ԵՐԵՎԱՆԻ ՊԵՏԱԿԱՆ ՀԱՄԱԼՍԱՐԱՆ

ԵՎՐՈՊԱԿԱՆ ԼԵԶՈՒՆԵՐԻ ԵՎ ՀԱՂՈՐԴԱԿՑՈՒԹՅԱՆ ՖԱԿՈՒԼՏԵՏ

ԱՆԳԼԻԱԿԱՆ ԲԱՆԱՍԻՐՈՒԹՅԱՆ ԱՄԲԻՈՆ

ԱՆԳԼԵՐԵՆ ԼԵԶՈՒ ԵՎ ԳՐԱԿԱՆՈՒԹՅՈՒՆ

ՄԻՆԱՍՅԱՆ ԱՆՆԱ ԼԵՎՈՆԻ

ՄԱԳԻՍՏՐՈՍԱԿԱՆ ԹԵԶ

ԼՈՒԻՍ ՔԵՐՈԼԻ ԵՎ ՎԼԱԴԻՄԻՐ ՆԱԲՈԿՈՎԻ ԵՐԿԵՐԻ

ՄԻՋՏԵՔՍՏԱՅԻՆ ԼԵԶՎԱՈՃԱԿԱՆ ԵՎ ԴԻՊԱՇԱՐԱՅԻՆ
ՎԵՐԼՈՒԾՈՒԹՅՈՒՆ

<<Անգլերեն լեզու և գրականություն>> մասնագիտությամբ մագիստրոսի

որակավորման աստիճանի հայցման համար

ԵՐԵՎԱՆ 2021
 YEREVAN STATE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
AND COMMUNICATION
ENGLISH PHILOLOGY DEPARTMENT
ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

ANNA MINASYAN

MASTER'S THESIS

AN INTERTEXTUAL READING OF LEWIS CARROLL'S

AND VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S WORKS: MOTIF AND
STYLE ANALYSIS

For Master’s Degree in English Language and Literature

SUPERVISOR: ALVARD JIVANYAN

YEREVAN 2021
Ուսանող՝
ստորագրություն

Մինասյան Աննա
ազգանուն,անուն

Գիտական ղեկավար՝
Ստորագրություն

բ.գ.դ., պրոֆեսոր Ջիվանյան Ալվարդ

գիտ. աստիճան,կոչում,ազգանուն, անուն

Գրախոս՝
ստորագրություն

բ․գ․թ․ դոցենտ Ա․ Մաթևոսյան

գիտ. աստիճան,կոչում,ազգանուն,անուն

«Թույլատրել պաշտպանության»

X
Սեդա Գասպարյան
Ամբիոնի վարիչ

Բ.գ.դ., պրոֆեսոր, ՀՀ ԳԱԱ թղթակից անդամ

գիտ. աստիճան,կոչում,ազգանուն, անուն

«__25___»__ապրիլի__2021թ.
 ԿԱՐԾԻՔ
ԵՊՀ մագիստրատուրայի
ուսանող(ուհի)
Աննա Լևոնի Մինասյան -ի
(ազգանուն, անուն, հայրանուն)

ԼՈՒԻՍ ՔԵՐՈԼԻ ԵՎ ՎԼԱԴԻՄԻՐ ՆԱԲՈԿՈՎԻ ԵՐԿԵՐԻ ՄԻՋՏԵՔՍՏԱՅԻՆ ԼԵԶՎԱՈՃԱԿԱՆ

ԵՎ ԴԻՊԱՇԱՐԱՅԻՆ ՎԵՐԼՈՒԾՈՒԹՅՈՒՆ

(թեմայի անվանումը)

մագիստրոսական թեզի վերաբերյալ

1. Աշխատանքի արդիականության հիմնավորումը և գրականության

վերլուծությունը

Հետազոտված նյութը արդիական է, հետաքրքիր և հիմնավորված

վերլուծություններով։

2. Հետազոտության իրականացումը և արդյունքները

Գիտական թեզի հետազոտությունը կարելի է համարել հաջողված, արդյունքները
հավաստի են, և բխում են նյութի վերլուծությունից։

3. Աշխատանքի շարադրումը և ձևավորումը

Աշխատանքը շարադրված է գիտական լեզվով, օգտագործված են գիտական
եզրույթներ։ Աշխատանքը բաղկացած է գիտական թեզի համար պահանջվող
բաժիններից և ներկայացված է պատշաճ ձևավորմամբ։
 4․Դիտողություններ չկան

Եզրակացություն (աշխատանքը բավարարում է/չի բավարարում մագիստրոսական

թեզին ներկայացվող պահանջները, հեղինակն արժանի է տվյալ մասնագիտությամբ
մագիստրոսի որակավորման աստիճանի շնորհմանը)
Աշխատանքը բավարարում է մագիստրոսական թեզին ներկայացվող պահանջները,
հեղինակն արժանի է տվյալ մասնագիտությամբ մագիստրոսի որակավորման
աստիճանի շնորհմանը։

Գրախոս՝
Արմինե Իլյայի Մաթևոսյան
(ազգանուն, անուն, հայրանուն)
Բ․գ․թ․ Դոցենտ

(գիտական աստիճան և կոչում)

Երևանի պետական համալսարան, դոցենտ

(աշխատանքի վայրը, պաշտոնը)

Ստորագրություն

«26 » 04___2021թ.
Լուիս Քերոլի եվ Վլադիմիր Նաբոկովի երկերի միջտեքստային լեզվաոճական եվ
դիպաշարային վերլուծություն
AN INTERTEXTUAL READING OF LEWIS CARROLL'S AND VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S
WORKS: MOTIF AND STYLE ANALYSIS
Интертекстуальная интерпретация произведений Владимира Набокова и Льюиса
Кэррола: мотивный и лингвостилистический анализ.

Հետազոտության նպատակն է ներկայացնել միջտեքստայնությունը որպես

իմաստային առնչությունների դրսևորում, ինչպես նաև տեքստի վերլուծության
ուրույն միջոց: Հետազոտության առանցքը Լուիս Քերոլի և Վլադիմիր Նաբոկովի
երկերի միջտեքստային լեզվաոճական և դիպաշարային վերլուծությունն է:
Հետազոտության արդյունքում պարզ դարձավ, որ յուրաքանչյուր գրական տեքստ
կառուցում է ժամանակայնորեն ավելի վաղ ձևավորված տեքստերի հետ բազմաշերտ
դիպաշարային, թեմատիկ, իմաստային և լեզվաոճական առնչությունների հաշվին:
Ստեղծագործական գործընթացի ժամանակ ենթագիտակցական ոլորտներում
մնացած շատ մտքեր, պատկերներ, գնահատումներ կամա թե ակամա մղվում են
գիտակցական ոլորտ՝ ազդելով ստեղծագործական գործընթացի վրա: Ասվածի վառ
օրինակն են Լուիս Քերոլի և Վլադիմիր Նաբոկովի գրական առնչությունների,
գրական ազդեցությունների, աշխարհայացքային, մարդկային հարաբերությունների
արժևորման, պատկերակերտման ընդհանրությունները: Երկու հեղինակներն էլ աչքի
են ընկնում դրվագները պատկերավոր և մանրակրկիտ ներկայացնելով, արտառոց
տրամաբանական-լեզվաբանական բառախաղերով, ակնարկներով և հղումներով:
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6
CHAPTER ONE
INTERTEXTUALITY AS A THEORY OF SEMANTIC DEPENDENCE
1.1 The Notion of Intertextuality----------------------------------------------------------------- 9
1.2 The Origin of the Term---------------------------------------------------------------------- 10
1.3 Theories of Intertextuality: Main Lines of Development-----------------------------------12
1.4 Gérard Genette’s Approach to the Subject of Intertextuality------------------------------ 17
CHAPTER TWO
AN INTERTEXTUAL READING OF LEWIS CARROLL'S AND VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S
WORKS: MOTIF AND STYLE ANALYSIS
2.1 Lolita in Humberland-----------------------------------------------------------------------------21
2.2 Humbert Humbert through the Looking-Glass -----------------------------------------------44
CONCLUSION----------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------54
BIBLIOGRAPHY---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------
56

5
 INTRODUCTION

Today we live in an age of remake or remix. This remake has conquered all the fine arts
such as music, painting, sculpture, architecture and poetry. Though it seems that remake is
well-known and well-developed in the area of music, the style and strategy of remake or
remix are much older in the field of literature. In the antiquity, this form of the remake was
known as translation. It is nothing but the rewriting of earlier, already existing works or pre-
texts. This rewriting is mainly concerned with textual transformation which includes
allusions, imitations, repetitions, parody, satire and burlesque. These features stand with
literature, are capturing the attention and producing aesthetic in the text. Nonetheless, the
question is the use of such elements or rewriting, creates problems in the tradition of
reading. Consequently, this kind of writing is creating diverse readings of the text and
spreads one text’s relation to other texts. This ideology is called intertextuality which is a
post-structuralist concept and tool of interpretation of the texts. It is a form of meaning-
making notion, or it is readers’ reference of one text in reading another. Primarily, it refers
to text’s relationship with other text or texts and present references of further texts. It refers
to author’s borrowing and transformation of the previous books or to a reader’s referencing
of one text in reading another. In such a process, the reading becomes a process of moving
between texts and the meaning that we extract from the text becomes something that exists
between text and all the other texts/textual matters to which it refers and relates. Therefore,
the text becomes inter-text.
The subject matter of our thesis is “An Intertextual Reading of Lewis Carroll’s and
Vladimir Nabokov’s works: motif and style analysis”.
The aim of the research is to investigate and bring out Nabokov’s allusions to Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland and to Lewis Carroll. These allusions provide insight into Nabokov's
sense of fiction and his affinity for Lewis Carroll, as well as providing greater understanding about
Lolita. To achieve the aim the following objectives have been set:
 To provide a succinct discussion of intertextuality from a theoretical perspective;
 to examine the relations each text has to the texts surrounding it;

6
  to provide an accurate and all-inclusive definition of intertextuality;
 to refer to a text as the product of pre-existent codes and discourses and to
approach
intertextuality as the main characteristic of literary reading;
 to reveal all the influences Carroll has on Nabokov’s style and motif;
 to investigate intertextual links between Nabokov’s Lolita and Carroll’s Alice
books from different angles.
The topicality of the subject is connected to the fact that intertextuality theory is still
a new branch of the humanities and it is worth examining thoroughly as it influences the
readers and add layers of depth to a text, based on the reader’s prior knowledge and
understanding.
The novelty of the present work consists in the fact that it is going to address some of
the gaps that are found in the intertextual study of a series of parallels between Carroll’s
and Nabokov’s texts and the results of the work might add to the findings of the previous
studies.
The theoretical value of our thesis consists in the possible contribution of the
research to further investigation of the subject matter taking into consideration the fact
that intertextuality is a powerful writing tool that should not be overlooked as it opens
new possibilities and perspectives for constructing a story. Moreover, it is conditioned by
the possibility of clarifying certain theoretical approaches to intertextuality and
intertextual references.
The practical value of our research is that the accomplished analysis can be useful for
those who study intertextual relations and references intended by different authors. The
findings of our research can be practically applicable during seminars of intertextual
studies and comparative stylistics. Besides it can be used by students in their term papers
and graduation papers.
The theoretical background of our analysis was conducted on the basis of the works by
different scholars of intertextuality, among them Kristeva, Allen, Bakhtin, Barthes, Genette
others.

