Bruce Stone in Miranda n°3 - Editorial In(ter)ference: Errata and Aporia in
Lolita initiates his arguments using the subtitle: "Adducing error." He
draws a parallel between Brian Boyd's observation, in Nabokov's
Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery, ["that the first sentence of
Nabokov's 1962 novel contains a joke... The sentence has the effect of a
malapropism"] and the opening lines in Lolita. ["it might have
been his second time experimenting with the device] Bruce Stones argues that the
novel Lolita, "begins in nearly identical fashion...The first
sentence of John Ray's Foreword reads: "'Lolita, or the
Confession of a White Widowed Male,' such were the two titles under which the
writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates"...
But while the sentence contains numerous stylistic peculiarities—the strained
syntax, the dubious reference to "two titles" (is there not only one title, with
two parts?), the too-precious and antiquated verb "preambulates"—the comical
impropriety hinges on the humble pronoun "it", which has an ambiguous referent.
Ostensibly, the intended referent is "present note", but this antecedent is the
object of a preposition, while the pronoun fills a subject slot in the
sentence's concluding clause. This grammatical asymmetry can breed confusion in
pronoun reference, particularly when there are multiple potential antecedents
available to choose from...Humbert's manuscript (in the sense of "to walk
before", if not "to preamble"), and thus, both might reasonably serve as the
antecedent. The grammar of the sentence creates the potential for this
equivocation in its meaning, which is exactly the problem...Of course, this
grammatical inelegance only becomes malapropian in context; in the very next
paragraph, Ray assures readers that he has corrected the "obvious solecisms" in
Humbert's text, yet under scrutiny, his own first sentence belies the
claim....If this error is more than chimerical—a joke planted intentionally by
Nabokov—it remains devilishly subtle. However, in Lolita, the initial blunder is
only the first in a series of grammatical errors strewn throughout the
novel."*
I couldn't but wonder if a comparison between Nabokov's mistakes, as
demonstrated by Bruce Stone, were in any way indicative of Lolita's
puzzles [ "its composition and its solution at the same
time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you
look"] after I isolated Nabokov's sentence in connection to Edmund
Wilson's "mistakes and misapprehensions"
The problem with the pronoun "it" as it appears in English was never an
issue for me, a non-native quasi-anglophone. After all, in
Portuguese, we don't have the "it" or an obligation to announce the subject of a
sentence or something in what are the "impersonal verbs" (such as "to
rain", snowing, aso). My intuitive correction, if it were indeed a
correction, might prove correct in another language. In Maurice
Couturier's edition we read in the "Avant-Propos":
"Lolita, ou La Confession d'un veuf de race blanche,
tel était le double titre sous lequel l'auteur de la
présent note reçut les pages étranges auxquelles celle-ci sert de
préambule." The problem seems to have been dealt with
quite naturally! In the Brazilian edition the solution is even more fluid: "
Lolita, ou a Confissão de um Viúvo de Côr Branca - eis
os dois títulos sob os quais o autor desta nota recebeu as estranhas páginas que
ora prefacia." What shines out in English, because of the use
of "it," isn't an error but it maight be, as Bruce Stone claims, a
"devilish subtle" joke planted by Nabokov that disappears when the words are
translated. There are no "multiple antecedents" at all. There's a
self-reference ("auto-reference" is more neutral because it doesn't suggest any
human "self" but a doubling on "itself") that doesn't point to John Ray Jr.
or to HH's manuscript at all, but to the "Preamble" proper. Perhaps I could
formulate it, in a caricatural way, like that: "I preambulate these notes (HH's)
in this preamble"
I bet that there is no "it-error" in the Russian prefatory words. If
the translation runs as smoothly as it does in French or in Portuguese, we may
suppose that Nabokov induced the ambiguity on purpose. But cannot be
really certain of it, anyway. If we were, this can only mean that
John Ray Jr. wasn't a native English speaker, just like Humbert Humbert.
Once again I remind the List that I've no special talents as a translator
to be able to judge any professional's interpretation, or even to disclaim the
"it-error." As any amateur reader, I fall in love with certain
interpretations and, thanks to Bruce Stone, I had a kick out of JR Jr.'s
inadvertent "auto-referential" manoeuver, something that, following Alfred
Appel's notes, teems all over Lolita..
.
.........................................................................
*Bruce STONE, « Editorial In(ter)ference: Errata and Aporia in
Lolita », Miranda, n°3 (2010) - Lolita: Examining "the Underside of the Weave" /
Lolita : Examiner "l'envers de la toile" (Ed. Marie Bouchet - November 2010),
mis en ligne le 26/11/2010. URL :
http://www.miranda-ejournal.eu/1/miranda/article.xsp?numero=3&id_article=article_09-579.
Consulté le 03/03/2012.