Edit: wrote "Ada's Foreword" instead of "Lolita's"
There are apparently some allusions to Melville and Tolkien in Lolita's foreword, which I hope can be confirmed. Apologies for any sloppiness. Unitalicized, bold mine:
"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. "Humbert Humbert," their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client's will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of "Lolita" for print. Mr. Clark's decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work ("Do the Senses make Sense?") wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed. 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 persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author's bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask--through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow--had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer's wish. While "Haze" only rhymes with the heroine's real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so.
"'White Widowed Male' easily syncopates into White Whale. As much as Lolita is the White Whale to the captivated Capt Humbert, Humbert is especially the White Whale to the reader. With "mask" and the alliterative pair "wearer's wish", VN has in mind Ahab's Quarterdeck monologue in Moby-Dick, Ch 23, with its talk of "pasteboard masks." Ahab says of the Whale, "I see in him outrageous strength, with inscrutable malice sinewing it." Ahab quests for the whale, and one might pole a boat along (more Tolkien's hobbits, but vaguely nautical). When Melville created Ahab, it was with the intention of creating a morbidly obsessed character; in Ch 16, "For all men tragically great are made so with a certain morbidness."
Or: "White Widowed Male" plays on the black widow, a spider, which combines with "the two titles", a play on The Two Towers, to give Shelob, the giant monstrous spider in that book. And VN was thinking of Shelob. See Lolita 49: "Monday. Rainy morning. 'Ces matins gris si doux . . .' My white pajamas have a lilac design on the back. I am like one of those inflated pale spiders you see in old gardens. Sitting in the middle of a luminous web and giving little jerks to this or that strand. My web is spread all over the house as I listen from my chair where I sit like a wily wizard." "[M]iddle", as in Middle-Earth, the overall setting of much of Tolkien's fiction, but with "garden", that setting's inspiration, Midgard, our earth according to Norse Mythology.
(I suspect Humbert is also meant to be like Thor, not terribly important: worms may be sea serpents, like the biblical Levithan classically depicted, which Ishmael refers to Moby-Dick as, or limbless if winged dragons, such as Smaug in The Hobbit, and Thor, it is said, is destined to destroy and be destroyed by the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr.)
Cont.: If "captivity" is to Ahab, then "legal" rhymes with Sméagol, the original name of Gollum, which isn't the poor hobbit's invention, but both are certainly bizarre cognomens. And "fiber" of the book, as in a spider web's fibers (and also muscle fibers). The foreword again:
"'Ramsdale"', the next significant bit is to Tolkien's township Dale in The Hobbit, and ram is goat is kid, Lolita being kidnaped. Actually, VN has Peter Pan in mind. See, for example, 210, "Felis tigris goldsmithi, and Red Indians under the catapalas," which evokes Tiger Lily, the Indian Princess in Peter Pan. "Darkbloom" combines Joyce's Bloom and Melville's ark, or Pequod. Then:
True, not a single obscene term is to be found in the whole work; indeed, the robust philistine who is conditioned by modem conventions into accepting without qualms a lavish array of four-letter words in a banal novel, will be quite shocked by their absence here. If, however, for this paradoxical prude's comfort, an editor attempted to dilute or omit scenes that a certain type of mind might call “aphrodisiac” (see in this respect the monumental decision rendered December 6, 1933, by Hon. John M. Woolsey in regard to another, considerably more outspoken, book), one would have to forego the publication of “Lolita” altogether, since those very scenes that one might ineptly accuse of a sensuous existence of their own, are the most strictly functional ones in the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. The cynic may say that commercial pornography makes the same claim; the learned may counter by asserting that “H.H”'s impassioned confession is a tempest in a test tube; that at least 12% of American adult males—a “conservative” estimate according to Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann (verbal communication)—enjoy yearly, in one way or another, the special experience “H.H.” describes with such despair; that had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 1947, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this book.
Since VN has combined Melville and Tolkien, "whole work" plays on whale, and orc. Specifically, this placing of whale and work side by side plays with the preface to The Hobbit, in which Tolkien, in his supposed role as editor of the fictional Red Book of Westmarch, clarifies that hobbits use the term orc, "not an English word", for goblin, or sometimes hobgoblins, but that it should not be confused with "sea-animals of dolphin-kind." I've emboldened "four-letter words" because in Ada 1.26, when Van writes "'love,' a four-letter word", VN is thinking of Lolita's foreword, which is generally important. "[R]egard" is to Midgard, as we know. Moby-Dick is also a "tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis", and quite expressly. VN is thinking of Chs 37, Sunset, and 23, The Lee Shore. The black-and-white mannwoman points back to "White Widowed Male" (Shelob being female), and "'H.H.'" and "despair" evoke Melville's first name in the main character of Despair, Hermann Hermann.
(23, "four years' dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term", for in Ada, "four years ('our black rainbow,' Ada termed it.)", and either or both 87, The Grand Armada, or 115, The Pequod Meets The Bachelor, for "our black rainbow". Note also how all the sps in Ada fuse with "termed" to make sperm, as in sperm whale, and semen)
But LoTR, though it does swerve, also matches this description, indicated by the t alliteration. Of course, the point is that Lolita is moralless, unlike the alluded works. "Blanche" plays on Mel Blanc, since VN is thinking of the Merrie Melodies cartoon What's Opera, Doc?, which parodies both reverently and irreverently Richard Wagner's operas. This isn't immediately clear, but he does the same thing in PF:
Oh, there were many such incidents. In a skit performed by a group of drama students I was pictured as a pompous woman hater with a German accent, constantly quoting Housman and nibbling raw carrots; and a week before Shade's death, a certain ferocious lady at whose club I had refused to speak on the subject of "The Hally Vally" (as she put it, confusing Odin's Hall with the title of a Finnish epic), said to me in the middle of a grocery store, "You are a remarkably disagreeable person. I fail to see how John and Sybil can stand you," and, exasperated by my polite smile, she added: "What's more, you are insane."
So Bugs Bunny, originally voiced by Mel Blanc. The confused epic, Kalevala, (from the Wiki article) partly influenced J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium (i.e. Middle-earth mythology). Then, a little ahead:
But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author!
As a case history, “Lolita” will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader, for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac—these are not only vivid characters in a unique story; they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita” should make all of us— parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world.
Magic, conjuring, enchantment all occur in Tolkien's work. Again, Lolita is Humbert's White Whale. Ahab is a monomaniac, like Humbert, and Gollum makes gross grunts, if he doesn't pant.
The foreword was written in Widworth, Mass. (New England, rather than Old) in August (a gust, the Euroclydon which Ishmael alludes to in Moby-Dick Ch II, The Carpet-Bag), and in it J R. Jr. talks.