7
 The methods that have been used in our research are comparative, contextual and
descriptive.
The thesis is comprised of Introduction, two Chapters, Conclusion and Bibliography.
In Introduction, we present the aim, the objectives, the topicality, the novelty, the
methods, the theoretical and practical significance of our study.
Chapter One presents the theoretical background of the research. The first part is
devoted to the theoretical definition and approaches to the subject of intertextuality, main
lines of its development with various types of it.
Chapter Two presents the general understanding of the main similarities between
Lewis Carroll and Vladimir Nabokov from different aspects. The main focus of this chapter is
the intertextual links and the huge amount of allusions between Alice books and Lolita. They
give a number of wide opportunities to study these references with concrete examples.
Conclusion presents the main findings of the study.
Bibliography includes all the sources that have been used in the course of our
investigation.

8
 CHAPTER ONE
INTERTEXTUALITY AS A THEORY OF SEMANTIC DEPENDENCE

1.1 THE NOTION OF INTERTEXTUALITY

Almost every word and phrase we use we have heard or seen before. Our originality
comes from how we put those words together in new ways to fit our specific situation, needs,
and purposes, but we always need to rely on the common stock of language we share with
others. If we did not share the language, how would others understand us? Often we do not
call attention to where specifically we got our words from. Often the words we use are so
common they seem to come from everywhere. At other times we want to give the
impression that that we are speaking as individuals from our individuality, concerned only
with the immediate moment. Sometimes we just do not remember where we heard
something. On the other hand, at times we do want to call attention to where we got the
words from. The source of the words may have great authority, or we may want to criticize
those words. We may want to tell a dramatic story associated with particular people with
distinctive perspectives in a particular time and place. And when we read or listen to others,
we often do not wonder where their words come from, but sometimes we start to sense the
significance of them echoing words and thoughts from one place or another. Analyzing those
connections helps us understand the meaning of the text more deeply. We create our texts
out of the sea of former texts that surround us, the sea of language we live in. And we
understand the texts of others within that same sea. Sometimes as writers, we want to point
to where we got those words from and sometime we do not. Sometimes as readers, we
consciously recognize where the words and ways of using words come from and at other
times the origin just provides an unconsciously sensed undercurrent. And sometimes the
words are so mixed and dispersed within the sea, that they can no longer be associated with a
particular time, place, group, or writer. Nonetheless, the sea of words always surrounds every
text.

9
 The relation each text has to the texts surrounding it is called intertextuality. Providing
an accurate and all-inclusive definition of intertextuality may be a challenging task due to its
multi-faceted nature. In his discussion of intertextuality Graham Allen states that it is “one of
the most commonly used and misused terms in the contemporary critical vocabulary.
Moreover, texts are seen as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. In order for them to
be interpreted a complex network of textual relations must be created. In this respect
meaning becomes a something which exists between the text and all the other texts to which
it refers, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations” (Allen
2000:2).
Originally proposed in the field of critical theory, intertextuality surpassed its
boundaries and has been occasionally employed by linguists as well. If one examines
different theorists' proposals, one notices that intertextuality has been defined so variously
that, as Irwin points out “it has acquired almost as many meanings as users” (2004:227).
It follows that intertextuality is a way of interpreting texts which focuses on the idea of
texts’ borrowing words and concepts from each other. Every writer, both before writing his
text and during the writing process, is a reader of the texts written before his text. S/he either
borrows from the prior or concurrent texts and discourses in the network through allusions,
impressions, references, citations, quotations and connection, or is affected by the other texts
in some ways. Therefore, an author’s work will always have echoes and traces of the other
texts to which it refers either directly or indirectly and either explicitly or implicitly.
Furthermore, the discussions about texts and intertextuality so far have made clear that a
work of culture only becomes a meaningful text through its interpretation by human beings,
whether they act as individuals, in social groups or with imaginary communities.

1.2 THE ORIGIN OF THE TERM

Intertextuality as a term was first used in Julia Kristeva’s “Word, Dialogue and Novel”
(1966) and then in “The Bounded Text” (1966-67), essays she wrote shortly after arriving in
Paris from her native Bulgaria. The concept of intertextuality that she initiated proposes the
text as a dynamic site in which relational processes and practices are the focus of analysis
instead of static structures and products. The “literary word”, she writes in “Word, Dialogue,

10
and Novel”, is “an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a
dialogue among several writings” (Kristeva 1980:65). Developing Bakhtin’s specialization of
literary language, she argues that “each word (text) is an intersection of other words (texts)
where at least one other word (text) can be read” (Kristeva 1980:66). In her works, Kristeva is
interested in establishing the mode in which the text is constructed of already existent
discourses. She argues that authors do not generate their texts from their ideas but rather
compile them from pre-existent texts. Thus, she defines text as:
A permutation of texts, in the space of a given text, in which several utterances, taken
from other texts, intersect and neutralize one another. Any text is constructed as a
mosaic of quotations: any text is absorbed and transformed of another. The notion of
intertextuality replaces that of intertextuality, and poetic language is read as at least
double (Kristeva 1980:66).
Kristeva explores the concept of the text is which is not a single activity in its totality
because text is the mixture of cultural textuality. She forms an idea that we create individual
text and the cultural text from the same textual material that the reader cannot distinguish
from each other. It is a re-wording of Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogue”, which has established a
relationship between author, work, reader, society, and history. However, the discrete
nature of Kristeva’s theory pays close attention to the textuality. On the other hand,
Bakhtin’s work was centered on human subject where language is its social aspect. Therefore,
all texts are destined to contain ideological structures that expressed through discourses.
According to Kristeva, texts do not exhibit clear and stable meanings; they embody society’s
conflict over the meanings of the language. Thus, intertextuality deals with the text’s
existence within society and history. Texts have no unity or unified meaning of their own;
they are thoroughly connected to ongoing cultural and social processes. In Kristeva’s views,
text’s meaning is seen as a temporary rearrangement of elements with socially pre-existent
meanings. Therefore, the meaning is may be either inside or outside the text. Here “inside” is
the reader’s view and “outside” is the society’s influence of the text.
Kristeva’s term intertextuality refers to the dialogic nature of literary language. In her
view, the literary text is not an autonomous entity, but as the product of pre-existent codes,
discourses and texts. Every word in the text is an intertextual and must not be defined only

11
in the work itself. It indicates that these words may trace its meaning to the outside of the
text. Intertextuality, in this sense, objectifies what is inside and what outside the text. It
shows that the meaning may not be contained and constrained within the text itself. There is
a mistaken tendency to readers of Kristeva, to confuse intertextuality with more traditional,
author-based concepts, particularly the concept of influence. Intertextuality is not the only
reference by the author in another book, but also intertextuality is the condition of
signification, of meaning in literary and indeed all languages
(https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/148953/8/08%20intertextuality%20a%20theoretical
%20perspective.pdf).

The evidence from this study implies that in Kristeva’s works intertextuality refers to
the concepts of signification and of meaning in language. Therefore, even the intertextual
relations are not intended by an author, there can still be found intertextual links in and
outside the text owing to the dialogic nature of language and the emergence of meaning in a
text’s relation with other texts (https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/411869).

1.3 THEORIES OF INTERTEXTUALITY: MAIN LINES OF DEVELOPMENT

Though, the notion of intertextuality was first introduced by Julia Kristeva in 1967, the
suggestion that any text is consciously or unconsciously related to other texts produced
before first appeared in the works of Russian formalists, M. Bakhtin in particular. In some of
his writings Bakhtin argues that apart from the reality a writer lives in, he has to deal with
preceding and contemporary literatures and is continuously in a dialogue with them
(Bakhtin 1981:33). He came up with an idea of dialogism and heteroglossia. The former
refers to the clash between the distinct characters’ voices, or else distinct languages, mainly
in novels or between the individual or personal and the social meaning of utterances or
words. On the other hand, heteroglossia refers to the recognition of different languages
within the society itself; that is languages of different social, professional groups and classes,
which have been termed registers in sociolinguistics. This social aspect of Bakhtin’s theory is
the strong link between his ideas and Kristeva’s notion of intertextuality.
Another stirring theorist of intertextuality is Barthes. He attacked the notion of the
natural and stable meaning, and idea of truth. His theory is built in the works of Julia

12
Kristeva and Mikhail Bakhtin. The study of the text has become crucial for Barthes, and he
defines the interpreter of the text, as a textual scholar, especially, concerned with manuscript
studies. For that, he differentiates the text and work, and prefers the text and calls it as “a
material inscription of work” (Barthes 1981:61). In his perception, the work is a material and
offering the possibility of meanings. But on the other hand, text is only an act of writing; for
that he states that “the work is held in hand, the text in language” (Barthes 1973:39). Graham
Allen points out this view of Barthes that:
The theory of the text involves theory of intertextuality, since the text not only sets
going a plurality of meanings but is also woven out of numerous discourses and spun
from already existing meaning (Allen 2000:67).
Therefore, Barthes has developed the view that the text is not unified and isolated
object which has a singular meaning, but it is an element open to various interpretations.
Similar to Kristeva, Barthes says that “the literature written during and after modernism is
called text because of its openness to interpretation. And these texts are not just for reading
but can be re-interpreted” (Barthes 1973:41).
R. Barthes introduces the term intertext, suggesting that any text is at the same time an
intertext, other texts being present in it on different levels, in more or less recognizable
forms, texts belonging to past and present cultures. Any text is a weave of past quotations
(Barthes 1973:52). In his essay “From Work to Text”, Barthes mentions:
The intertextual relation in which every text is held, is not to be confused with some
origin of the text; to try to find the sources, the influences of the work, is to fall in with
the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous,
untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas
(Barthes 1978:160).
The most important feature of intertextuality is the publication of Barthes’s
groundbreaking essay “The Death of the Author” (1978) in which Barthes explains about the
origin of the text. It is combined with linguistic and psychoanalytical theories and other
influences because the text is nothing but plurality of other words, other utterances and
other texts. In the cognitive operation of meaning making, Barthes argues for heterogeneity
of meanings. It was because of the earlier period when the meaning making was authorial or

