight watchings, Nabokov not only sees things, but parts of things. Not only shadows, but, individual sections of shadows that pedantically peruse the inner area of the train car. In this we see that even from his early youth, Nabokov began to see life in fragmented amalgamation of realities, and, beyond even that, his burgeoning difficulty with duplicitous nature of things; outside vs. inside, dually projected by rhythmically swaying "bivalved nightlight."

Lo and Behold--Dolores Haze's C.Q. Diary

1
Camp Q has been an utter bore so far. Nothing but dumb girls and dumb counselors and boring activities and....Ugh, it's absolutely awful. I hate my dumb mother for sending me here. I hope she dies in a terrible crash and never says any of the dumb things she says ever, ever again. That's honestly the only good thing about C.Q. I'm far away from monsters like Mummy and Hummy. Though I do miss poor, hunky Humbert. I miss how pathetically he's in love with me. And the pimply paperboy. And the popcorn boy. And park boy under the picnic table. Boys, boys, boys...



2
The cattle are lowing, the baby's awake. I'm the baby, and the cattle are the stinking, smelling heifers surrounding me that are snoring their Goddam faces off and making it utterly impossible to sleep! I hate Camp Q. I hate nature and the outdoors. I'll die without ever sleeping again. While everyone else gets to dream of kissing Quilty's and mashing Bogarts, here I sit, wide awake. Can't everyone just leave me alone? Can't I just be a nobody, that nobody knows and everyone leaves alone? I hate my detestable mother for putting me in this awful place. I hate her so much and I hate C.Q. so much and I just wish both of them were long gone and dead. 

3
It is incredibly unfair that I have to be stuck with all these mopey mary-janes. There's not one exciting thing to look at. As far as the eyes can see there's nothing but pigs and cows of the girl variety all chewing cuds of chef's surprise, and dumbly smiling with bits of cud still stuck in their braced teeth. They're all boring and have nothing funny to say and completely bore me. Just like my dumb ole moms. Both are so boring and should really just be erased. This one girl barbara's not completely terrible. Barbara said that I'm the only other girl that's made it out to willow island. She said tomorrow she's gonna take me in her canoe after lights out to the island to meet Charlie and goof off. 


4
It's been a while since I wrote you. Guess I was too busy goofing off.... I don't goof off with Charlie anymore. It was all stupid and boring anyway. Grownups make such a deal about it and really it ain't squat. You just lay on the ground and get your butt dirty and feel dumb and silly about how dumb and silly you probably look laying there with your bare ass on the wet ground, but then everything around you is so serious and peaceful so you just quietly wait until the goof is off and you can put your underwear back on and go sit in your stupid cabin and wait for the summer to be over. I hate boys. Boys are utter wastes of time and......

I miss you mom. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm an awful daughter, and I know I deserve this awful camp. I promise that when I get out of here (if ever) and see you again I promise I'll be a great daughter and I won't ever mess with awful boys ever, ever again.

Prestidigitated Poetry/Nabokovian Prose

            In Nabokov's 1944 poem, The Poem, one could say that we begin to see the initial aesthetically-tuned"throbs" of language that would eventually manifest themselves into Lolita. The poem works in a similar style to Lolita; using rhyming, doubling language, playing heavily (and possibly cruelly) with the reader's expectations, and possibly even illustrates the shadowy purpose of the poetically elusive Lolita (albeit in much more clear and direct language, aided by the interpretive mode of poetry).

           But even before we are given "the poem" that is promised by the title--The Poem--Nabokov first plays the game of telling us every type of poem that "the poem" is not.

