Dear List,
Recently there was a discussion here on how
best to apply Appel's Annotated Lolita in class. The latest issue of
The Nabokovian ( n.58) also brings up this theme with "Emendations fo
Annotated Editions of Lolita" ( Appel's and Boyd's) by Leland de la
Durantaye.
On his note on 311. about "The first little throb of Lolita...at a time when I was laid up
with a severe attack of intercostal neuralgia... a newspaper story about an
ape...first drawing ...the bars of the poor creature's
cage..." Durantaye mentioned famous researches
on Primate art and charcoaled cage bars, when he brought up
VN's "intercostal neuralgia" in connection to
the "the pangs of creation" since the pain between the
ribs could suggest what poor Adam had felt "when he passively provided life
for a woman". I was led to think about two other items: the expression "rib
cage" for the visceral protection that emprisons heart and
lungs and VN's equally famous "raising of dorsal spinal hairs", which could
similarly apply to VN's physical complaints.
This return to VN's early success allowed me to approach a special scene in
Pale Fire in which Semberland's King Charles II escapes to
freedom to Lolita's own "Enchanted Hunters" seen
by Humbert Humbert as "red-capped, uniformly attired hunters"
( joined by a seventh Hunter, a green-capped poet
who invented himself as a character who danced with
" nymphs, elves and monsters" and the play itself where
he had invented himself as this same Poet) - we might be
able to note the similarity bt. HH's red-capped hunters to Zembla's
patriots (and brocken phantoms gaining shape at an "eerie
altitude" inspite of "alfear", or a red-capped
Steinmann), disguised like their fleeing King in
red-caps.
Such an approach would also link
Shade's scattered body parts on line 149: "one foot upon a
mountain top" to words like "elves, nymphs", "red-caps",
"eerie", mountains and farmers "checking a daughter's virginity", plus
Kinbote's notes on "the little cap of red velvet ...as a symbol of
menstruation" .... to HH's own doubts concerning Lolita's
virginity!
We might even find a degraded "Red
Admirable" feasting on oozy plums ( colored like HH's purple sleeping pill) or
on corrupted stinking rabbits, flitting in browns and reds like Gradus's
tie. Whereas John Shade conceded to CK's
mention of red-capped Steinmann that he had "guessed your secret quite
some time ago", or that "this is not a paper chase", already
on CK's notes to line 894 Shade's smiling words conclude (
right after the alderwood-ancestral German visitor's "eerie
note"): "Kings do not die - they only disappear". And
yet, the mystery and secret about VN's intended meaning remains,
independently of our own paper chases, red and brown ties and sexual
identity.
HH's words reminisced: "there would have
been... a last throb, a last dab of color, stinging red, smearing pink, a
sigh, a wincing child." and Shade's discarded draft held: "
There are events, strange happenings, that strike the mind as emblematic.
They are like lost similies adrift without a string, attached to nothing.
Thus that northern king...forty of his followers that night impersonated him and
aped his flight".... and we now return to throbbing innocence,
red caps, cages and apes....
Jansy Mello