13
author intended. It means that the meaning was from author’s unique consciousness.
However, Barthes breaks this tradition of acquisition of meaning and shifts it from the
author to the language or writing. What he means that it depends upon the placing of words
within linguistic and cultural systems. Hither, the role of the author is only a compiler of
preexistent possibilities within the language system. Thus, each word, sentence, paragraph or
the whole text have its origin in the language system, out of which they are produced.
Therefore, this new view of language expressed by Barthes is what theorists have termed as
intertextuality. For Barthes the term intertextuality has come to be used to refer to
something that cannot exist outside the text (Barthes 1978:23). Therefore, the idea of the text
breaks the traditional notion of meaning making, or it is the authority of the author. Graham
Allen comprehensively synthesizes this view by saying that:
The modern scripter, when she/he writes, is always already in the process of reading
and rewriting. Meaning comes not from the author, but language viewed
intertextuality (Allen 2000:14).
Though it breaks the traditional notion of meaning making, as well as it also transforms
traditional author and critic into readers. In this way, Barthes concludes his essay in the
following manner:
A text is made from multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into
mutual relations of dialogic, parody, contestation. There is no place where this
multiplicity is focused, and the place is reader, not, as hitherto said, the author. The
reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up the writing are inscribed
without any of them being lost: a text’s unity lies not in its origins but in its
destination; the birth of the reader must be at the cost of death of the author (Barthes,
1978:148).
Bakhtin’s contributions to intertextuality lie in his acceptance of language as a socially
constructed phenomenon and of text as a social construction having traces of social, cultural
and ideological norms. Conventionally, a text was considered to be shaped by the original
mind of its author. Shifting attention away from the originality of the author’s mind, Bakhtin
decentered the individual author and portrayed him/her as a consequence of social and
cultural values and defined literary texts as socio-cultural productions. With Bakhtin’s ideas

14
text also became a rich texture that was made out of the conventions of genre and out of
styles. Texts were no longer self-contained structures but differential, cultural, historical and
ideological constructions. With his theories of polyphonic, double-voiced and heteroglossic
novel, Bakhtin provided the intertextual theory with a strong base
(http://faculty.weber.edu/cbergeson/quixote/martinez.pdf).
The concept of intertextuality became an influential practice in the discipline of
literary studies a few decades after the publication of T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” in The Egoist in 1919. The notion may, nevertheless be considered to have
existed in this famous poet-critic’s influential essay. Although the general trend towards
Eliot’s insights presented in his essay is in the direction of combining them with modernism,
his ideas sound partly intertextual. Due to the common conception of intertextuality- that
every text is related to other texts and these relations are essential as well as constitutive for
the generation of the text’s meaning(s)- it may be thought that Eliot’s work highlighting the
synchronicity of all texts and seeing the intertext as a synonym for tradition and culture
offered, in its own time, new insights about the text and the network of texts. The essay
reads:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot
value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. What
happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously
to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments from an ideal order
among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new)
work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives;
for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be,
if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportion values of each work of art
toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.
Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature
will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as
the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of
great difficulties and responsibilities (Eliot 1919:4).

15
 Eliot also notes that “each work exists within the tradition from which it takes shape
and which it, in turn, redefines” (Eliot 1919:5). He sees tradition as “something to which the
poet must be faithful and something that he or she actively makes; novelty emerges out of
being steeped in tradition” (Eliot 1919:8).
A link can be drawn between intertextuality’s recognition of text as a cultural artifact
as well as its approach to text in its contextual aspect and that of Eliot which accepts text as
an artifice based on tradition and history and as a production of the culture in which it is
produced and therefore, as a part of that culture. According to Eliot “an artist has and should
have a historical consciousness while producing his/her work of art because s/he is not a
separate entity but rather a being culturally involved in the tradition” (Eliot 1919:6). Seen
from this perspective, no author and no text are unique, which is at the same time a
declaration of intertextuality. Additionally, all texts in a network, for both Eliot and
intertextuality, are concurrent. The two insights are identical in the sense that every text is
more or less related to every other text and that the artist does not produce any unique art
because his work will always have the effects, traces and impressions of culture or tradition
in Eliot’s term.
The second path, that in which intertextuality is used to achieve greater interpretive
certainty, has been taken by critics who have applied it rather effectively to their practical
criticism, such as Michel Riffaterre and Gérard Genette.
Taking into account the relevant role of the reader, Riffaterre approaches
intertextuality not only from the point of view of all the possible relations among texts but as
the main, fundamental characteristic of literary reading. He defines the literary phenomenon
as not only the text, but also its reader and all the reader's possible reactions to the text
(Riffaterre 1983:3). He claims that there is only one correct reading and that it is the
intertextual method that guides the reader in his/her interpreting. According to him, the
ability to recognize gaps and ungrammaticalities are part of every reader’s linguistic
competence and it does not require much erudition or “preternatural insights” (Riffaterre
1987:373). Yet his own interpretations of poems and novels are full of learned allusions and
draw on an encyclopedic command of French and English literatures. Anyway, what is
relevant in his theory is his basic concern with the effect on the reader of a textual

16
presupposition: readers presuppose that there is an intertext which gives structural and
semantic unity to the work, but the success or failure to locate that intertext on the part of
the reader is, in a sense, irrelevant to the experience of intertextual reading. Analogous if not
identical with Kristeva’s assertion that every text is under the jurisdiction of other discourses,
Riffaterre’s thesis is that “literary reading is possible only if the reader recognizes that the
text articulates a presupposition of intertext, to such an extent that the text can be considered
not simply a sequence of words organized as syntagms but a sequence of presuppositions”
(Riffaterre 1980:627). M. Riffaterre would distinguish between intertextuality, as a relation
which the reader establishes between texts that his memory and culture present him and
obligatory intertextuality, which leaves in the text an ineffaceable trace, the evocation of
which is necessary for the reader. In this case, the writer deliberately invokes a comparison
or association between two (or more) texts. Without this pre-understanding or success to
grasp the link, the reader’s understanding of the text is regarded as inadequate (Fitzsimmons
2013:58). In consequence, obligatory intertextuality relies on the reading or understanding of
a prior hypotext, before full comprehension of the hypertext can be achieved (Jacobmeyer
1998:158).
More generally, these basic findings confirm that the concept of intertextuality reminds
us that each text exists in relation to others. In this regard, Michel Foucault declared that:
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last
full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a
system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences; it is a node within a
network … the book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands…Its unity is
variable and relative (Foucault 1969:23).

1.4 GÉRARD GENETTE’S APPROACH TO THE SUBJECT OF INTERTEXTUALITY

Since the appearance of intertextuality in poststructuralist period of 1960s, it has been
adopted and explored by theorists of more structuralist frame of mind. Genette, who is a
leading structuralist, states:

17
 The ability to constitute a system is precisely the characteristic of any set of signs and,
it is this constitution that marks the passage from pure symbolism to the strictly
semiological state (Genette 1982:30).
The above statement of Genette concerns not to an individual symbol or individual
works but to the ways, in which signs and texts function. Signs and texts are generated by
the describable system, codes, cultural practices and rituals. In this sense, the essential thrust
of structuralist project seems to be moving towards the intertextuality. In that, they denied
the existence of unitary objects and emphasized their systematic and relational nature,
whether they are literary texts or other works of text. Gérard Genette’s approach to the
subject of intertextuality can be considered as an attempt to delimit the definitions of
intertextuality put forward by Kristeva, Bakthin, Barthes, etc., as they have been found
difficult to apply to the practical analysis of texts. In contrast with Bakhtin’s and Kristeva’s
wide interests, which are not only linguistic but also social, political, philosophical, Genette
concentrates basically on the literary text in the strict sense of the word. Reading Kristeva’s
notion of intertextuality as referring to the literal and effective presence in a text of another
text, he asserts that intertextuality is an inadequate term and proposes in its place
transtextuality, by which he means everything, be it explicit or latent that relates one text to
others (Genette 1982:46). His map of relations between texts represents a structural approach
to intertextuality. Genette uses the concept of transtextuality in such a way as to show how a
text can be systematically interpreted and understood in terms of relations between and
among various kinds of texts.
By proposing the term transtextuality as a more inclusive term than intertextuality
Genette lists its five subtypes:
1. Intertextuality: Genette’s view about intertextuality is little confusing. He reduces
intertextuality to “a relationship of copresence, between two texts or among several
texts and as “the actual presence of one text within another” (Genette 1992:1-2). Here,
Genette’s concept intertextuality is concerned with quotation, plagiarism, allusion and
thus providing a pragmatic and determinable intertextual relationships between,
specific elements of individual the texts. What Genette desires is to place any particular
element of textuality with a viable system that can be easily applied.