                        Not the sunset poem you make when you think
                                                           aloud,
                        with its linden tree in India ink
                        and the telegraph wires across its pink
                                                             cloud;

                        not the mirror in you and her delicate bare
                        shoulder still glimmering there;
                        not the lyrical click of a pocket rhyme--
                        the tiny music that tells the time;

                        and not the pennies and weights on those
                        evening papers piled up in the rain;
                        not the cacodemons of carnal pain;
                        not the things you can say so much better in plain
                                   prose--

           Nabokov here in these opening stanzas dually edifies and mystifies the reader; clearly (yet ironically) stating what "the poem" is not by poetically creating the recognizable shadow and sound of line that seems to be a poem--using the captivating imagery and rhetorical tricks of the trade; but, as he repetitiously reminds us--these are not The Poem. Nabokov creates tension with every poem that is not; poking fun at what is not while simultaneous showing his almost effortless mastery of the various archetypical forms.

           The end of The Poem seems to land just in time before the reader's patience drifts away, but the duplicitous enchantment it creates rings with an uncanny, unknowably understandable tone.

                         but the poem that hurtles from heights unknown,
                         --when you wait for the splash of the stone,
                         deep below, and grope for your pen,
                         and then comes the shiver, and then--

                         in the tangle of sounds, the leopards of words,
                         the leaflike insects, the eye-spotted birds
                         fuse and form a silent, intense,
                         mimetic pattern of perfect sense.

            The Poem, for Nabokov, is an ideal to which he thoroughly describes: a divine, heaven-sent, intuitive "throb," transcended into tangled, deceptive, hidden, natural words, both "silent, intense," and yet perfectly attuned and reflective of the beauty in nature and the natural world.
         

The Tragic Triumvirates of Time in Nabokov & Lolita

         As Nabokov leads us, "the men and gentlewomen of the jury," with his poetically-pitched, prose pipe, through the quagmire of Humbert Humbert's memories, tingles of "aesthetic bliss," and the verbose, verbal virtuosity that make up the pages of Lolita, the reader is propelled, enchanted, and even asked to participate in H.H.'s literary, pot-au-feu of a story, and would not be remiss to note, as the late Prince of Denmark once did (and still does), that "the time is out of joint." 
         In Nabokov's life and fiction, the issue of Time--its incessant negation and non-negotiable forward movement--is an immortal suffering that plagues both him and his characters in their search and desire for the eternal. Nabokov states in his autobiography Speak, Memory that,

         "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).... I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage." (S.M., 19-20)

         Nabokov's desire for literal immortality is literarily mirrored by H.H., who also finds himself in an eternal antagonism with the falling sands as stated by Matthew Winston in his essay, Lolita and the Dangers of Fiction; mixing literature and life not only in the world of Lolita, but dually in Nabokov's literature and life as well.

         "Humbert's desire for the literary immortality of his book reflects his need to stop the passage of time in his life or at least to pretend it does not exist. His actions, as we shall see, are designed toward this end, and his language is consistent with his actions. Twice in a single paragraph he mentions that his interrupted sexual liaison with Lolita's predecessor took place on an "immortal day." He says that his ultimate quest is for the "eternal Lolita." Even when he is on the verge of his final separation from Lolita, Humbert still pleadingly holds out the hope that "we shall live happily ever after"....Lolita, then, is Humbert's bid for the immortal future of which he and his nymphet are personally incapable. But the book is also a memorial of the past, a "souvenir" of Humbert's travels, a record of events that have already happened. Humbert is preoccupied with memory, that dead thing which was once living experience, now resurrected and transmuted by the imagination..... He is obsessed by his memory of Annabel Leigh to the point that his entire life becomes an attempt to make his immortal moment with her in the past eternally present, to possess her forever. He fails to perpetuate Annabel through Lolita, who effaces her, and he cannot make his liaison with Lolita permanent, but he does succeed by writing his memoir." (Dangers of Fiction, 422)

        Humbert desires the immortality of the self and others, namely his beloved Lolita; an attainable immortality that had been taught to him through the effluvium of the past, literature and stories, just as his own creator, Nabokov, desires the kleos and timelessness that are physically and logically impossible under his mortal constraints. In the end, both writers are forced to succumb to the physical limitations of Time that are imposed upon us all, ever so tongue-in-cheekily proclaiming immortality from the dead words of their forgotten loves.

