LOLITA IN HUMBERLAND

Author(s): JAMES JOYCE

Source: Studies in the Novel, Vol. 6, No. 3 (fall 1974), pp. 339-348
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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LOLITA IN HUMBERLAND
JAMES JOYCE

Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita continues to provoke scholarly in?

terest through its texture of characters, action, allusions, and motifs.
Elizabeth Phillips has pointed out allusions to Edgar Allan Poe,1 and
Diane Butler has shown that Nabokov's use of butterflies and butterfly
imagery in Lolita is meaningful.2 But apparently no one has explored the
most pointed allusions of all: those to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson).
Allusions to the Alice books are far more important to the story than
those to Poe; they have structural and thematic purpose, and thus impor?
tant consequences for understanding the novel. In The Annotated Lolita
Alfred Appel does not make much of the many references to Lewis Car?
roll's work. In at least one instance (to be discussed below), he completely
misses the Carrollian aspect of one reference, a reference which is crucial
to an understanding of the link between Lolita and Lewis Carroll. The
focal note devoted to references to Lewis Carroll in Lolita is that for page
133.3 In this note Appel quotes a Vogue interview in which Nabokov calls
Carroll "the first Humbert Humbert," and Nabokov is quoted as saying
he did not allude to Carroll's "wretched perversion and to those ambigu?
ous photographs [Carroll] took in dim rooms" in Lolita. Appel appears
at first to doubt the statement as he discusses "the photography theme"
in Lolita, but he does not go any further than to quote a further denial by
Nabokov that he had Carroll in mind when referring to photography in
the novel. The note ends with a rather unsure statement that Nabokov's
wordplay is Joycean, admitting also that the term "Carrollian" could be
used.
Perhaps The Annotated Lolita was not the place for an investigation
of the relationships between Nabokov, Lolita, and Lewis Carroll?al?
though Appel does explore the similarities of language used by Nabokov
and Joyce in several places. Similarities of literary language are only a

[339]

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340 / JOYCE

part of the affinity between Carroll and Nabokov, and need exploring, as
do the links between the worlds of Lewis Carroll and Lolita.
If we turn to the Vogue interview Appel refers to, we see Nabokov
himself has made the crucial link between the worlds of Alice and Lolita
explicit. Vogue's interviewer writes,

In the car again I asked him about something he had once writ?
ten about the author of Alice in Wonderland.
"I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll," he said, "be?
cause he was the first Humbert Humbert. Have you seen those
photographs of him with little girls? He would make arrange?
ments with aunts and mothers to take the children out. He was
never caught, except by one girl who wrote about him when she
was much older."4

Humbert Humbert plots how he will arrange for him and Lolita to be
alone at several points in the novel, and (as Appel notes) laments his fail?
ure to capture Lolita on film. But this link may be too easy, and Nabokov
is not easily caught; Updike has fittingly dubbed him "Grandmaster
Nabokov,"5 and in chess one must beware of traps. Further evidence for
linking Alice and a Lolita-figure, however, is conclusive, found both in
Nabokov's memoir and in Lolita.
Nabokov's memoir Speak, Memory (or, as it was formerly called,
Conclusive Evidence) has four allusions to things about Alice s Adven?
tures in Wonderland. The allusions are pointed, different, and of course
purposeful: to visualize a thing, a person, an incident, and lastly to give
the reader the information that Nabokov translated Lewis Carroll's
book.
In describing a "so-called 'typographical' portrait of Tolstoi,"
Nabokov says: "Like the tail of the mouse on a certain page of Alice in
Wonderland, it was wholly composed of printed matter."6 Since Tolstoi
is a writer, the typographical portrait, a pictorial representation using let?
ters as most painters use brush strokes, is his image in the same way the
shape of the type in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland suggests the
mouse's tail.
The second allusion to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is in a de?
scription of a cousin of Nabokov's: "one of my most fidgety girl cousins,
a nebulous little blonde of eleven or so with long, Alice-in-Wonderland
hair and a shell-pink complexion, sat so close to me that I felt the slender
bone of her hip move against mine every time she shifted in her seat... ."7
In addition to evoking the hair-style associated with Alice through the
famous Tenniel illustrations that appear in most copies of Alice s Adven?
tures in Wonderland, Nabokov associates an Alice-like person with
sensuous feeling; the sexual connotation of "the slender bone of her hip"

