ERIC NAIMAN
“NOT
A SINGLE OBSCENE TERM is to be found in this whole work”—so states the
fictitious Dr. John Ray, Jr., and until recently I had not thought that many
readers would agree. Lolita has always struck me as a stylistically lewd book,
an opinion I had not regarded as an original point of view. I was, therefore,
surprised by an exchange in which I participated on “Nabokv-L,” the electronic
mail list server. The discussion began with a relayed query concerning Chestnut
Lodge, a motel in which Humbert Humbert discerns a clue left by his nemesis
Clare Quilty. The author of the query asked whether this might be a reference to
the insane asylum of the same name in Baltimore (Drescher and Edmunds). After
the list’s editor responded that he had once tried unsuccessfully to track down
a motel by this name in old Triple A tourbooks, I suggested that the first word
in this hotel’s name should be read as an anagram, beginning with the definite
article and concluding with the possessive form of a word best not transported
electronically across state lines.
Nothing that I have ever written in my career as a scholar has produced the
response generated by this brief suggestion. Most of the responses displayed a
mixture of astonishment and outrage: “we shouldn’t underrate [Nabokov] by
ascribing to him the kind of fun and pun that immature schoolboys enjoy in
lavatories and suchlike places”; “I had problems with the indecency unearthed:
it’s just not like the writer we all think we know. Eryx [referring to the site
of a cult to Aphrodite], Kitzler [to the German word for clitoris],
absolutely—but vocabulary on this level?” There were also several pointed ad
hominem replies, observing that “there are cases when an interpretation tells us
more of the critic’s predilections and idiosyncrasies than the author’s.” This
outrage surprised me; Lolita at least masquerades as a story about sexual
relations with a child and is littered with what might be called schoolboy
humor, most notably in the list of faculty teaching at Beardsley College and the
Beardsley School for Girls: Miss Redcock, Dr. Pierce, Miss Pratt, whose surname
is an obsolete term for buttocks and who insists that Lolita is “shuttling
between the anal and genital zones of development,” Miss Lester and Miss Fabian,
whose names are to be cut and spliced, Miss Horn and Miss Cole, the first
letters of whose names we are told Lolita likes to transpose, and Gaston Godin,
the French “invert” whose name seems to derive from a slang term for an
artificial phallus (gode) and who answers Humbert’s need for “a label, a
background, and a simulacrum” that might protect him from suspicion about his
interest in nymphets. The ribald nature of most of these names is fairly
obvious; others require just a minimal familiarity with century-old English or
current French slang. And Nabokov is, after all, the author of
Ada.
a novel that practically wears its salaciousness on its sleeve.
Yet
ever since Lionel Trilling declared Lolita the great American love story,
there has been a certain reluctance to tackle in any systematic fashion the
bawdy linguistic games played in the novel or to discuss their purpose in the
context of the novel’s larger meaning. In part this hesitancy may be due to the
uneasiness still experienced by readers about the sexual nature of the novel’s
central plot—the theme of sexual abuse has provoked outrage from both the Left
and the Right (Kaufman, Patnoe, and Podhoretz, inter alia). The necessity of
responding to the implied charge of indecency has effectively traumatized many
readings of the text, and even the efforts of a staunch defender such as
biographer Brian Boyd are colored by the perceived necessity to show that the
novel displays Nabokov’s condemnation of the horrors of child abuse. Quite early
on, Carl Proffer suggested that much of the erotic action in the novel was
occurring on the level of word play generally missed by “outraged Congressmen
and nervous mamas,” but since then the impression has generally been cultivated
in Nabokov scholarship that the lexical sex occurs at a fairly superficial
level. Alfred Appel, who claims that Nabokov may have had the last laugh on
outraged critics by giving his novel a “racy” “substratum,” soft-pedals this
claim with a calming adverb when he writes that “the erotica which seemed to be
there and turned out not to be was in fact present all along, most modestly.”
In the pages that follow I intend to investigate most immodestly the poetics and
significance of this substratum; in particular, I will inquire into the extent
to which Nabokov’s technique of sexual reference is indebted to the tradition of
Shakespearean bawdy and scholarship thereof. In the process, I hope both to
revise current understanding of the poetics of Nabokov’s novel and to place
Lolita within the context of postwar Shakespeare studies as a work of applied
scholarship.