...celebrations 400th anniversary of Don Quijote (Part I) and the 50th of Lolita, a reconsideration of Nabokov's infamous pronouncements on Cervantes is in order. Much has already been done to set the record straight. Hispanists have rightly pointed out that Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote is a somewhat dubious piece of literary criticism (Close, Kunce, Márquez Villanueva); Milan Kundera persuasively suggested how Nabokov misunderstood Cervantes' humor (Kundera 59-61); Robert Alter, Michael Wood, and others have discussed similarities between Lolita and Don Quijote. Yet the links between these two masterpieces--the titles of which regularly appear in close proximity on the fashionable "top ten lists"--have by no means been exhausted.

Nabokovians, who have tended to focus primarily on the French, Russian, and English-language references in Lolita, could benefit from a more thorough consideration of Don Quijote. (2) And cervantistas have more to gain than a vindication of our dear novel, so sensationally maligned in Nabokov's lectures. A look at Lolita's self-reflexiveness, deployment of parody, and representation of games and play affords a useful perspective from which to reconsider some of the critical debates surrounding Don Quijote, particularly the occasionally misleading assumptions behind the "romantic" vs. "hard school" controversy. If I commit the sin of anachronism by drawing Don Quijote into a modern conceptual framework, recklessly disregarding its Counter-Reformation context, I am also guilty of attempting to demote Lolita as a paragon of postmodern allusion and mirror-play.

Nabokov's near-categorical denial of influence on his own work certainly merits skepticism, and Hispanists are entitled to their righteous indignation at his Lectures on Don Quixote. But Catherine Kunce distorted the issue by asserting, in this ,journal, that "Nabokov is really an imitator [of Cervantes]" (103). Kunce's many insightful observations regarding character, theme, and narrative strategy in Don Quijote and Lolita would benefit from a more nuanced approach to the complicated question of influence. Nabokov himself comments: "The only matter in which Cervantes and Shakespeare are equals is the matter of influence, of spiritual irrigation--I have in view the long shadow cast upon receptive posterity of a created image which may continue to live independently from the book itself" (Lectures 8). This "long shadow" represents influence in a very general sense, what Nicholas Round terms "availability" in contrast to the more direct and intentional mining of "appropriation." Archetypes such as Falstaff and Don Quijote, or techniques of narrative self-reflection become so generally familiar that a particular author need not have even read the original work to be within its range of influence. Alter, for whom the two novelists form the bookends of his study of the self-conscious novel, provided one of the most substantial discussions of Cervantes' "availability" to Nabokov. (3) The representation of fictitious "found manuscripts" and editors who ponder their meanings is just one example of how both novelists unremittingly interrogate the nature of story-telling in the very act of telling the stories. As Alter made clear, even though Cervantes looms smilingly behind such practices, there were many other sources from which Nabokov might have drawn--including his own very idiosyncratic earlier works. Michael Wood has entertainingly argued that, notwithstanding the modern master's celebrated involutions, Cervantes' self-reflexive narrating in certain respects is actually more radical than Nabokov's. (4)

The following pages are concerned with how Don Quijote's influence on Lolita involves both availability and direct appropriation. It bears emphasizing that even when such influence is plausibly established, another important question remains: to what extent are the later author's borrowings consistent with the intention of the predecessor? A look at any number of appropriations of the Quijote figure would illustrate how meanings quite alien from Cervantes' original intent are generated (Anthony Close's landmark The Romantic Approach claims that many of the most salient novelistic receptions of Don Quijote involve such distortions). I will argue that Lolita and Don Quijote articulate fundamentally similar attitudes regarding the relationship between fiction and reality, that there is a consistency of intention between them. An examination of play and parody will support this claim. On one hand, the role-playing and other recreational activities represented in both novels correspond to solipsistic and escapist tendencies on the part of the characters: Humbert's tyrannizing of Lolita and his own inability to integrate socially; Don Quijotes delusional journey with Sancho. But both works also present moments in which play becomes a means of authentic expression, community-formation, and understanding. In like manner, parody initially functions to expose and undermine moribund conventions (e.g., the chivalric romance, the confessional novel). In addition to mocking, however, parody may be used to salvage and revitalize. Nabokov's formulation of parody as a "springboard" can help us understand how Cervantes' "funny book" developed into something much more profound--as Cervantes himself realized the possibilities of the strange combinations his imagination proposed.

I. PARALLELS AND ALLUSIONS.

Para mí sola nació don Quijote, y yo para él; él supo obrar y yo escribir; solos los dos somos para en uno ... (II, 74; 592)

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. That is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (309)

The closing apostrophes in Don Quijote and Lolita announce the narrators' ultimate devotion and permanent claims to their creations: Humbert wrests Lolita from Quilty ("One had to choose between him and H. H., and one wanted H. H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations," 309), and Cide Hamete's pen does so from the likes of the literary usurper, Avellaneda ("que se atrevió o se ha de atrever, a escribir con pluma de avestruz grosera y mal deliñada las hazañas de mi valeroso caballero" [II, 74]). Thus the novels end by redeeming their deceased title characters in art, claiming a conjoined immortality for artist and protagonist alike, and affirming the authenticity of both. We shall see that this final consonance is a culmination of many parallels and allusions that in fact begin at the very outset of both novels.

As with Don Quijote, Humbert's "bizarre cognomen [as the fictitious foreword's John Ray. Jr, PhD informs us] is his own invention" (Lolita 3), and both authors have their men choose comical names: Cervantes gives us "Sir Thighpiece;" Nabokov, a similar combination of exaltation and bathos: "The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive.... It is also a kingly name, and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble" (Strong Opinions 26). In Quixotic fashion, Humbert also transforms the names of others: "Dolores Haze" becomes "Lo-lee-ta" (9), just as Don Quijote changes "Aldonza Lorenzo" (a near anagram, and prosaically phonetic sister to Dolores Haze) into Dulcinea--"nombre, a su parecer, músico y peregrino y significativo, como todos los demás que a él y a sus cosas haba puesto" (I, 1; 78). Humbert also calls his pistol "chum," and the personification of his bedraggled, "limping car" near novel's end puts one in mind of Rocinante. And so when Humbert says of Lolita that "There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it" (264), one is compelled to agree with Ronald Paulson's comment that "It is fascinating to think of Nabokov writing his Harvard lectures on Quixote and his obsession with Dulcinea in 1952 as he was also writing the story of Humbert and Lolita" (218 note 3).

Part of the richness of both novels resides in the fact that the putative "normal" world surrounding the deranged protagonists pulsates with its own low-grade quixotism: Lolita's imagination is captured by movies and advertisements, Charlotte Haze's by cheap paper-backs and magazines, the headmistress Pratt of Beardsley by the psychobabble of "progressive schooling" (177). The range of Cervantine characters with similar "incitements" is broad, including the aficionados of chivalric novels at Juan Palomeque's inn (I, 32), and the many pastoral characters in both parts of the novel. Now, neither Cervantes nor Nabokov...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
Was Thomas Shelton the translator of the 'Second Part' (1620) of Don Q..., March 22, 2006
On the rhetoric within and without Don Quixote (1)., March 22, 2006
Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote., March 22, 2006
Hearing voices of satire in Don Quixote., March 22, 2006
Eric J. Kartchner. Unhappily Ever After: Deceptive Idealism in Cervant..., March 22, 2006

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