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 LOLITA / 341

is almost too commonplace to mention; what is not so commonplace,

perhaps, is that Nabokov's cousin is the aggressor, just as Alice is an
aggressor in Wonderland (especially at the end when she dismisses the
court as "a pack of cards") and as Lolita is the aggressor in seducing
Humbert Humbert (p. 134).
In a series of "fragmentary little pictures" of his Cambridge days as
a student, Nabokov makes direct reference to the Dormouse in Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland, a reference that jars and yet carries on the
stream of images:

T., a very old and fragile waiter, spilling the soup in Hall on
Professor A. E. Housman, who then abruptly stood up as one
shooting out of a trance; S. S., who was in no way connected
with Cambridge, but who, having dozed off in his chair at a
literary party (in Berlin) and being nudged by a neighbor, also
stood up suddenly?in the middle of a story someone was read?
ing; Lewis Carroll's Dormouse, unexpectedly starting to tell a
tale; E. Harrison, unexpectedly making me a present of The
Shropshire Lad, a little volume of verse about young males
and death.8

The allusion to the Dormouse captures the train of association from lis?
tening to a storytelling to telling a story, and relays the association of
the unexpected from the direct reference, "unexpectedly," and from the
sudden juxtaposition of fiction and fact.
Mention of Nabokov's translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonder?
land is the fourth direct reference in Speak, Memory.9 His mention of
the book is fleeting: merely the information that he translated it into Rus?
sian for five dollars. But an investigation of the translation reveals much
of Nabokov's artistic interest in the book.
Warren Weaver, in Alice in Many Tongues, feels "Nabokov's ver?
sion is especially clever and sensitive."10 Weaver notes that the translation
of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat" is a faithful translation of Carroll's
idea, rather than a literal translation of the text. Nabokov found a nur?
sery rhyme in Russian to parody, matching Carroll's parody of the En?
glish "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."11 One might hold that the good
job Weaver commends is only characteristic of Nabokov as a thorough
artist; but his use of Alice and Lewis Carroll in his autobiography more
than twenty years after the translation suggests a lasting interest and con?
tinuing familiarity with Lewis Carroll.
Perhaps "familiarity" is not a strong enough word, for I believe
Nabokov feels an affinity for Lewis Carroll. Nabokov explains the origin
and growth of Lolita as the "Interreaction of Inspiration and Combina?
tion?which, [he admits] sounds like a conjurer explaining one trick by

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342 / JOYCE

performing another" (p. 313). Nabokov suggests here a portmanteau

world of reading, experience, and imagination given to us much as Lewis
Carroll composed "Jabberwocky" of portmanteau words, despite his
claim he does not think Carroll's language shares any roots with his. If
Nabokov uses "one trick to explain another," this is not different from
what Lewis Carroll does in A Tangled Tale, where within a series of
stories mathematical problems are presented, and an imaginary class
asked to solve them; nor is Nabokov's trickery alien to the logic in incon?
gruities that pervades Wonderland. The intent of both writers is to mys?
tify, to delight, to intrigue; Lewis Carroll's readers were Victorian chil?
dren and adults, and Vladimir Nabokov's readers were educated, post
Freudian adults.
Nabokov's statement to the Vogue interviewer on the link between
Lewis Carroll and Humbert Humbert may be viewed as a genuine area
of investigation despite Nabokov's denials to Appel, and not a grand?
master's trap laid for the the unwary. We may now turn with caution
to similarities between Alice and Lolita, many of which Appel notes but
does not explore.
Nabokov gives Dolores Haze, better known as Lolita, an I.Q. of 121
(p. 109); thus she is above average in intelligence. Lewis Carroll's Alice
is obviously above average intelligence also, as seen in her attempts at
solutions to Wonderland puzzles and problems. Intelligence, however, is
not the only (or even best) criterion for a comparison of Alice and Lolita.
Lolita is a nymphet, defined by Humbert Humbert as "maidens [between
the ages of nine and fourteen] who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice
or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not hu?
man, but nymphic (that is, demoniac). . ." (p. 18). That the real Alice,
Alice Pleasance Liddell, exerted an unusual influence over Charles Dodg
son is evident from his use of her as heroine of his two stories Alice's Ad
ventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. More pointed
evidence is the entry Dodgson made in his diary on the first day he met
Alice: "I mark this day with a white stone"12?a mark he reserved for
special occasions. The identity of Alice Liddell as the heroine of the two
Alice books is shown in two places. One is in his presentation to her of the
manuscript version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which he titled
Alice's Adventures Under Ground; the story is the same, with a few
changes in the later published version. Alice is linked to Through the
Looking Glass through the acrostic of her name in the final poem of the
book: ALICE PLEASANCE LIDDELL. That the poem recalls the boat
ride which gave rise to Alice's Adventures Under Ground13 is well known
by Lewis Carroll enthusiasts. Alice's relationship with Charles Dodgson
is strikingly convenient for use by Nabokov when writing his novel con

