The Annotated Lolita

Quilty is so ubiquitous because he formulates Humbert’s entrapment, his criminal passion, his sense of shame and self-hate. Yet Quilty embodies both “the truth and a caricature of it,” for he is at once a projection of Humbert’s guilt and a parody of the psychological Double; “ Lo was playing a double game ,” says Humbert punningly referring to Lolita’s tennis, the Doppelgänger parody, and the function of parody as game. The Double motif figures prominently throughout Nabokov, from the early thirties in Despair and Laughter in the Dark (where the Albinus-Axel Rex pairing rehearses the Humbert-Quilty doubling), to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and on through Bend Sinister , the story “Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster,” Lolita, Pnin , and Pale Fire , which offers a monumental doubling (or, more properly, tripling). It is probably the most intricate and profound of all Doppelgänger novels, written at precisely the time when it seemed that the Double theme had been exhausted in modern literature, and this achievement was very likely made possible by Nabokov’s elaborate parody of the theme in Lolita , which renewed his sense of the artistic efficacy of another literary “thing which had once been fresh and bright but which was now worn to a thread” ( Sebastian Knight , p. 91). By making Clare Quilty too clearly guilty, 31 Nabokov is assaulting the convention of the good and evil “dual selves” found in the traditional Double tale. Humbert would let some of us believe that when he kills Quilty in Chapter Thirty-five, Part Two, the good poet has exorcised the bad monster, but the two are finally not to be clearly distinguished: when Humbert and Quilty wrestle, “ I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us. ” Although the parody culminates in this “ silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati ”, it is sustained throughout the novel. In traditional Doppelgänger fiction the Double representing the reprehensible self is often described as an ape. In Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (1871), Stavrogin tells Verkhovensky, “you’re my ape”; in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Hyde plays “apelike tricks,” attacks and kills with “apelike fury” and “apelike spite”; and in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1845), the criminal self is literally an ape. But “good” Humbert undermines the doubling by often calling himself an ape, rather than Quilty, and when the two face one another, Quilty also calls Humbert an ape. This transference is forcefully underscored when Humbert refers to himself as running along like “Mr.

Quilty is so ubiquitous because he formulates Humbert’s entrapment, his criminal passion, his sense of shame and self-hate.