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2. Paratextuality: By this term, Genette refers to the relations between the body of a
text and its title, subtitle, epigraphs, illustrations, notes, first drafts, and other kinds of
accessory signals which surround the text. According to Genette, paratext performs
various functions which direct the text’s reader and can be understood pragmatically in
terms of the manner of the text’s existence. The term “paratextuality” indicates
elements such as the purpose of the text and intention of the text (Allen 2000:104). A
paratext is what enables the text to become a book. The paratext consists of peritext
and epitext. The peritext includes elements such as titles, chapter titles, prefaces,
captions, and notes. It also encompasses dedications, illustrations, epigraphs. The
epitext consists of elements such as interviews, publicity announcements and reviews,
as well as authorial and editorial discourse. Thus, the paratext is the sum of the peritext
and the epitext. The paratext helps the reader to know about the text’s threshold,
which has different elements, including the title, chapter, and even the design of the
cover, and can help the reader understand a text quite easily. It helps the reader to
know various elements about a text; for example, the text’s author, when it was
published, and so on. Paratextual elements can direct the readers in multiple ways, and
similarly organize their understanding and interpretation of the text. It performs
several functions which lead and guide the reader of the text. Though it helps us
understand a text, we cannot define a text’s meaning clearly, unless and until we read it
out. It can help make guesses about a text, but we cannot define how the different
elements work. Sometimes they serve as comments on the text.
3. Metatextuality: Genette’s definition of metatextuality is “the relationship most often
labelled commentary. It unites a given text to another of which it speaks without
necessarily citing it, sometimes even without naming it” (Genette 1997:4). It means
that there are explicit and implicit references of one text to another text. This kind of
text expresses all details in a clear way and leaves no doubt to the denoted meaning.
Here through implicit references Genette wants to highlight an implied reference.
4. Architextuality: This term refers to the generic category to which a text belongs.
This term includes thematic and figurative expectations about texts. Genette states that
“an important aspect of architextuality is the reader’s expectations, and thus their

19
 reception of the work” (Genette 1997:5). Genette defines this term in the way that it is
“the entire set of general or transcendent categories-types of discourse, modes of
enunciation, literary genres from which emerges each singular text” (Genette 1997:1).
It shows that, if the literature is understood as a formal system, it is filled with the
types such as the realist novel, tragedy, and others. Therefore, architextuality becomes
the study of literature, in terms of these formal categories.
5. Hypertextuality: The next term in Genette’s critical repertoire, hypertextuality,
denotes the relation between the late-come text (hypertext) and its pre-text (hypotext).
He defines hypertext as “every text derived from a previous one by means of direct or
indirect transformation (imitation, but not through commentary) (Genette 1997:7). In
the former, a case of direct or simple transformation, a text “B” may make no explicit
reference to a previous one, text “A”, but it could not exist without “A”. He defines that
hypertextuality is not only representing the relationship of “A” text and “B” text, which
it is based on, but also which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (Genette
1997:8). Therefore, Genette believes that all texts are hypertextual, but sometimes the
existence of a hypotext is too uncertain, to the basis for hypertextual reading. In this
sense, Genette reminds the reader that a hypotext can be read either for its individual
value or in relation with its hypertext.
This combination of findings provides some support for the conceptual premise that
intertextuality has become a major term in literary studies and has been identified in
different ways. Emerging from the tradition of post-structuralism, it originally aimed at
destabilising cultural values and conventional categories of interpretation. The concept of
intertextuality is a literary theory stating all works of literature are a derivation or have
been influenced by a previous work of literature.

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 CHAPTER TWO
AN INTERTEXTUAL READING OF LEWIS CARROLL'S AND VLADIMIR NABOKOV'S
WORKS: MOTIF AND STYLE ANALYSIS

2.1 LOLITA IN HUMBERLAND

An important but hitherto unexplored area of artistry in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita
concerns his use of allusions to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and to Lewis Carroll. These
allusions provide insight into Nabokov’s sense of fiction and his affinity for Lewis Carroll, as well
as providing greater understanding about Lolita. Nabokov’s interest in Carroll is of many years’
standing, and it is not surprising that he would make use of his knowledge of Carroll’s fascination
with Alice Liddell in writing Lolita. Not only is the “wonderland” motif recurrent, but
Nabokov also conceived an affinity between Lewis Carroll and Humbert Humbert that is
why he used to say Lewis Carroll Carroll because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
Lewis Carroll was perhaps the strangest of all the sexually troubled Victorian writers.
In “The Image of Childhood” Peter Coveney observed:
Everything for Carroll pointed to disaster in his personal life. He was almost the case-
book maladjusted neurotic. The stammering, awkward, spinsterish don was imprisoned
within Christ Church, Oxford, first as a student, then as a mathematics tutor, from
1851 when he was nineteen, until his death in 1898. Carroll liked to befriend and
photograph naked preadolescent girls, and confessed one hardly sees why the lovely
forms of girls should ever be covered up! (Coveney 1967:38).
He admired them as long as they remained children, who seemed to have no sexual
feelings, but lost interest in them as soon as they reached puberty. His own sexual desires,
though precariously under control, were powerfully expressed in his photography, and his
obsession with little girls, as Coveney adds, “was both sexual and sexually morbid” (Coveney
1967:38). He possessed some of them by removing all their clothes and capturing their image
with his camera. He was particularly fond of Alice Liddell and her sisters, the daughters of

21
the dean of his college, and took more discreet though still suggestive photographs of them.
In 1863, after an obscure argument with the family, Carroll was banished from the Liddell
household. But his famous books, written for and about Alice, expressed his adoration of this
lovely child.
Charles Dodgson was a mathematician, Vladimir Nabokov a lepidopterist, and both
used pseudonyms: Dodgson called himself Lewis Carroll for his children’s books, Nabokov
used the name V. Sirin for his Russian novels published in Europe. The Alice books formed
part of Nabokov’s literary culture. Educated in English by an English governess, and by
teachers at Cambridge, Nabokov knew Carroll’s work from an early age, and discovered a
kindred spirit in his witty wordplay. Like Carroll, Nabokov enlivened his books with puns
and portmanteau words, puzzles and chess games, parody and humorous verse. George
Steiner suggests that Alice in Wonderland “has long been recognized as one of the keys to
the whole Nabokovian oeuvre” (Steiner 1971:5). Likewise, Tony Tanner reaffirms that
“Lewis Carroll is one of Nabokov’s favourite writers” (Tanner 1979:33). James Joyce has
studied Alice in Wonderland allusions found in Lolita. Neither critic expands upon his
statement, however, and this is fairly representative of most of the major Nabokov critics,
who note the Carroll influence but fail to study it at length. Thus, there is a need for a study
of the true extent of Alice allusions in Nabokov’s fiction. There is a Carrollian thread which
winds its way through Nabokov’s life and art, from Switzerland in 1969, back to turn-of-the-
century St. Petersburg.
Alice influenced Nabokov so strongly that one of the first things that he published, at
the age of 23, was a translation of “Alice in Wonderland”. The translation was entitled “Аня
в стране чудес” and as Simon Karlinsky (1970:310-316) and Beverly Lyon Clark (1979:102)
have both noted, the precision with which Nabokov crafted his rendition is evidence of a
close and careful reading of Carroll’s work. Both Karlinsky and Clark are helpful in detailing
the changes which Nabokov made to the original, and Clark is particularly adept at showing
how those changes relate to Nabokov’s own fiction. The greatest change he chose to make
was moving Alice-Anya’s earthly domain to Russia, thus enabling him to draw upon his
knowledge of Russian literature. This was because he created his own parodies of Russian
works, rather than simply translating Carroll’s nonsense verse. This also gave Nabokov the

22
opportunity to practice a difficult cross-language wordplay, for rather than simply translating
the dialogue word for word, he tried to emulate Carroll’s wordplay, which involves both
sound and meaning. Nabokov adapted characters and narrative into Russian forms and
moved the setting to Russia. The result was a brilliant rendition which is reputed to be the
finest translation of Alice into any language.
Nabokov’s interest in Carroll eventually bore fruit in his most celebrated novel, Lolita
(1955), and in its hero Humbert Humbert. When asked about Carroll’s influence on his work
Nabokov, who liked to throw critics off the scent, adopted a moralistic tone and expressed
disgust. Though he did not mention the notorious photographs of naked girls or the
charming ones of Alice Liddell, he çonnected Carroll’s photography to his sexual obsession:
In common with many other English children (I was an English child) I have always
been very fond of Carroll. He has a pathetic affinity with H.H. but some odd scruple
prevented me from alluding in Lolita to his wretched perversion and to those
ambiguous photographs he took in dim rooms. He got away with it, as so many other
Victorians got away with pederasty and nympholepsy. His were sad scrawny little
nymphets, bedraggledb and half-undressed or rather semi-undraped, as if participating
in some dusty and dreadful charade (Interview from Strong opinions 1973).
His statement suggests that Alice in Wonderland was read along with English fairy
tales when he was a child in St. Petersburg. Despite his disclaimer, Nabokov certainly did
allude to Carroll in the novel and used references to Alice to suggest his anti-hero’s Carroll-
like propensities Humbert states that “a breeze from wonderland had begun to affect my
thoughts” (Nabokov 1955:87) and recalls-as if summoning up one of Carroll’s erotic
photographs. The Alice leitmotif pervades and even named Humbert Humbert's world-
Humberland.
As a character Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual, an émigré who lives an
itinerant life in the United States, working as an academic at both Beardsley College for
Women and Cantrip College. He is self-absorbed, condescending, sardonic, and cold, an
intellectual snob who sees himself as superior to everyone he meets. He has been in and out
of psychiatric wards in his life, although he is disdainful of Freud and psychology. So used to
living in his mind, in his own imagination, that he sometimes seems insane, he does not find

23
adult women sexually attractive. He is a pedophile who is aroused by prepubescent girls. He
is sexually obsessed with one 12-year-old in particular, Dolores Haze, whom he calls Lolita.
Throughout the novel Humbert attempts to deceive his readers into believing he was
wronged by Lolita, not the other way around. He presents himself as a dramatic, romantic
hero, but his behavior is in turn self-pitying, violent, self-dramatizing, cowardly, and cold,
and he seldom shows empathy for other human beings. Though he denies it through his
elaborate language, Humbert has held Lolita captive, raped her, kept her isolated, and
threatened her. Humbert Humbert uses language to seduce the readers of his memoir, and he
almost succeeds in making himself a sympathetic pedophile. He criticizes the vulgarity of
American culture, establishing himself as an intellectual. His ironic, self-mocking tone and
his complicated word games divert readers’ attention from the horrors he describes. His skill
with language makes him a persuasive narrator, often able to convince readers to see his
perspective. These linguistic skills, along with his distinguished appearance, erudition, and
European roots, enable him to seduce the women around him as well. Humbert has never
wanted for love.
As a young boy, Humbert embarks on a short-lived, unconsummated, and ultimately
tragic romance with Annabel Leigh. Since then, he has been obsessed with the particular
type of girl Annabel represents. He marries adult women in an effort to overcome his craving
for nymphets, but the marriages always dissolve, and the longings remain. Despite his failed
marriages, his mental problems, and his sporadic employment, Humbert still attracts
attention consistently from the opposite sex, though he usually disdains this attention. He
claims to have loved only Lolita, and his obsession eventually consumes him.
Humbert is a completely unreliable narrator, and his myopic self-delusion and need for
sympathy make many of his statements suspect. He claims Lolita seduced him and that she
was in complete control of the relationship. However, Humbert, as the adult, clearly has the
upper hand. He controls the money and Lolita’s freedom, and he often repeats that Lolita has
nowhere to go if she leaves him. When Lolita occasionally shrinks from his touch, he views
her reluctance as an example of her mercurial nature, rather than as a child’s repulsion at an
adult’s sexual advances. Humbert claims that his feelings for Lolita are rooted in love, not
lust, but his self-delusion prevents him from making this case convincingly. Alternately