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 LOLITA / 343

cerned with an adult male's fascination with a girl-child. Again, Nabo?

kov's statement in the Vogue article is brought to mind. For if Lewis Car?
roll was the first Humbert Humbert, Alice must have been the first Lo?
lita. Before going on, perhaps I should point out that I do not claim Hum?
bert Humbert is an exact or even disguised copy of Lewis Carroll or that
Lolita is a copy of Alice Liddell; Nabokov's mind is combining Lolita
and Alice in the texture of fiction just as he combines elements from Poe
and butterflies; the result of Lolita in Humberland is illuminating to both
the fiction of Lolita and the psychological reality of Lewis Carroll.
There are three important direct allusions to Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland in Lolita, as well as many elements which suggest the Alice
books. The first instance of allusion occurs before Lolita seduces Hum?
bert. Lolita is asleep, but not far under from the drug which Humbert
gave her:

I moved toward my glimmering darling, stopping or retreating

every time I thought she stirred or was about to stir. A breeze
from wonderland had begun to affect my thoughts, and now
they seemed couched in italics, as if the surface reflecting them
were wrinkled by the phantasm of that breeze. Time and again
my consciousness folded the wrong way, my shuffling body
entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again, and once or twice
I caught myself drifting into a melancholy snore (p. 133).

The "breeze from wonderland" affects not only the thoughts of Humbert,
but the entire chapter as well. The beginning of the chapter has Humbert
noting that Lolita's "lightly veiled body and bare limbs formed a Z"
(p. 130). The Z is too closely identified with sleep through cartoons and
newspaper comic strips for Nabokov not to have realized the dreamlike
quality of his own Z, Lolita asleep. When Humbert sheds his clothes, it
is "with the kind of fantastic instantaneousness which is implied when in
a cinematographic scene the process of changing is cut" (p. 130). Nabo?
kov might have been describing dreamlike instantaneousness of action as
well; the unreality of the undressing is certainly one more way in which
the "breeze from wonderland" affects the chapter?or at least is part of
the unreality. When Lolita awakens the next morning Humbert is still
tossing in a half-sleep in which the dead Charlotte enters. The dream real?
ity becomes fantasy when, to Humbert's surprise, "it was [Lolita] who
seduced me" (p. 134). But the end of the dream is a nightmare: "she was
not quite prepared for certain discrepancies between a kid's life and
mine" (p. 136).
The very end of the chapter is the dream of Humbert come true?
possession of his nymphet as an agreeable partner in his quest to fix the

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 344 / JOYCE

perilous magic of nymphets; certainly the "breeze from wonderland"

(foreboding pleasure and pain in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland as
it does in Lolita), the breeze of dreams, is of utmost importance to this
important chapter of Lolita.
The girl with "Alice-in-Wonderland hair" (a phrase he also used to
describe his cousin in Speak, Memory) is a nymphet in Lolita:

I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my

trustful, pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel
bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, the ever alert
periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a
half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her Alice-in
Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection
which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision
was out of reach. . . . [But] there would be nothing in the win?
dow but an obese partly clad man reading the paper (p. 226).

