“My Poor Little Girl”: Lolita and Nabokov’s Faulkner1 Ahmed Honeini (bio) “Down with Faulkner”? Nabokov’s Postmodern Response to Faulkner Vladimir Nabokov had exacting literary tastes. He considered the “masterpieces of twentieth century prose” to be “Joyce’s Ulysses; Kafka’s Transformation; Biely’s Petersburg; and the first half of Proust’s fairy tale In Search of Lost Time” (1973, 57). Two of the few modern American writers he admired were J. D. Salinger and John Updike – he was more amenable to nineteenth-century U. S. authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe (1973, 57; 64). Nabokov’s disdain for William Faulkner, however, was notorious. Nabokov admitted he was “amused by fabricated notions about so-called ‘great books,’” specifically that “Faulkner’s corncobby chronicles can be considered ‘masterpieces’” (1973, 57). He made clear, in fact, that Faulkner’s work “mean[t] absolutely nothing to” him (1973, 102). Literary critic Edmund Wilson was surprised by Nabokov’s stringent dislike of Faulkner, opining that “Your failure to see his genius is a mystery to me” and that “I think you would be rather congenial to him.” Unlike Nabokov, Wilson considered Faulkner “the most remarkable contemporary American novelist.” Nabokov bluntly rejected Wilson’s pleas, however, quipping “Down with Faulkner!” (Karlinsky, 211; 230–31). Given Nabokov’s severe dismissal of Faulkner, scholarly comparisons between their work are virtually non-existent. Edward A. Malone explains that this paucity in comparative studies on Faulkner and Nabokov is compounded because “It is difficult to determine precisely how many books by Faulkner Nabokov had read”: [End Page 65] He was definitely familiar with Light in August. He may have known Sanctuary. His quip about Faulkner’s ‘corncobby chronicles’ suggests the scene in which Popeye rapes Temple Drake with a corncob. [ . . . ] There is no indication, however, that Nabokov was familiar with any other novel or short story by Faulkner.2 (65) This essay builds upon Wilson’s contention that Nabokov should have been “congenial” to Faulkner by proposing that Lolita, one of the central works of transgressive postmodernist literature, was written in response to three of Faulkner’s own modernist “corncobby chronicles”: The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, and Absalom, Absalom!3 I argue that key aspects of Humbert Humbert’s character, personality, and actions are comparable to, and indeed a distillation of, Quentin Compson, Popeye Vitelli, and Wash Jones. Dolores “Lolita” Haze, meanwhile, is an amalgamation of Caddy Compson, Temple Drake, and Milly Jones. In his pursuit and sexual victimization of Dolores during their two-year journey across the United States, Humbert is driven by base, socially transgressive instincts which mirror Quentin’s sexually perverse desire for his sister Caddy; the routinized violence and abuse which Popeye subjects Temple to while she is held captive at the Old Frenchman place; and Wash’s exploitation and murderous rage towards Milly. Despite Nabokov’s overt aesthetic disdain for Faulkner, I urge a reevaluation of his position on Faulkner’s modernism through Lolita’s explicitly postmodern lens, especially because Nabokov’s concerns with the abuse, silencing, and subjugation of women often parallels and intersect with Faulkner’s.4 By positioning Nabokov as a distinctly postmodern author responding to the quintessentially modernist Faulkner, I echo Brian McHale’s formulation [End Page 66] of postmodern aesthetics, which “produces new insights, new or richer connections” to modernism (4): Postmodernism is not post modern, whatever that might mean, but post modernism; it does not come after the present (a solecism), but after the modernist movement. Thus the term “postmodernism,” if we take it literally enough, à la lettre, signifies a poetics which is the successor of, or possibly a reaction against, the poetics of early twentieth-century modernism, and not some hypothetical writing of the future. (5, italics McHale’s) Following McHale’s lead, I argue that, within Lolita, Nabokov interrogates and critiques traditional, heteronormative notions of sexuality and desire through his depiction of Humbert’s perverse relations with Dolores. In doing so, he follows on from precisely the kinds of questions and concerns which Faulkner raises about male desire and female subjugation through Quentin’s destructive penchant for incest, Popeye’s relentless victimization of Temple, and Wash’s objectification of Milly. Nabokov...