       "The artist wants 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. The lover wants to write a history which will glorify his beloved for future generations (it is to be published only after both of them are dead). In his final words, 'this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita,' Humbert appears as Renaissance sonneteer, boasting that he will make his love immortal in his writing, while ruefully admitting that such permanence is no adequate substitute for possessing the lady, or, as Humbert expresses it, 'Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with!'" (Dangers of Fiction, 421)

        In Nabokov and H.H.'s aesthete-like way of continually, and ever-foolishly, fighting against, being conscientious of, and diligently recording the tragedies that are all subsequently consumed by the exacting power of Time's tick, the pair transcends their role as two-faced, duplicitous fool and transforms their personal expression and individual recollection into art--the true escapee of Time.

       "How small the cosmos (a kangaroo's pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!...But even so, the individual mystery remains to tantalize the memoirist. Neither in environment or heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp or art is made to shine through life's foolscap." (Speak, Memory 24-25)

Sex, Love, and Violence--Past and Future, Present

        Throughout Nabokov's Lolita, H. H. is haunted by Clare Quilty in many poetic and parodic ways. Both H.H. and C.Q. pursue and conquer the idea of Dolores (Lolita), both sexually and violently, physically, metaphysically, and metaphorically, while all the while both H.H. and C.Q. claim innocence from immorality, repentance from sin, and above all else: Love.
     
        But for all their similarities and mirrorisms, the actual existence of H.H.'s "subhuman" doppleganger, C.Q., is often left blurry and undefined, leaving the reader with questions--Is C.Q. actually real, or just an unplanned guilt trip?  A passage that highlights this is shown in H.H.'s cornering and eventual murder of C.Q.:

        "To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage...To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands...To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain...To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling--oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!" (Lolita, 295)

        For when H.H. looks at his nemesis and describes him thusly to the reader, the physical similarities seem to pile up and their actual individual distinctions seem reticent and benign. At this point in the story we could almost imagine H.H. in purple robes; H.H. in his presently detailed state revels in trapping his reflection, and delights in the idea (spoken here I believe without metaphor) in "the music of pain." Nabokov further test's the limits of the reader's suspensive powers by having C.Q. and H.H. call each other "Punch" in two discursive lines before one obliterates the other, signaling, potentially, at the possibility of C.Q.'s reality within Lolita as nothing but a dark joke.

       In the opening lines of his autobiography, Speak, Memory, Nabokov beautifully paints how and why characters such as H.H., C.Q., and Lolita can, and do, exist. Nabokov writes:

       "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).... I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage." (S.M., 19-20)

      Nabokov here seems the elegiac H.H., while the "gaudily painted savage" is none other than the "semi-animated" C.Q. For both characters doubtlessly seek the immortality of timelessness described by Nabokov--H.H. through words; C.Q. through film; both through the youth and inhumane characterization of Lolita--and both fear and (what's possibly worse) understand the terrifying abyss that waits on the other side of their present, brief, crack in the seamless orb of Time.
     

Vacillating Space between Time and Place & Lolita and Lottelita

Charlotte Haze, in her short spanning role in Lolita, is seen as the antithesis to her Daughter, Lo. She is a strict and aging social climber without tact or art, providing many moments of tongue-in-cheek humor for Humbert and the audience, as well as painting the archetype of many of America’s women in the 1950’s.

A transformation though overcomes the pseudo-francophile, when in her heart of hearts, her dream beau, H.H., has remained in her home and overdramatically climax together in a scene fit for the drippiest of romance novels:

“…I laid my hands upon her which happened on the threshold of Lolita’s room whither she tremendously backed repeating ‘no, no, please no.’”

This metamorphosis from “harsh, cold, contemptuous” woman to “touching, helpless creature” makes the older Charlotte glimmer in way that resembles her younger form—Lolita.

