Boyd's idea is a possibility, but John Ray seems to make it quite clear, or Clare, that much of his editorial duties amounted to weeding out any remaining "real" referrences to actual people and places remaining in H.H.'s confession: p.3 Library of America "My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite "H.H."'s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or presons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact." Thus if H.H. had left Quilty's name in, Ray did not. Which reminds me. I believe that Boyd, either in his VNAY analysis of the novel or somewhere else, once suggested that H.H. left
Mona Dahl's real name in to get revenge on her for her part in helping Dolly sneak around with Quilty--even if he did, though, Ray must have changed it. By the way, one of the previous commentors challenged my idea that Lolita's was the only "real" name in the book. It was a good point. I realized I had taken certain things for granted. Ray says that her first name, Dolores, is her real name, and I guess I just extended the reach of the quote I used at the begining of this note (in combination with Humbert's saying all but one of the names had been altered) further than it may really reach, for, as someone else noted, Clarence Choate Clark's name is brought up by Humbert at one point, and Ray vouches for this being the actual name of H.H.'s attorney. As to whether or not Ray himself is a puppet of Humbert's, this to me is a less interesting avenue of pursuit--It can't really be established by the internal evidence of the
text (this leads us down the same who's the real narrator rabbit hole we went down in the spring over Pale Fire), and it would, I firmly believe, violate Ray's purpose as a device: to provide an outside to the text which gives it the necessary novelistic quality of completeness and meaningfulness beyond the narrator's sociopathic narrowness. And, anyway, why would Humbert want, at the end of the novel, to hopefully suggest that we, the readers, are perusing his text sometime around 2000 (p 281 Library of America), when he estimates Lolita would probably die in the course of a natural life, only to kill her off under his Ray pseudonym exactly a week before her eighteenth birthday? This makes the opposite of his case. Adds a terrible a note of cruel irony that swamps his confession at the most redemptive moments, which continually, with rereadings, darkens his story and its implications. This
suggests an almost incoherent dramatic distortion.
--- On Fri, 7/17/09, b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ <b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ> wrote:
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