The girl Humbert saw was a nymphet, for the nymphet was of his imagi?
nation, not of the reality of the obese man. The vividness of his vision and
anguish of its end recall the last two stanzas of the poem in Through the
Looking Glass:

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die;

Ever drifting down the stream?

Lingering in the golden gleam
Life, what is it but a dream?14

One could not think of a more appropriate place for Humbert's nymphet
to comb her hair than in Humbert's wonderland?Humberland?his
dream, the dream within life, the dream within the dream.
But the wonderland of Humbert Humbert is more an overtly sinister
combination of dream and lust. Instead of Wonderland we have Humber?
land: "She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with
rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it
seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with some?
thing akin to plain repulsion" (p. 168). Appel's note to this passage makes
Humberland an actual place?perhaps true, but Humbert here is clearly
referring to the world he has fashioned out of his imagination. A little
further in the passage Humbert says "To the wonderland I had to offer,
my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge" (p. 168).
The verbal echo of "wonderland" in "Humberland" is even echoed in
turn by "wonderland" later in the passage?a very Nabokovian, if not

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 LOLITA / 345

Carrollian, play on words. Unquestionably Nabokov has in mind Alice's

entry into Wonderland through the rabbit hole, and her trip and exit from
the Wonderland she entered with rash curiosity. If Humbert's world of
dreams, of Wonderland and Looking Glass illusion, is Humberland, and
Humbert is the governing force subservient to none but Fate itself, then
it is apparent that Humbert must always stay in Humberland until he
awakens from the totality of the dream which Humberland is?his life.
Humbert cannot get to the real Dolores Haze; he breaks his nose
on the inside of the mirror (p. 227) of a Looking Glass dream world. He
is wrong, then, when he says, "Her tennis was the highest point to which
I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although
I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality" (p. 233).
Actually the highest point for Lolita is in the geometry of the day-to-day
trip they are making; it is the careful make-believe characterized in her
remark, "the gal author is Clare [Quilty]" (p. 223), a make-believe that
leaves a frustrated Humbert Humbert finally and utterly alone at the
hospital. The best Humbert can do to recapture Lolita is to be a melan?
choly lover who writes his "Confession of a White Widowed Male" (p. 5);
the best Lewis Carroll can do to recapture Alice Liddell is to write a poem
at the end of Through the Looking Glass, and to portray himself as the
melancholy White Knight.
To turn to considerations of literary language, Lewis Carroll and
Vladimir Nabokov have several specific common delights in language:
the love of puns, anagrams, and puzzles. Carroll's Pillow Problems and
A Tangled Tale are both replete with all three forms of wordplay, and one
has the famous riddle of the Mad Hatter in Alice's Adventures in Won?
derland. Of Nabokov Diane Butler notes, "A prize has been offered to
'puzzle-minded readers of Nabokov' who discover the puzzle hidden in
his story 'The Vane Sisters,' published in the Hudson Review and in the
March, 1959, Encounter."15 The "Enchanted Hunter" anagram in "Ted
Hunter, Cane, NH" (p. 253), the morbid pun in "Harold Haze, Tomb?
stone, Arizona" (p. 253), and the town "Kawtagain" (p. 250)?a port?
manteau word of "caught again" by the definition Humpty Dumpty gave
for portmanteau words16?give instances of wordplay in Lolita similar to
the kind of wordplay Carroll is noted for. Perhaps as Appel suggests
Nabokov learned the word-games from Joyce, whom he mentions in his
memoir,17 and who gave Nabokov a fragment from Finnegans Wake
(p. 404); nonetheless, puns and nonsense words were special problems in
the translation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland into Russian, and
those linguistic problems are the aspects of the translation Weaver's ex?
amination found to be especially well done by Nabokov. Nabokov and
Carroll can be said to belong to the same literary tradition of puzzles and