“The transformation improved her looks. Her smile that had been such a contrived thing, thenceforth became the radiance of utter adoration—a radiance having something soft and moist about it, in which, with wonder, I recognized a resemblance to the lovely, inane, lost look that Lo had when gloating over a new kind of concoction at the soda fountain or mutely admiring my expensive, always tailor-fresh clothes. Deeply fascinated, I would watch Charlotte while she swapped parental woes with some other lady and made that national grimace of feminine resignation (eyes rolling up, mouth drooping sideways) which, in an infantile form, I had seen Lo making herself. We had highballs before turning in, and with their help, I would manage to evoke the child while caressing the mother. This was the white stomach within which my nymphet had been a curved little fish in 1934…. I kept telling myself, as I wielded my brand-new large-as-life wife, that biologically this was the nearest I could get to Lolita; that at Lolita’s age, Lotte had been as desirable a schoolgirl as her daughter was,…I was able to make out a dim first version of Lolita’s outline, legs, cheekbones, bobbed nose. Lottelita, Lolitchen…So I tom-peeped across the hedges of years, into wan and little windows. And when, by means of pitifully ardent, naively lascivious caresses, she of the noble nipple and massive thigh prepared me for the performance of my nightly duty, it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests.” (77)

In this way we can see H.H. transforming Charlotte into Lolita through his memories, fantasies, and words—while all the while being unable to fully convert to normalcy or debauchery.

Lolita's Russian Doll of Confessions

Nabokov's  Lolita is structured as a confession, but often bends and challenges that structure and description with varying elements and departures from such. During a moment of "poignant chaos" in the story, when Lolita runs back into the Haze's home to kiss her beloved H.H.'s lips one last time before being deported off to camp (the entire scene playing with the idea of a romance novel or other such work where the characters break away from themselves and fold into their passion; this parody being set with the vast age difference and pseudo-familial relations between H.H. and Dolores). For when after she leaves and H.H. is left with himself and the despair of losing his Riviera nymphet, he is given a "curious-looking letter" by Louise, "written" by Charlotte Haze:

"This is a confession: I love you [so the letter began; and for a distorted moment I mistook its hysterical scrawl for a schoolgirl's scribble!]. (67)

Already the game that H.H. is playing with the audience has begun. By placing (with the aid of his photographic memory) a fully transcribed letter (with a few aesthetic omissions by H.H., of course) from Charlotte Haze, confessing her unadulterated love for Humbert, one that we as readers must accept without question or qualm and must take as literal fact. This confession within the confession that is the novel Lolita plays upon the audiences idea of who is the guilty party, the antagonist within theses confessions and stories. For in Charlotte's confessions we can see H.H.'s cynicism towards her and her falsely cultured ways shine through: her various bastardized-french phrases, her improper use of poetic language (which H.H. is able to flawlessly pull of), her false show of nonchalance and her way of play acting, and her distorted view of the world to which H.H. has skillfully shown us. 

But the most exciting parts of C.H's confessional letter are the happy coincidences that magically seem to lift off the page, causing the reader to connect things that H.H. hasn't already verbosely connected for us, and draws us in deeper to his game. The most poignantly painful moment of this occurs in the middle of Charlotte's letter:

"But if, after reading my "confession," you decided, in your dark romantic European way, that I am attractive enough for you to take advantage of my letter and make a pass at me, then you would be a criminal--worse than a kidnaper who rapes a child."(68)

This passage in particular rings like an alarm bell in the reader's head. For how could C.H. hit the nail so upon the head whilst still being so oblivious to the entirety of the situation? Especially after in H.H.'s confession of Lolita running back to him before leaving and kissing him he said: "...then she was in my arms, her innocent mouth melting under the ferocious pressure of my dark make jaws, my palpitating darling! The next instant I heard her--alive, unwrapped--clatter downstairs."(66) This juxtaposition is meant to challenge and confuse the reader, leading us to further investigate and involve ourselves in this literary Russian doll of confessions.