24
slavish and domineering, Humbert has little control over his feelings and impulses. He never
considers the morality of his actions, and he refuses to acknowledge that Lolita may not
share his feelings. As his relationship with Lolita deteriorates, Humbert becomes more and
more controlling of her and less and less in control of himself. He considers Quilty’s love for
Lolita deviant and corrupting, and he murders Quilty to avenge Lolita’s lost innocence, a
seemingly drastic act of denial of his own complicity in that loss. Only near the end of the
novel, when he admits that he himself stole Lolita’s childhood, does Humbert allow the truth
to break through his solipsism.
Interestingly, Nabokov does not allude specifically to Lewis Carroll or his works,
although we know that Nabokov had a thorough knowledge of Carroll’s works and admired
them very much.
Carroll’s influence goes far beyond specific clues. Lolita, a continuation of Alice,
portrays the adventures of a sophisticated child, far wiser than her tender years, after she has
reached puberty. In Nabokov’s hands it becomes a story for adults who admire ambiguity
and appreciate wit. In Humbert, a cultured, mentally agile and sometimes endearing
narrator, Nabokov explores Carroll's obsessive inner life. Like Carroll, Humbert never wants
the child he loves to grow up. Both men are college teachers who instruct the girls in Latin
and French, assume parental roles and have to pretend to be innocent in order to deceive the
child’s mother. Humbert also fulfills Carroll’s wildest fantasies by marrying into rather than
being rejected by his beloved’s family, by evading the lax vigilance of the mother, and by
kidnapping and completely possessing the child.
Carroll’s pastoral riverboat trip with Alice, which inspired him to write her story,
becomes Humbert’s perverse cross-country car trip with Lolita. In the novels Lolita’s
journey, like Alice’s has no fixed destination. Alice does not care where she goes, as long as
she goes somewhere; Humbert and Lolita roam all over the States.
Alice precisely foreshadows Lolita’s ambivalent and constantly changing attitude
toward Humbert when she exclaims. In both books violence erupts surprisingly and
punctuates the restless movement. For instance, Alice, losing her patience and temper, tears
off the tablecloth and sends “plates, dishes, guests, and candles crashing down together in a
heap on the floor” (Carroll 1865:83). The Queen of Hearts, the embodiment of ungovernable

25
fury, constantly threatens capital punishment, “off with his head” (Carroll 1865:104) for even
the most minor infractions. Lolita’s mother and Humbert’s wife, Charlotte Haze, is knocked
down and killed by a car, paving the way for the demonic voluptuary to make off with her
daughter. And the vengeful Humbert murders the treacherous Quilty.
It would be of special interest to have a look at intertextual associations between these two
works from the standpoint of time and place.
Generally speaking time and space, the two bases of reference upon which the novel, in
seeking to come to grips with human experience, must depend for its validity, operate
together, of course. They might be taken for granted as ordinary factors, until the novelist at
his work comes to scrutinize them apart. Place, the accessible one, the inhabited one, has
blessed identity- a proper name, a human history, a visible character. Time is anonymous;
when we give it a face, it is the same face the world over. While place is in itself as informing
as an old gossip, time tells us nothing about itself except by the signals that it is passing. It has
never given anything away.
Place has always nursed, nourished, and instructed man; he in turn can rule it and ruin
it, take it and lose it, suffer if he is exiled from it, and after living on it he goes to it in his
grave. Of course it is the stuff of fiction, as close to our living lives as the earth we can pick
up and rub between our fingers, something we can feel and smell. But time is like the wind
of the abstract. Beyond its all-pervasiveness, it has no quality that we apprehend but rate of
speed, and our own acts and thoughts are said to give it that. Man can feel love for place; he
is prone to regard time as something of an enemy. Yet the novelist lives on closer terms with
time than he does with place. The reasons for this are much older than any novel; they reach
back into our oldest lore. 
Indeed, the little ingots of time are ingots of plot too. Not only do they contain stories,
they convey the stories-they speak of life-in-the-movement, with a beginning and an end.
All that needed to be added was the middle; then the novel came along and saw to that.
The novelist can never do otherwise than work with time, and nothing in his novel can
escape it. The novel cannot begin without his starting of the clock; the characters then, and
not until then, are seen to be alive, in motion; their situation can declare itself only by its
unfolding. While place lies passive, tıme moves and is a mover. Time is the bringer-on of

26
action, the instrument of change. If time should break down, the novel itself would lie in
collapse, its meaning gone. For time has the closest possible connection with the
novel’s meaning, in being the chief conductor of the plot. In going in the direction of
meaning, time has to move, of course, through a mind. What it will bring about is an
awakening there. Through whatever motions it goes, it will call forth, in a mind or heart,
some crucial recognition.
 In fiction time can throb like a pulse, tick like a bomb, beat like the waves of a rising
tide against the shore; it can be made out as the whisper of attrition, or come to an end with
the explosion of a gun. For time is of course subjective, too. Time appears to do all these
things in novels, but they are effects, necessary illusions performed by the novelist; and they
make no alteration in the pace of the novel, which is one of a uniform steadiness and
imperturbability. The novel might be told episodically, hovering over one section of time
and skipping over the next; however its style of moving, its own advance must remain
smooth and unbroken, its own time all of a piece. The plot goes forward at the pace of its
own necessity, its own heartbeat. Its way ahead, its line of meaning is kept clear and
unsnarled, stretched tight as a tuned string.
Both Alice and Lolita are a unique configuration of events where, a provisional
resolution, a discordant concordance of time aporias become possible, where a collision of
the universal and phenomenological time takes place, and the phenomenological time is
liberated from the chronological grid. Time in these two works of art is the course through
which, and by which, all things in their turn are brought forth in their significance- events,
emotions, relationships in their changes, in their synchronized move toward resolution. It
provides the order for the dramatic unfolding of the plot. 
Time haunts both Alice books. Lewis Carroll stepped across the boundaries of the
geometry of space and time. Carroll saw problems of temporality as fundamental both to
logic and to possible worlds. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, time sparks the whole
adventure. When Alice sights the White Rabbit at the start, the animal mutters about
lateness, but it is the time piece that startles her. Alice’s curiosity about the hurrying Rabbit
is the first instance of the book’s obsession with time:

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 When the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it…
Alice started to her feet (Carroll 1865:2).
Belatedness, anxiety and physical props such as the watch bespeak the individual
under time regulated society. Watches had become established as a token of human
respectability and, along with the factory clock, were the instruments that controlled
industrialized labor. Carroll was a railway enthusiast, and the Alice books appeared when
railway timetables required the regularizing of time across Britain. During Carroll’s lifetime,
space and time came to be understood more and more as linked concepts. Chronometers kept
time at sea and helped in the mapping of colonial claims, bringing time and space together.
But echoes and reflections of industrial, scientific and technological changes are not the only
markers of temporality in these books: sundials, solar time and dreams each add their diverse
processes. Alice shrinks and swells, is crushed into the space of the Rabbit’s house or finds
her head swaying on an elongated neck in the canopy of a tree. In this alternative space and
time, her body’s shape is not constant and its relation to its environment is approximate. As
well as clock-time, the more individual or personal time of aging and developing is skewed
in Wonderland. Alice can get bigger and smaller in an instant though she cannot control by
how much. As she ponders her sudden growth in size, she wonders:
Shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way-never to be
an old woman- but then-always to have lessons to learn! Oh, I shouldn’t like that!
(Carroll 1865:46).
The child’s everyday and helpless experience of growing, and of being always the
wrong size in a world designed by adults, is meshed with new mathematical speculations.
The wayward non-causal sequences experienced in dreams nudge the episodes onward
in both books. Dreams share with narrative the property of presenting experience as
simultaneously in the past and yet in process. The games in the books- cards, croquet and
chess- do not unroll within a rigid time frame. But they involve strategic moves, giving them
a time-driven urgency.
Time, in the sense of duration, exists in Wonderland only in a psychological and
artistic sense. When we ordinarily conceive of time, we think of units of duration- that is,
hours, minutes, and seconds; or days, weeks, months, and years. We may also think of

28
getting older and having lived from a certain date. We assume that the time reflected on a
clock and our age are essentially the same kind of process. But a clock may repeat its measure
of duration, whereas we have only one lifetime. Our age is therefore a function of an
irreversible psychological sense of duration. We live in the conscious knowledge that we can
never return to a given point in the past, as we might adjust a clock for daylight savings time.
Our personal, psychological time is absolute and irreversible. And that is the kind of time
that creatures like the Mad Hatter employ in Wonderland. When the Mad Hatter takes out
his watch, it seems to be broken because it has been wrong two days in a row. Alice looks at
the Mad Hatter’s watch and sees a date, but she sees neither hours nor minutes. Alice
observes that the watch is pretty strange:
What a funny watch! It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!
(Carroll 1865:99).
The Hatter claims Time as an ally during the tea-table argument, when Alice becomes
exasperated, saying that the Hatter might do “something better with the time…than wasting
it in asking riddles that have no answers” (Carroll 1865 101). And the reply is:
If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s Him. (Carroll
1865:101).
It turns out that the Mad Hatter had quarreled with Time last March and now they are
stuck:
And ever since that,” the Hatter went on in a mournful tone,” he won’t do a thing I
ask! It’s always six o’clock now. It’s always tea-time, and we’ve no time to wash the
things between whiles (Carroll 1865:104).
When Alice discovers that Time is a person and not merely an abstract concept, she
realizes that not only are social conventions inverted, but the very ordering principles of the
universe are turned upside down. Not even time is reliable, as Alice learns that Time is not
an abstract “it” but a specific “him.” An unruly, subjective personality replaces the indifferent
mechanical precision associated with the concept of time. Time can punish those who have
offended it, and Time has in fact punished the Mad Hatter by stopping still at six o’clock,
trapping the Mad Hatter and March Hare in a perpetual teatime. The Mad Hatter, the March
Hare, and the Dormouse must carry out an endless string of pointless conversations, which