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346 / JOYCE

puns in fiction, and that might account for the stylistic affinities; but the
repeated references Nabokov makes to Carroll compel me to consider the
affinities more direct links between the two writers. This does not mean
Appel's linking of Nabokov and Joyce in much the same manner is incor?
rect; Nabokov's complex creative intellect has ample room for both Joyce
and Carroll. My concentration on Carroll here is motivated by the lack of
attention to his influence in previous scholarship.
To return to Lolita, chapter 29 of Book II portrays Lolita gone for?
ever from Humberland. She refuses Humbert's last desperate gesture for
a life together (p. 280), and he leaves 10 Killer Street. Humbert, to find a
resolution to the nightmare his dream of Lolita has become, must now
take Lolita's place as Alice in Wonderland. And so he does at the end of
the novel. Humbert drives up into a pasture and waits to be taken to jail.
While watching, he grows "aware of melodious unity of sounds rising like
vapour from a small mining town that lay at [his] feet" (p. 309). Humbert
says, "What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but
that. ... I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's ab?
sence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord"
(p. 310). Here as nowhere else in the novel is Humbert aware of his error;
he has stolen from Lolita the only thing she really had: youth. Humbert
has realized he is dreaming much the same as Lewis Carroll realized life
is a dream when he wrote:

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July.

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die.18

Alice awakens on a bank where her sister and she were lounging, a bank
with "long grass"19 and daisies to make a daisy-chain; the setting is anal?
ogous to the "grassy slope" (p. 308) on which Humbert rests after his
adventure in Humberland. But, as the first page of the novel reminds the
reader, Humbert did not escape from Humberland on the grassy slope.
The life which itself was Humberland ends in an affliction of the heart?a
coronary thrombosis (p. 5).
As one more aspect of the Alice allusions in Lolita I asked Mr.
Victor Ledin, who is a fluent native speaker of Russian and English, to
compare Nabokov's English and Russian versions of Lolita. He found
that, although Nabokov apologizes for his bad Russian in a postscript
to the Russian version, the changes Nabokov makes are modifications for

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 LOLITA / 347

the sake of idiom or usages that cannot be translated directly into Rus?
sian. Pointedly, the allusions to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and
Through the Looking Glass are translated almost literally from the Eng?
lish.
The allusions to Alice and Lewis Carroll in Lolita are undeniably
significant. The explicit connection Nabokov made between Humbert
Humbert and Lewis Carroll in the Vogue interview only confirms what
appears to be a pervasive use of Carroll's affinity for Alice as leitmotif in
Lolita. I am tempted to exclaim, "Checkmate!" But the game is not yet
really won. The many allusions to Alice in Lolita are not always as
straightforward as those I have used here. Discovering all the allusions
to Alice is a delicate work, leading into an infinity produced by two par?
allel mirrors, in which the reflection is reflected in the reflection, continu?
ing until there is no more light for us to see. Being in a receptive mood for
allusions to Carroll is a dangerous source of intentional fallacy. The dan?
ger is, however, to some degree necessary as the reader watches Nabokov
blend together the various parts of his grand strategy, a blending which in
the final analysis completes Lolita with the grace a Grandmaster might
have displayed in an elegantly-played chess game on a Looking Glass
board in Humberland.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY

NOTES

1 Elizabeth Phillips, 'The Hocus-Pocus of Lolita,'" Literature and Psychology, 10 (1960),

97-101.

2 Diane Butler, "Lolita Lepidoptera," in New World Writing, No. 16 (New York: New
American Library, Signet Books, 1960), 58-84.

3 Alfred Appel, Jr., ed., The Annotated LOLITA (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970),
377-78. Subsequent references in my text are to this edition.

4 Penelope Gilliatt, "Nabokov," Vogue, Dec. 1966, p. 281.

5 John Updike, "Grandmaster Nabokov," New Republic, 26 Sept. 1964, pp. 58-84.

6 Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1951), 105-6.

7 Ibid., p. 115.

8 Ibid., pp. 202-3.

9 Ibid., p. 212.

10 Warren Weaver, Alice in Many Tongues (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1964),
p. 90.

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348 / JOYCE
11 Ibid., pp. 90-91.

12 Charles Dodgson, The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1954), 1,83.

13 Martin Gardner, ed., The Annotated Alice (Cleveland: Dover, 1964), pp. 161-62. Here?
after citations are to "Carroll."

14 Ibid., p. 345.

15 Butler, pp. 83-84.

16 Carroll, p. 271.

17 Nabokov, p. 203.

18 Carroll, p. 345.

19 Ibid., p. 163.

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