Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] A new question on a "centonial" Quilty
From: "jansymello" <[email-masked]>
To: "Vladimir Nabokov Forum" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 06 Jun 2006 18:04:09 -0400

Michael Strickland brought us an astounding list of literary allusions in "Lolita" and a wealth of insights and details that also helps us to locate similar references in VN´s other works ( such as Louÿs "Chanson de Bilitis" with its links with Sapho and Lesbos in "ADA", or quills-aiguille in "Transparent Things" - and so on). 
Nevertheless, it was not my intention to suggest a joint effort to weave something like a "Nabokov´s Quilt: Lolita as Patchwork". My "cento-centonian" suggestion, as inspired by the poet Manuel Bandeira´s brief poem named "Anthology", i.e, by his "florilege": a collection of flowers he´d picked from his own garden. I saw it as a kind of poetic statement and as a refinement of his poetic aims.   
 T.S.Eliot achieved his poems while building up several "poetic fragments". He also noted that when we are looking for an original trait in any poet "we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his world may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously". ( Tradition and the Individual Talent", in The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism, Methuen & Co., London, 1920, following Ivan Junqueira´s article on "Eliot and the Poetics of the Fragment".) 
And yet we are also familiar with what VN himself wrote about Eliot´s poetry and therefore I suppose we´d have to go a step further than a"patchwork", if we want to understand VN´s intentions.     
Anyway, I can only thank Michael Strickland for the honor of having offered us his amazingly rich research after my "centonian" posting.
Jansy
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Michael S Strickland 
  To: [email-masked] 
  Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 4:53 PM
  Subject: [NABOKV-L] A new question on a "centonial" Quilty

  Jansy Mello's intuition anent the patchwork or mosaic or centonian nature of Lolita seems quite apt. A collaborative project aimed at tracking down the novel's various tesserae may be called for. Such a project could have for title something like "Nabokov's Quilt: Lolita as Patchwork" or "Nabokov's Quilt: Lolita as Cento." 
  Maurice Couturier's insights concerning the use of the name Lolita among early 20th century French novelists would be included: "Isidore Gès's En villégiature. Lolita published in 1894, René Riche's La Chanson de Lolita published in 1920 which obviously refers to Pierre Louÿs's Chanson de Bilitis (1894) which itself celebrated nymphets. And Valéry Larbaud's passage on the name of Lolita in his Des prénoms féminins (1927) has often been quoted" [NABOKV-L posting of 2 April 2004]. Perhaps we should add Marcel Schwob's Le livre de Monelle to the list, and mention in passing that, in the first edition of Lolita, the drugstore where Bill's wife "used to secretly admire the famous young actor as he ate sundaes" was called Schwob's [Lolita I, 32]. 

  We might also like to expand upon and refine Mary Catherine Rainwater's observations concerning the structural and thematic links between Lolita (and its Russian precursor) and H. G. Wells's Apropos of Dolores (1938) [Mary Catherine Rainwater, Twentieth-Century Writers in the Poe Tradition: Wells, Bowles, and Nabokov. PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 1982]. (We will have to make an important emendation to Rainwater's thesis. Rainwater states that "Dolores 'Lolita' Haze derives from Wells's Dolores" [p. 238] and that "Nabokov fashions Lolita after Wells's Dolores almost as much as after Poe's Annabel Lee" [pp. 239-240]. This contention is surely false. Although the narrator of Apropos of Dolores, Stephen Wilbeck, meets his Dolores in circumstances quite similar to those in which Humbert Humbert meets his Annabel Leigh, the Dolores whom Wilbeck meets is long past her nymphettage, if ever she had been a member of that species. No. Wells's Dolores is a member of the same species as "the Haze woman," Charlotte. That being said, we may note that Stephen Wilbeck has a daughter from a previous marriage, Lettice. Lettice, alas, is not a nymphet. However, Apropos of Dolores indirectly implies that the relationship between Wilbeck and Lettice borders, at least, on the incestuous: Wilbeck's attitude towards Lettice seems to be more romantic than paternal, and Wilbeck's cousin John, under the influence of Dolores's "nasty imagination" [Wells, Apropos of Dolores, IV, 7: 138], accuses Wilbeck of having an affair with his "own flesh and blood" [Wells, Apropos of Dolores, IV, 7: 137]. Wilbeck denies the accusation. In addition, after Dolores dies unexpectedly (in a manner that parallels the deus ex machina that conveniently removes Charlotte), Wilbeck sends for his daughter (whom he has not seen for several years) and they embark on a tour of Brittany (Armorica). Lettice is quite unlike the elegant and refined young lady Wilbeck had imagined: her conversation consists mostly of the monosyllable "Urm.") 

  In our collaborative work, we may also wish to mention that Humbert pens his confession in order to assist his case in an imaginary (or infernal) trial and that the equally unreliable narrator of the Wells novel pens his confession as the "Case of Stephen Wilbeck contra Dolores" in preparation for divorce proceedings that never materialize since Dolores suddenly dies (or does Wilbeck murder her?). 

  Furthermore, we may wish to interpret Nabokov's afterword as a signpost pointing to other tessellae: 

  "There was a spacious, bright Jardin des Plantes with nice unhurried- looking people sitting about, more old ladies in lovely white caps, and children playing and being reproved, and various of those rotund groups of sculptures just for the sake of sculpture, all breasts and thighs and bottoms and sprawl, with which France abounds." [Wells, Apropos of Dolores, I, 2: 7.] 

