Find what the Sailor has Hidden Priscilla Meyer (1988), Major Literary Characters: Lolita ed Harold Bloom (1993), Lolita: A Janus Text Lance Olsen (1995).
I like pretty much the whole Nabokov canon, underrated earlier Russian works included – but the run he had writing in English and the American years: Sebastian Knight, Lolita, Pale Fire, Pnin and Speak, Memory – is just unbeatable. I think I could read Pale Fire on an endless loop and not get bored by it.
It’s just joyous maximalism and so damn fun to read.
If you’ve not read any Nabokov … I mean, imagine like Joyce or Borges, then imagine the same mastery of language and artistry but in a form that’s so light-handed, so economical and readable, so natural and funny and lively you can just fly over it … and then you stop and realise that the beauty, the virtuosity, the moving humanism, the word games and the literary references are all there – all at once, all part of the same thing. It’s just joyous maximalism and so damn fun to read.
Reading the runes
Find what the Sailor has Hidden is a really strange book. On the one hand, it’s a crazily obsessed attempt to resolve all the historical references in PF, with a focus on Norse/Germanic mythology. As there are a lot and I pick up on precisely none of them (Kongs-skugg-sjo, anyone?) this is really useful, and an impressive effort in itself. In some ways just having this as a crib would be useful.
Unfortunately it falls apart a bit in an attempt to draw all this into a grand theory to explain both Lolita and Pale Fire as a sort of synthesis of the history of language. The fact that Nabokov was translating Eugene Onegin at the time is supposed to provide a sort of crib for Lo, for instance – the main characters (Lolita, Quilty and Humbert) are supposed to represent Tatyna, Lensky and Onegin – as evidenced by the number of syllables in (mangled) names! Brian Boyd reckons this is “dotty”, and it certainly isn’t very convincing.
Lo and Hum
It’s odd, because while Lolita is by far the most well-known and right in the centre of Nabokov’s work, I’ve read much less around it. The Olsen and Harold Bloom edited collection remedy this.
If the point is the multiple perspectives and literary games, why are the key scenes so unbearably moving? If Humbert is a pawn and a bad poet to boot, why is he so diabolically convincing?
The Bloom collection Major Literary Characters: Lolita is pretty interesting (once you get past Bloom’s introduction where he embarrasses himself by banging on about Freud the whole time) – as it’s a chronological history of the literary response to Lo. It’s kinda amazing how much this has evolved, while the book continues to stand up. So you have:
- Point: obvious lols at “sheer unrestrained pornography”. I mean, talk about mis-selling!
- Counterpoint: Hair-raising early stuff about the love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name and what a terrible brat Lolita is. Would genuinely be worried about anyone that came away with this impression.
- To … Nabokov is an aesthete, his characters are just puppets in literary games. “I have no social purpose, no moral message”.
- But … Freud … why doesn’t he accept the word of our good lord Freud?!?
- To … no, he’s the ultimate moralist, “cuffing sin”, Humbert is a wretch, the book is all about his “tear-iridized little girl”.
It’s sort of amazing it took .. is taking .. so long for a synthesis to emerge.
Because there’s a problem – if the point is the multiple perspectives and literary games, why are the key scenes so unbearably moving? If Humbert is a pawn and a bad poet to boot, why is he so diabolically convincing? (check out some of the reviews on amazon if you don’t believe me … chilling!).
If we’re tough minded, we must condemn Humbert irrevocably, and laugh bitterly at “suave” John Ray’s idea he has any kind of “moral apotheosis” as Nabokov invites us to. So is the key scene when Hum finally tracks down Lo again, all grown up, meant to be ironic? Did it not happen at all, as Leona Toker (mistakenly) believes? Again and again that key passage is quoted … and it never gets less moving, never gets any less clear that this is Nabokov pulling out all the stops – that scene just takes off:
Somewhere beyond Bill’s shack an afterwork radio had began singing of folly and fate, and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands … and I looked and looked at her, and know as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen of imagined on earth … you may jeer at me and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted … but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed … no matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish … I would go mad with tenderness at the sight of your dear wan face.
“No, honey, no” she said … “it is quite out the question. I would sooner go back to Cue …It settles everything, we can start next week. Stop crying, please. You should understand. Let me get you some more beer”.
We have to despise Humbert, and as our unreliable narrator he has written every word of the book (less the forward). What’s Nabokov’s game with giving him this sublime stuff – not to mention the word games, doubles, fate, inexplicable funny sidetracks (back in Grainball, with Rita)?
The magician ascendant
Lo is, in many ways, as much as a puzzle as Pale Fire, the more obvious literary game. The pyrotechnics of the language (and subject matter) tend to obscure this.
Lolita is, in many ways, as much as a puzzle as Pale Fire, the more obvious literary game.
Lance Olsen has a really good go at this in A Janus Text – with I think the only kind of synthesis that makes sense. The puzzles (Toker), aesthetics (Boyd) or humanism (Wood) are inseparable, and are all an expression of Nabokov’s belief in the redemptive power of art and memory against the inevitability of time and time. Of course, this underpins Humbert’s nympholepsy – he’s a solipsist, wanting in to fix a moment of the past for eternity (in the most unwholesome way possible). Nabokov is showing us the well-realised alternative, by using artistry to talk past his creature Humbert and capture Dolly Haze’s essential humanity … often without Humbert realising it. It gives the feeling of someone explaining an astonishing magic trick – which is what the book has always felt like to me.
Olsen is just a terrifically careful reader, noticing things which I don’t think I’ve seen pointed out anywhere else – like Humbert is a heavy drinker throughout and a fairly massive alcoholic by the end, or what’s the point of Humbert having a couple of drunken lost years with Rita in the middle of the book (one of my favourite bits, and a hilarious interlude).
The weird thing, is I think this is supposed to be like a literary theory Cliff-notes type guide. Every so often, he has a little sally off to e.g. explain who Derrida is for half a page, and my heart sinks. But then – hallelujah – dodgy deconstructions are completely forgotten and he just gets on with it. This is pretty funny as it’s almost more dismissive than not mentioning them at all.