Bruce Stone: "It's at this point--when all of the plot is on the brink of annihilation--that we have to consider the role of John Ray's Foreword in text: it serves as a stay against the kind of existential erosion that RSG is describing. Some critics have suggested that John Ray might well be part of the deception, that he might simply be another mask for HH, but I'm not convinced by this reading. I outline why in my paper in Miranda....Lolita is "about" much more than pedophilia, obviously: it's a meditation on reality, art, and time, and in terms of artistic design, it is nearly peerless. The book does require us to attend to its moral dimensions, yes. It seems to raise the questions, is Humbert rehabilitated by the novel's end? Is it possible for him to love Lolita authentically, as an autonomous other? The pathos of the book derives from the asking of these questions. The genius of the book lies, at least partly, in its refusal to answer them."

"First identified in 1976, Lolita's calendar problem—the discrepant dates between Humbert's manuscript confession and John Ray's Foreword—remains the most stubborn enigma in the novel....While the errata tell us little about the calendar problem, there is additional evidence—woven into the novel's structure and emerging in its connections to "'That in Aleppo Once…", Nabokov's 1943 short story—to support the conclusion that Humbert has fabricated much of his confession, and especially its last nine chapters. John Ray's Foreword, then, plays a crucial role in demarcating the boundaries of the "real" in the novel. Still a bumbler and buffoon, Ray does leave a detectable presence in Humbert's manuscript, a finding that serves to rebut the claim that Ray is Humbert's invention and which necessitates an alternate theory of the "real" in the novel's concluding chapters. The theory outlined in this paper begins to reconcile the text's discrepant dates and posits the innocence of Humbert's victim. [...] George Ferger (2004 - Nabokov Studies) considers that "the discrepant dates stand as a representative (and singularly important) instance of a pattern within which the errors serve as a signaling device: they alert readers to Ray's intrusive editorial presence in Humbert's narrative. According to Ferger, Ray...gets credit for simulating Humbert's "moral apotheosis" at the novel's end,... but he seems primarily to be occupied with inscribing his name anagrammatically into key passages in the text...leaving behind a trail of "shadowgraphs" for readers to track. .. Boyd clearly rejects the wisdom of these hermeneutic assumptions and moves. Although Ferger argues that "the principal narrator of the concluding chapters of Lolita" is John Ray, Jr. (Ferger 139), he nevertheless concludes, as does Boyd, that the existential status of the scenes in Coalmont and Pavor Manor need not be disputed: those pivotal events happen, for Humbert, Lo, Quilty and the reader[...] There is, I would argue, overwhelming evidence to counter the conclusions of both Boyd and Ferger, confirming (unevenly) the positions of Alexander Dolinin, Julian Connolly, Anthony Moore and their predecessors, Elizabeth Bruss, Christina Tekiner and Leona Toker: namely, the novel's last nine chapters are at least partly bogus, and the discrepancy in the novel's dates points the way toward this discovery... the dates in the novel warrant close inspection, and they serve as one of those mechanisms that point reliably to the divergence of the real and the illusory...In the correspondence between local detail and structural scheme, we are clearly invited, and even directed, to question the limits of reality in the work as a whole...For years, critics have examined the suspicious traces of Humbert's vocal signature in Ray's Foreword, with Ferger being the latest, and this textual phenomenon has made it possible to argue that the two writers are in fact the same, that they share an identity, just as critics contend that John Shade and Charles Kinbote share an identity in Pale Fire....".

My first contact with Nabokov and with "Lolita" was through Collins Collector's Choice, where we can find a short introduction by Peter Quennell - but in which there is no Foreword by John Ray Jr. Although I read the foreword in "The Annotated Lolita," I failed to attach to it the importance it certainly deserves. Only because of the questions concerning HH's "redemption," brought up in our present discussions, did I start with my amateurish conjectures. Bruce Stone's article per se, with his research into the vast bibliography related to the theme under investigation, now invites me to return to "Lolita" with renewed zest and an humbleness. .

The notes by David Rutledge in The Nabokovian 60,2008, ("Baudelaire,Melmoth, and Laughter") are a joy to read and his arguments about the importance of Baudelaire's "Melmoth" are very convincing. David Rutledge answers my original query on moths, writing that "Nabokov playfully adds another reference: ' Melmoth may come from Mellonella Moth (which breeds in beehives) or, more likely, from Meal Moth (which breeds in grain).' but he asserts that "these.three possibilities do not have great resonance within the novel. They do not quite explain why Nabokov (or Humbert) would choose the name Melmoth. In fact, the name seems to have greater resonance in yet another source, Charles Baudelaire's essay "On the Essence of Laughter" (the other two possibilities are: a reference to "Charles Robert Maturin's large Gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer and to Oscar Wilde'' 'post-prison pseudonym,' Sebastian Melmoth." D.R's connections of Melmoth and Baudelaire are extremely pertinent.
Should I give up the idea related to an authorial signalling twang by a moth? I'm not sure that it's necessary to decide between those two possibilities.
btw: the internet led me to another curious fact: there was an entomologist named Melmoth.*