29
may reflect a child’s perception of what an actual English teatime was really like. Alice must
adjust her own perceptions of time, since the Mad Hatter’s watch indicates that days are
rushing by. Instead of time moving, they must move round the table forever as if on a clock
face and Alice soon ends up with the March Hare’s dirty tea-things in front of her. Teatime
is, of course, not an instant but a period, so the participants can continue their own lives and
conversations within the arrested time. Luckily, Alice can walk away. She is not imprisoned
in their eternal loop.
Overall it may be said, Carroll suggests that time is uncontrollable and cannot be
pinned down. So much so, in fact, that it can become an active character in the narrative,
thus personified. Time in Wonderland is troubled and topsy-turvy. Characters rush around,
a sense of haste predominates, and everything seems to happen just in time or suddenly. This
is not a systematic fiction. It is a field of play. Time here, as in a mathematical manifold and
the various forms of time will not lie still together; they are rumpled and energetic, endlessly
alluring Alice.
Although the task of narrating time might seem challenging and even impossible
because we do not have an organ to perceive time, modernist literature proves otherwise.
Given the importance that such writers as, for example, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Mann, and
James Joyce ascribe to consciousness, they begin to treat time as the image of the mind and
by doing so connect the perception of time with a certain awakening of sight.
In his representation of time in “Speak, Memory” (1951) Vladimir Nabokov connects
to this modernist tradition by transforming an abstract category of time into an entity he
urges us to perceive through the sense of sight by weaving time into mortality and writing.
In Speak, Memory time emerges as a perceptible entity following modernist modalities of
spatial form as description, patterning, or flashes of insight and illumination, which have
been long recognized in scholarship. Nabokov posits that an awareness of time is both the
origin of consciousness in primitive man and the source of a sense of personal identity in the
individual. Furthermore, memory, the storehouse of personal time, is the enchanted garden
of an individual's most exalted existence into which he escapes the mortal facts of chance
and death.

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 That time and memory are equally central themes in the scheme of Lolita, only Julian
Moynahan has fully recognized:
The core element of Humbert’s sexual perversity, arch-romanticism and derangement
is an attitude toward time (Moynahan 1971:25).
The nature of Moynahan’s monograph, an overview of Nabokov, did not provide him
the space to delve into the minute particulars of how Humbert’s attitude toward time, his
core element is represented in details of structure, allusion, and metaphor in Lolita. Without
such an analysis of the themes of time and memory in the novel, however, our grasp of this
important book must remain partial.
Throughout Lolita, Humbert Humbert is at odds with time. It is time which has
inexorably swept onward after his childhood sweetheart, Annabel Leigh, suffered an
untimely death, leaving him only with the desire for a physical relationship with pre-
adolescent girls, but removing him each year further and further from the possibility of
legally consummating his desire. Humbert has two alternatives: either he can render time
powerless by suspending its effects, or he can attempt to rid himself of his passion.
Throughout Lolita he attempts to resolve his dilemma using both solutions at once, and it is
only at the end that he succeeds, curiously enough, with both.
Early in the book, Humbert tries a number of approaches to his problem, hoping each
will end his misery. He seeks at first to rationalize his lust by demonstrating that the acts he
seeks to perform were once acceptable:
Here are some brides of ten compelled to seat themselves on the fascinum, the virile
ivory in the temples of classical scholarship. Marriage and cohabitation before the age
of' puberty are still uncommon in certain East Indian provinces. Lepcha old men of
eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds After all, Dante fell madly in
love with Beatrice when she was nine, a sparkling girleen, painted and lovely…and this
was in 1274, In Florence (Nabokov 1955:20-21).
But again, his attempts fail because of space and time: if such acts are possible in
contemporary society, it is only in remote locales; if they were acceptable in Europe, it was
only in the distant past.

31
 Humbert delineates the concept of youth-oriented games as part of his need to
eradicate time by becoming a child’s playmate and thus gaining access to her physically:
A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger's shivering child. Darling, this
is only a game (Nabokov 1955:21).
A few lines later, Humbert writes his own solution to his time problem in the form of
a prayer:
Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around
me forever. Never grow up (Nabokov 1955:22).
Humbert Humbert exerts the power of memory as he attempts to manipulate time to
suit his devices and desires. Realizing that the nymphet stage which occurs in the lives of a
select number of girls endures only between the ages of nine and fourteen, Humbert employs
a variety of techniques as he struggles to cope with his unusual lust for these young girls
whom he claims possess a rare grace and charm that sets them apart from their peers.
Because Humbert’s obsession with rediscovering Annabel clearly derives from his
attitude toward time, the cause of his attraction to nymphets, therefore, can be explained
from the influence of his Aunt Sybil more persuasively than from his quest for his mother’s
image. Aunt Sybil’s importance to the novel increases as we see her character becoming a
consistent part of a pervasive texture of motifs of time in the novel. Sybil’s importance in the
symbolism of Lolita derives from the internal and organic details of the representation and
not from the arbitrary and reductive application of Freudian symbolism from outside the
structure of the work. The sibyls of the ancient world prophetesses and fortune-tellers had
the ability to foresee the future. Aunt Sybil, like her mythological counterparts, is prophetic;
she predicts her own death soon after Humbert’s sixteenth birthday. As their latter-day
descendent, Aunt Sybil therefore possesses a special and significant relationship to future
time. After the traumatic death of Humbert’s mother, Aunt Sybil serves as a surrogate
mother to Humbert: he calls her an “unpaid governess and housekeeper” (Nabokov 1955:12).
She enters his life at the critical period when his conscience is being formed. Humbert says,
cryptically, of Aunt Sybil:
I was extremely fond of her, despite the rigidity the fatal rigidity- of some of her rules
(Nabokov 1955:12).

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 As an explanation of Sybil’s fatal rigidity, Humbert offers an enigmatic explanation.
Perhaps she wanted to make of me, in the fullness of time, a better widower than my
father (Nabokov 1955:12).
Because Sybil can be seen as a representation of future time, and because her rules are
directed to what Humbert will become in the fullness of time, we must pay careful heed to
what she intends for young Humbert to learn from her. The crucial admonition is that he
becomes a better widower than his father. It is vital to understand how her fatal rigidity is
related to making Humbert a better widower, particularly in view of the importance of the
word widower as a key term in Lolita.
The concept of relativity appears to feature strongly in the novel. This is suggested by
the relative differences in age and development between Humbert and his child lover, Lolita,
and in the differing ages Humbert quotes for the onset of puberty in young girls, which he
claims differs from place to place:
The median age of pubescence for girls has been found to be thirteen years and nine
months in New York and Chicago (Nabokov 1955:28).
We first encounter the concept of relativity when, instead of just telling us what age
he was when he met Annabel, Humbert gives it relative to when he met the object of his
obsession: “about as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer”
(Nabokov 1955:7). Similarly, the more his obsession with Lolita deepens the less precise
becomes Humbert’s grasp of definite dates and times, and the more relativistic his account of
events appears. For example, although Humbert tells us that his diary entries covered most of
June 1947, he only gives the day of the week on which the events recorded happened. He
never supplies the actual date, or on which Monday or Tuesday in the month these events
occurred. So the reader has only a relative idea of when the events he describes happened,
and can only say that they took place in and around the Haze house sometime during that
month. Along the novel Humbert is using phrases such as “the Sunday after the Saturday
already described” (Nabokov 1955:62) and “Time: Sunday morning in June” (Nabokov
1955:63) which is so relativistic a date and time that it is virtually meaningless to the reader.
Thus, fiction does not hesitate to accelerate time, slow it down, project it forward or
run it backward, cause it to skip over itself or repeat itself. It may require time to travel in a

33
circle, to meet itself in coincidence. It can freeze an action in the middle of its performance.
It can expand a single moment like the skin of a balloon or bite off a life like a thread. It can
put time through the hoop of a dream, trap it inside an obsession. It can set a fragment of the
past within a frame of the present and cause them to exist simultaneously the expression of
which we can see both in Alice in Wonderland and Lolita.
We may now turn with caution to similarities between Alice and Lolita. Nabokov gives
Dolores Haze, better known as Lolita, an I.Q. of 121. 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 in the following way.
Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain be-
witched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which
is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to
designate as "nymphets” (Nabokov 1955:11).
Between those age limits, are all girl-children nymphets? Of course not... Nymphets
have certain mysterious characteristics, the fey grace, the elusive, shifty, soul-
shattering, insidious charm that separates the nymphet from such coevals of hers as are
incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of synchronous phenomena than
on that intangible island of entranced time where Lolita plays with her likes (Nabokov
1955:17).
Although the name Lolita has become synonymous with underage sexpot, Nabokov’s
Lolita is simply a stubborn child. She is neither very beautiful nor particularly charming, and
Humbert often remarks on her skinny arms, freckles, vulgar language, and unladylike
behavior. Lolita attracts the depraved Humbert not because she is precocious or beautiful,
but because she is a nymphet, Humbert’s ideal combination of childishness and the first
blushes of womanhood. To non-pedophiles, Lolita would be a rather ordinary twelve-year-
old girl. Her ordinariness is a constant source of frustration for Humbert, and she
consistently thwarts his attempts to educate her and make her more sophisticated. She adores
popular culture, enjoys mingling freely with other people, and, like most prepubescent girls,

34
has a tendency toward the dramatic. However, when she shouts and rebels against Humbert,
she exhibits more than the frustration of an ordinary adolescent: she clearly feels trapped by
her arrangement with Humbert, but she is powerless to extricate herself.
Lolita changes radically throughout the novel, despite aging only about six years. At
the beginning, she is an innocent, though sexually experienced child of twelve. Humbert
forces her transition into a more fully sexual being, but she never seems to acknowledge that
her sexual activities with Humbert are very different from her fooling around with Charlie
in the bushes at summer camp. By the end of the novel, she has become a worn-out,
pregnant wife of a laborer. Throughout her life, Lolita sustains an almost complete lack of
self-awareness. As an adult, she recollects her time with Humbert dispassionately and does
not seem to hold a grudge against either him or Quilty for ruining her childhood. Her
attitude suggests that as a child she had nothing for them to steal, nothing important enough
to value. Her refusal to look too deeply within herself, and her tendency to look forward
rather than backward, might represent typically American traits, but Humbert also deserves
part of the blame. Humbert objectifies Lolita, and he robs her of any sense of self. Lolita
exists only as the object of his obsession, never as an individual. The lack of self-awareness in
a child is typical and often charming. In the adult Lolita, the absence of self-awareness seems
tragic.
Lolita is a fantasy, a nymphet, and a figment of Humbert’s past, a reincarnation of his
lost Annabel. Lolita, as a typical American teenager has a deep affection for the shallow and
meaningless culture industry, which already implies a sort of loss of purity. That she does not
always comply with Humbert’s appetite for sex is a source of enormous frustration to him;
along these lines, he describes her in the following way:
A combination of naïveté and deception, of charm and vulgarity, of blue silks and rosy
mirth, Lolita, when she chose, could be a most exasperating brat (Nabokov 1955:97).
Ultimately, Lolita is a tough character to puzzle out because she simply does not easily
fit into the victim category. She is, in spite of her treatment under Humbert, a very strong
figure. It is certainly notable that she initiates the first sexual encounter, according to him, at
least. From that moment on, she figures out how to get whatever she wants out of Humbert-
new clothes, magazines, trinkets, and long vacations. She takes her victimization and uses it