  "The other day, just before I started upon this trip, I spent half an hour in silent and sympathetic proximity to a big rusty-red orang-outang in the Jardin d'Acclimatation. He is that sort of orang-outang which has a flat expansion of the cheeks on either side so that its face, so far as its lower parts are concerned, looks like a mask. It seems to wear those huge jaws and lips like something that has been imposed upon it, and over them very intelligently light-brown eyes look out with an expression of patient resignation upon the world. So it has pleased God. Sometimes those quiet eyes would scrutinize me, mildly speculative, sometimes they watched other spectators or brooded upon the baboons in an adjacent cage, whose sins were as scarlet. // My sage moved rarely, to scratch his chest or his arm thoughtfully and once to yawn. But even in captivity and already perhaps mortally sick, for these great apes acquire tuberculosis and suchlike human infections with a terrible readiness, he gave no sign of unhappiness. Those little hazel eyes were wise and tranquil. Captive and ill, he had every reason to be unhappy, but I do not think he was unhappy. If I could have changed consciousness with him and got into that cokernut head of his, I think I should have perceived small weak childish interest in spectators and baboons -- like a child looking out of a window -- little imaginations set going by these sights and nothing else. I doubt if he was worried and distressed in the least by his captivity. Quite possibly, but not certainly, he would have been happier in his native forest, but he did not know that. He had forgotten his native forest, or remembered it and the parental nest only in dreams. There may have been terror in these dreams and it may have been reassuring to wake in the large secure cage again. I think he was still to be counted as a mild fragment of at least contentment." [Wells, Apropos of Dolores, II, 2: 24-25.] 

  We will also include, of course, Michael Juliar's NABOKV-L posting of 26 October 1998 in which he presents letters from an issue of Life magazine from H. Huber Clark and Seaborn Jones Jr (John Ray Jr himself could not have invented more strangely apropos pseudonyms), both about chimps with cameras, with the facing letter from Nabokov about one of Bosch's butterflies. 

  More pieces for our patchwork, in no particular order: 

  Le délicat coquillage de son oreille tremblait au fond de sa mémoire. Helena. 
  Helena. Helena. 
  Helena. Elle serait perdue. L'absence s'enflerait de toutes les catastrophes et dans la masse opaque des malheurs du monde cette séparation se perdrait indiscernable. Elle serait engloutie. [Raymond Queneau, Un rude hiver. Paris: Gallimard, 1939. ch. XII, p. 141.] 

  Lorsque Lehameau arriva au bout de la jetée près du sémaphore, la Zbelia s'engageait entre les deux digues. Il n'en pouvait plus voir que la poupe blanche qui disparaissait graduellement, un fantôme qui marchait sur les eaux, et s'en allait à reculons, en le regardant. Helena. 
  Helena. Helena. 
  Helena. 
  Puis les deux transports traversèrent l'avant port et disparurent, suivis d'un torpilleur. [Raymond Queneau, Un rude hiver. Paris: Gallimard, 1939. ch. XIII, p. 152.] 

  The lexical, rhythmic, and phonetic parallels between the above passages and Lolita II, 26 are unmistakable. ("Repeat till the page is full, printer.") Attentive readers of the Queneau will also notice the sexualized relationship (never consummated) between the main character, Lehameau, and a young girl. 

  Other collaborators may wish to consult the two volumes of Francis Hemming, Hübner: A bibliographical and systematic account of the entomological works of Jacob Hübner, and of the supplements thereto by Carl Geyer, Gottfried Franz von Frölich, and Gottlieb August Wilhelm Herrich- Schäffer. London: Royal Entomological Society of London, 1937. This work (with which Nabokov was certainly familiar due to its importance in regards the systematics of the Lepidoptera) contains the following delightful passage: "When this copy [the 'Francillon' copy of Hübner's Sammlung] was received at the British Museum at Bloomsbury, from which it was transferred as a duplicate, there was pinned on to the title- page of the text of the 'Sechste Horde' with an old pin with a twisted wire head, a manuscript of two quarto pages. This manuscript is unsigned and it has not been possible to identify the author. Since its receipt at South Kensington, this copy has been bound and the two pages of manuscript have been bound up with it. The old pin has been carefully preserved." [Hemming, Hübner. vol. 1, p. 148.] 

  The French word 'quille' designates the keel of a boat, a bowling or juggling pin, a game of bowling (as one might have seen played on the gravel in the Jardin des Plantes not far from place Valhubert in Paris, between the Museum of Anatomy and the Zoological Gardens, as one sat among sunlight and tree shadows with nymphets gamboling about in the late '30s...), the boat which brought prisoners back to France from the penal colonies (abolished in 1938) [could we imagine the ship which brought Nabokov and family to the freedom of America from the 'prison' of Fascist- overshadowed Europe as a sort of 'quille'?], and hence the argot term for the end of military service. 'Quille' is cognate with 'aiguille,' needle, and with both quill and quilt. The word 'quillet' (is it pronounced 'key- yay' or 'kill-it' or 'quill-it'?) occurs in Shakespeare, Love's Labour Lost v, ii: "Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil!" 

  Michael S Strickland ([email-masked]) 

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