"Nature's Reality" or Humbert's "Fancy"?: Scenes of Reunion and Murder in Lolita

Abstract

Nabokov Studies, 2 (1995), 41-61. JULIAN W. CONNOLLY (Charlottesville, VA, U.S.A.) "NATURE'S REALITY" OR HUMBERTS "FANCY"?: SCENES OF REUNION AND MURDER IN LOLITA This essay explores the supposition first put forth by Elizabeth Bruss that two of the most important scenes in the novel—Humbert's reunion with Dolores Haze (now Dolly Schiller) and his execution of Clare Quilty—are imaginative fabrications by Humbert the narrator.1 The evidence for this hypothesis rests in a careful consideration of calendric clues implanted by Nabokov in his text. These include Humbert's statements that he received a letter from Dolly Schiller on September 22 (1952), and that he has worked on the manuscript of Lolita for fifty-six days, as well as a statement by the author of the Foreword, John Ray, Jr., that Humbert died on November 16, 1952.2 If Humbert is accurate in stating that he had been working on his manuscript for fifty-six days, then he began the manuscript on the day he received Dolly's letter and he concluded it on the day he died. He could not have traveled to Coalmont , seen Dolly, and ventured on to kill Quilty as he indicates.3 T. Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 145-46. Bruss's hypothesis has been developed by Christina Tekiner in her article, "Time in Lolita," Modern Fiction Studies, 25 (1979), pp. 463-69, and by Leona Toker in Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 209-11. 2. These three statements can be found on pages 267, 308, and 3 of Vladimir Nabokov's The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). All further references to this edition will be noted in the text by a parenthetical reference con raining the page number. 3. For a detailed discussion of the calendric evidence, see Tekiner, Toker, and the article by Alexander Dolinin which accompanies the present article. Of course, it is possible that Humbert has become muddled over the precise dates to which he refers in his manuscript. As he admitted earlier: "My calendar is getting confused" (109). The dates he mentions in the late stages of his manuscript, however, are much fresher in his mind than the earlier ones, and Nabokov's own revisions of the novel suggest that these dates are meant to be considered valid by the reader. As Toker points out, in his Russian version of the novel Nabokov changed the wording of Humbert's description of going to the mailbox from "late in September 1952" to "September 22, 1952" (Toker, Nabokov, p. 210). The word "late" it self had been changed from "early," which had erroneously appeared in the 42 Nabokov Studies What I intend to do in the following essay is to examine the two scenes in question—the reunion with Dolly and the murder of Quilty—and to discuss what it might mean for our understanding of Humbert's evolution (and Nabokov's design) if the two scenes are wholly the product of Humbert's imagination. Before I begin this investigation, however, I would like to quote two passages from other Nabokov novels which I think are relevant for the present topic. First, the narrator of The Eye muses: "A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a 'thus' and an 'otherwise,' with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past."4 Second, Charles Kinbote states in response to Shade's query as to how Kinbote knows that the story of King Charies of Zembla is true: "Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff wi7/ be true, and the people will come alive."5 Putting these two concepts together , I would suggest that even if the two scenes occurred only in Humbert's imagination and not in his physical life, they may be just as substantial and true for him as any other experience he describes in his narrative, and they represent a possible zigzag of experience which illuminates and gives meaning to the dark...