35
against him, teasing him for being a rapist and predator, even accusing him of murdering her
mummy. But she does not run away until deep into their relationship, despite ample
opportunity. When she does finally run away, it is into the arms of another predator, Clare
Quilty. In her final encounter with Humbert, she is a disillusioned but practical young
woman. She loves her husband (though is not crazy about him as she was Clare Quilty) and
bears no grudge against Humbert. She knows that what he did to her was deeply wrong – he
broke her life, as she puts it but finds hope in her relationship with her husband Dick and
the impending birth of her baby.
On the other side Alice is a typical Victorian upper-class girl. She is well-educated and
speaks very respectfully and politely in all kinds of conversations, she has manners and is
capable of feeling embarrassed. In the first chapter of Alice’s adventures, “Down the Rabbit-
hole” the reader finds out important elements of Alice’s character:
She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and
sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she
remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet
she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be
two people (Carroll 1865:15).
Alice is a sensible prepubescent girl from a wealthy English family who finds herself in
a strange world ruled by imagination and fantasy. Alice feels comfortable with her identity
and has a strong sense that her environment is comprised of clear, logical, and consistent
rules and features. Alice’s familiarity with the world has led to describe her as a disembodied
intellect. Alice displays great curiosity and attempts to fit her diverse experiences into a clear
understanding of the world.
Alice approaches Wonderland as an anthropologist, but maintains a strong sense of
noblesse oblige that comes with her class status. She has confidence in her social position,
education, and the Victorian virtue of good manners. Alice has a feeling of entitlement,
particularly when comparing herself to Mabel, whom she declares has a “poky little house”
(Carroll 1865:21) and no toys. Additionally, she flaunts her limited information base with
anyone who will listen and becomes increasingly obsessed with the importance of good

36
manners as she deals with the rude creatures of Wonderland. Alice maintains a superior
attitude and behaves with solicitous indulgence toward those she believes are less privileged.
The tension of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland emerges when Alice’s fixed
perspective of the world comes into contact with the mad, illogical world of Wonderland.
Alice’s fixed sense of order clashes with the madness she finds in Wonderland. The White
Rabbit challenges her perceptions of class when he mistakes her for a servant, while the Mad
Hatter, March Hare, and Pigeon challenge Alice’s notions of urbane intelligence with an
unfamiliar logic that only makes sense within the context of Wonderland. Most significantly,
Wonderland challenges her perceptions of good manners by constantly assaulting her with
dismissive rudeness. Alice’s fundamental beliefs face challenges at every turn, and as a result
Alice suffers an identity crisis. She persists in her way of life as she perceives her sense of
order collapsing all around her. Alice must choose between retaining her notions of order
and assimilating into Wonderland’s nonsensical rules.
There are two elements in this description of Alice’s personality that are worth paying
attention to. Firstly, she is very conscious of herself; she is conscious of when she has been
naughty and knows when to be scolded. Victorian education was focused on applying a
strong code of morality and conduct from an early age through strong regimentation
methods. These methods were strongly influenced by evangelic morality, which promoted
prudery and decorum. Further, decorum and savoir faire were very important qualities
(Altick 1973:165).
As we see, Alice is not an exception. She was used to being scolded, even to the point of
scolding herself and boxing her own ears. Secondly, she likes pretending to be two people.
This fact suggests that Alice has two selves. Firstly, the superficial one, the one that always
has to be correct, gentle, prudent, and so on; the way she has been told to behave in public.
The other self would be her, the way she behaves without applying all these codes of
conduct, organised as a game between two characters or selves.
Eating is a recurrent theme in both books. Alice is constantly frustrated and denied
proper food; Lolita is constantly indulged and gorges on junk food. Similarly, the theme of
change dominates both novels. Alice, taking magic food and drink, is shocked by her sudden
expansion and contraction. The Cheshire Cat vanishes, leaving only a lingering grin; the

37
White Queen is transformed into a sheep; the squalling baby turns into a squealing piglet;
and the hookah-puffing caterpillar (high on a mushroom) will someday become a fluttering
butterfly-Nabokov's favorite insect. Quilty, whose hobby is photography, keeps changing his
various disguises and roles: popular playwright, literary celebrity, inquisitive hotel guest,
intrusive school psychologist, covert pursuer of Lolita, brazen seducer, owner of a decayed
mansion-and murder victim. Humbert changes from benign to sinister to pathetic, from
predator to prey. Lolita changes from virgin to vamp, from nymphet to matron. The
apparently naive and innocent Lolita, who turns out to be sexually eager and experienced,
manipulates and eventually dominates the cosmopolitan sophisticate. Lolita fetchingly
combines a “tender dreamy childishness and a kind of eerie vulgarity” (Nabokov 1955:29).
Humbert’s dream is progressively shattered, first when he discovers Lolita’s cunning
sexuality, then when she runs away from him and finally when he finds her again, grown up,
married and pregnant. Humbert, despite his compelling narrative, is surely abnormal and
may actually be crazy. The panting maniac and demented diarist (again, like the obsessively
scribbling Carroll) dies while writing his confession in jail. Alongside Alice shatters her
dream and returns to real life by shaking the Red Queen, who changes into the pet cat
Dinah.
There are other specific as well as thematic parallels. Both books evoke an idyllic
childhood in a perfect sunny setting. Carroll hoped that in the dream of Wonderland long
ago, Alice’s little sister (and putative successor) would later find a pleasure in all their simple
joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days. Humbert evokes the
enchanting memory of Lolita’s predecessor, his playmate Annabel Lee.
Alice’s identity, the revelation of her real self, inspires fear rather than friendship.
Similarly, the once innocent and bereaved Lolita trusts the pseudo-paternal Humbert until
she discovers who he really is and what he really wants.
The tone of both works is ambiguous and disturbing. Alice, in the midst of all the
dreadful confusion does not know like Lolita whether to be frightened or amused. Nabokov’s
vivid portrayal of Carroll’s sexual pathology, though not without its comical aspects, is
clearly more frightening than amusing during our epidemic of child molestation. Humbert
solemnly states that “under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence

38
of a child,” (Nabokov 1955:12) then adds the ironic proviso, “if there was the least risk of a
row” (Nabokov 1955:12). After he captures Lolita, eager to possess her but still under a slight
constraint, he notes:
I was dreadfully afraid I might go too far and cause her to start back in revulsion and
terror (Nabokov 1955:75).
And in a lascivious but disingenuous passage, Humbert attempts to excuse his own and
Carroll's defiantly deviant activities:
The majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical
but not necessarily coital, relation with a girl-child, are innocuous, inadequate, passive,
timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their
practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of
sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them (Nabokov
1955:58).
This passage, a striking contrast to Nabokov’s caustic condemnation of Carroll suggests
Carroll’s innocuous behavior, a fantasy life pursued with the aid of photographs, rather than
Humbert’s insidious carnality.
Although Humbert’s pedophilia takes center stage for most readers of Lolita, it is in fact
not sex but memory that plays the leading role. It presents recollected and not on-going
events and abounds with figurations of memory. Indeed, the narrative is an instrument for
provoking recall. The remembering self Humbert projects is defined in terms of the
exceptional memory he repeatedly draws to his reader’s attention and demonstrates in a
profusion of literary references and recollected details. The reader learns too that the props
of recall Humbert invokes in the course of setting down his story have for the most part been
destroyed or lost and, as he underscores, must be remembered.
Humbert’s passing phrase “photographic memory” (Nabokov 1955:26) may appear to be
a playful, yet eager attempt to credit his self-centered narrative focus and persuasive control
of language with photography’s apparent believability. But for a notoriously unreliable
narrator obsessed with visual recollection, and for an author notorious for his clever tricks,
the reader cannot make the same assumptions of photography whether too seriously
intertwined with believability, or too jokingly undervalued and must examine more

39
carefully what photographic memory can really mean. When characters in Lolita slip in and
out of the narration of Humbert’s visual memory, they challenge his singular control of his
memory’s recollection and the memoir’s authorship. By these same analogic relationships in
the novel, Nabokov opens an opportunity for the reader to reinterpret their place in it,
including even that place of unreliable authority Humbert occupies. These opportunities for
reciprocity in the development of Humbert’s visual memory invite an alternate and reversed
relationship of spectatorship in a book historically critiqued for its unapologetic presentation
of the solipsistic and often voyeuristic perspective of a pedophilic murderer. Additionally,
reciprocity in recollection challenges popular critical views that Nabokov exclusively treated
memory subject to the author’s will power, offering an alternate view of a famed author who
instead welcomes textual instability and democratized control of memory and language as
equally positive developments. By seeing the world differently, the reader can see Nabokov
differently as an author who welcomes instability and lack of single-minded authorial
control, without sacrificing care, cleverness, or optimism.
Even the richest of photographic memories such as Humbert’s is significant not simply
as a storage space for the moments it shelters from obscurity, but as the impetus for active
engagement in the course of which the memories emerge as both familiar and yet ever-new
within the interactive space of the remembering and the remembered self. In his attempt to
mediate his past fictionally, Humbert is faced with another dialectic to resolve. His past can
be recreated either through photography or through memory. The former is static and
synchronic and gives an exact denotative reproduction of past reality. Memory is fluid and
diachronic, constantly changing and altering perspective. It may fail to recapture accurately
the exact events of the past, but it is reliable in respect to the connotation of the events-the
feeling or impression they leave. This dichotomy marks the difference between Humbert’s
memory of Annabel and Lolita:
There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in
the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Anna- bel in such
general terms as: "honey-colored skin, hink arms, brown bobbed hair, long lashes, big
bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark

40
 inner side of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a
little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita) (Nabokov 1955:13).
Humbert later claims to have a photographic memory which enables him to reproduce
more or less verbatim the diary that Charlotte had destroyed (Nabokov 1955:40). Most of the
remaining references to memory as a means of recalling the past also refer to memory’s
antithesis, a photographic record of past events.
In the similar manner Carroll has surrounded the two stories of Alice’s adventures in a
golden nostalgic haze-deliberately evoking the sense of the past in presenting them to his
readers. Within the stories, however, longing for the past rarely appears. Alice is always
curious that is, eager to go forward and discover new things, not to go backwards and revisit
the past. Nevertheless, memory and the past are important presences within the Alice stories.
Exploring them reveals an important paradox. In the material surrounding Alice’s stories
memory is essentially pleasant, a means of possessing and preserving something desired-even
though it is tinged with anxiety. But within the worlds that Alice visits the experience of
memory is disturbing, even threatening. The characters whom Alice meets find their own
memories vaguely distressing, and Alice discovers that her memory has gotten
disconcertingly confused. 
Thus, the memory of past time is often distorted by strange anxieties, and most
characters seem to be on bad terms with their own pasts. Many are willing, even eager, to
tell Alice about their pasts, but what comes out is dreamlike and often nightmarish. The
Mouse, for example, has his tale and the Mock Turtle his history. The Mouse’s tale turns out
to be not straightforward fact but a poem about being condemned to death; it baffles and
almost hypnotizes Alice, who visualizes it as a tail. As for the Mock Turtle, it seems that the
Gryphon is right when he says that really he has no “history”: 
It's all his fancy, that: he hasn't got no sorrow, you know (Carroll 1865:126). 
In short, what is produced in these excursions into the past is not clear and factual but
dreamlike and unreal, usually in verse rather than prose, usually with a good deal of comic
violence or comic grief. Thus, understandably, many of the characters are vague and absent-
minded, as if they cannot bring themselves to re- member the past. The jurors have to write

41
down their names to be sure of remembering them until the end of the trial. The White King
has to keep a memorandum book:
The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will,
though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it (Carroll 1865:168).
The White Queen has the gift of remembering both past and future, but her memory
does not seem to be of much use to her: she is foolish and confused. Her famous rule, “Jam
to- morrow and jam yesterday but never jam today” (Carroll 1865:247), seems to sum up the
rather unsatisfactory terms she is on with Time. The White Knight is also absent-minded:
constantly inventing useless things and guarding against possibilities which will never occur,
he is oriented away from past and present toward an imaginary future:
“Now the cleverest thing of the sort that I ever did,” he went on after a pause, “was
inventing a new pudding during the meat- course”.
“In time to have it cooked for the next course?” said Alice.
“Well, not the next course,” the Knight said in a slow thoughtful tone: “no, certainly
not the next course”.
“Then it would have to be the next day. I suppose you wouldn’t have two pudding-
courses in one dinner?”
“Well, not the next day,” the Knight repeated as before: “not the next day. In fact, he
went on, holding his head down, and his voice getting lower and lower, I don’t believe
that pudding ever was cooked! In fact, I don’t believe that pudding ever will be cooked!
And yet it was a very clever pudding to invent” (Carroll 1871:107). 
There are other characters who are not absent-minded but are still forgetful. The
Queen of Hearts somehow overlooks the fact that her executions are never carried out. The
Red Queen bristles with facts and rules, all of them proof of the power of her memory. But
she defines herself by this willed kind of memory, not by personal experience. In this she is
similar to many other characters. The White Queen’s rules, the White Knight’s inventions,
the Duchess’s morals, the Gnat’s puns, Humpty Dumpty’s tyranny over language in fact,
everybody’s comic pedantries are all signs of an effort to replace experience and the personal
past with something safer. They reveal a desire to forget and, underneath that, a lingering
desire to remember. In Wonderland Alice’s memory is confused because her identity with

42
her past and so with her future has been suspended or postponed. She cannot remember her
lessons correctly and her memorized poems come out as nonsense. Sometimes it seems that a
malicious spirit has crept into her memory. Similarly, her memory replaces Isaac Watts’s
industrious bee with the lazy and predatory crocodile, and Southey’s pious Father William
with an unedifying old rascal. Moreover, she cannot remember who she is. That is, she can
remember details of her past life and that of other little girls she knows, but she cannot
remember which of the little girls she knows, is herself. She may be Ada, or Mabel or Alice.
As she says to the Caterpillar:
I can't explain myself. I'm afraid, Sir myself, you see (Carroll 1865:67).
She has difficulties while reciting poems. The first two poems that Alice tries to recite
in testing her memory are like “Resolution and Independence” about establishing a coherent
identity through time, indeed through a whole life.
By contrast, when it comes to nursery rhymes, Alice’s memory works very well: for
example, the old song about Tweedledum and Tweedledee:
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel (Carroll 1871:50).
Alice remembers them so well in fact that the rhymes, all in the past tense and
ostensibly about past events, come alive before her, so that somehow she has gone backward
in time. Alice can meet the celebrities of the nursery as living beings: perhaps this is a reward
for her childish faith that the rhymes are true. But what becomes present to her is still fixed
as if by the rhymes: it does not have the freedom of the present but is determined like
clockwork or like a nightmare. Alice is in the position of someone who has gone back in a
time machine but is helpless to change history. 

43
 In the two fantasy worlds, then, memory is something essentially unpleasant, vaguely
disturbing and baffling for Alice and an elusive, even painful enigma for the other characters.
But Carroll’s own memory is a threat too. Besides the listener, the storyteller himself must be
under the spell of his story in that creative state which the thought of the realities left
behind on the boat trip would end. He has to forget the hopelessness and ludicrousness of his
relation with Alice to forget that she is the daughter not only of Memory but also of the
Dean of Christ Church.
Memory is a threat within the Alice books because it could, if Carroll recalled his
painful past experience, destroy the psychological balance on which Carroll’s relations with
Alice Liddell, and so with the fictional Alice, are based. When he is outside the stories
writing the framing poems or the nostalgic close to Alice’s Adventures, he can remember
only what he wants to remember about the past, and it can be seen as pleasant and
dreamlike, with the painful realities kept down. But down the rabbit hole or through the
looking glass he is closer to the reality of his own childhood: he is looking through a child’s
eyes, even though speaking in an adult voice. The truth about his past is closer, and he
defends himself from it by projecting his anxieties onto his creatures.

2.2 HUMBERT HUMBERT THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS

The similarities between Lolita and Through the Looking Glass (1871) are of high
importance as well. Humbert’s whole narration has a “Looking-Glass world” perspective:
time and space move backward, doubles proliferate, language fractures into new
combinations. At the same time, within Humbert’s story itself, there is a concurrent
dramatization of Humbert’s struggle to penetrate the looking glass. When he finally does
break through to the “queer mirror side” (Lolita 1955:308), the book ends, which is just the
point where Lolita begins. Two levels of the novel, then, seem to be at work simultaneously.
Humbert the protagonist of the “confession” (Lolita 1955:5) pierces the mirror only to arrive
at imprisonment; Humbert writes from the nether side of the mirror only to come to self-
bafflement and entombment. The trap is double-locked. Fictional Humbert’s search for
escape no sooner circles on itself, than it seeks another release from time behind the looking
glass, which also boomerangs. To be sure, the art work remains, but Humbert’s ultimate fate,

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like that of so many of Nabokov’s characters, is to be condemned. It is in the light of
Through the Looking Glass that this captivity in time and self-Humbert’s entire tragedy in
fact-achieves a heightened perspective and clarification. Mirrors are Nabokov’s most
common metaphor for the phenomena which seal man in his solipsistic and temporal cell.
After a poetic revelry, Nabokov’s reflection in a mirror shocks him into an awareness of his
corporeality, the “mere dregs” (Nabokov 1951:166) of himself. There is an escape route
though. Mirrors and windows, then, operate as key symbols in Nabokov’s work, one
denoting solipsistic entrapment the other, release into timelessness and spirality. Only the
translucent lens of imagination and memory can yield a deliverance from self and temporal
bondage and to try to recapture time in the realm of actuality is a “dreadful mistake”
(Nabokov 1951:200) as Nabokov learned on revisiting Cambridge. Through the Looking-
Glass juxtaposed with Lolita gives two dimensions to Nabokov’s imprisonment theme. On
the first level, fictional Humbert’s desire to restore the past does battle with the mirrors of
reality which mock and incarcerate him. On the second, authorial Humbert’s penetration
behind the mirror where laws of space and time actually reverse leads to the same
entrapment, magnified and combined with self-loss. Despite Humbert’s inability to sustain
truc vision, though, the mirrored world has a paradoxical delight and fascination. It is a game
of intricate enchantment and deception enjoyment of both Lolita and Through the Looking-
Glass. To begin with the first level, fictitious Humbert’s quest throughout Lolita is to regain
his lost past, his “princedom by the sea” (Nabokov 1955:11). Imaginative windows again and
again open onto timelessness for him; his former world is illumined, but he wants instead to
accomplish this transcendence in the actual present. The mirrored surfaces of reality,
however, constantly road block his escape from time, and his response is to attempt to break
through the reflections themselves.
When Humbert evokes the past through the imaginative exercise of memory, it is
always through the medium of transparent glass and is accompanied by an outburst of high
lyricism. He sees Charlotte’s childhood photographs as “wan little windows” (Nabokov
1955:78), and his private prism first registers Lolita in “layers of light” (Nabokov 1955:44).
Fantasized coitus with Lolita on the davenport yields a poetic climax of “milk, molasses,
foaming champagne” (Nabokov 1955:64) and she appears as a “photographic image rippling

45
on a screen” (Nabokov 1955:64). It is the glass partition of his mailbox, though, that inspires
Humbert’s most ecstatic celebration of imaginary vision. The “harlequin light” (Nabokov
1955:265) of the slit, which makes him see Lolita’s handwriting on his mail, becomes
associated with the “jewel-bright windows” through which he gains images of pure
“perfection” (Nabokov 1955:266). The “forbidden fairy child beauty” exists outside time and
space there for Humbert’s “wild delight” (Nabokov 1955:266). Humbert, however, is not
satisfied with this visionary transcendence alone. He wants to “incarnate” (Nabokov 1955:17)
Annabel, representative of the spell of the past, in an actual nymphet.
Actuality assaults Humbert throughout by means of mirrors, and when it finally
overwhelms him, they multiply diabolically. Mirrors are a major symbol for solipsistic
imprisonment in Nabokov, especially in rooms, and it is appropriate that Humbert’s perverse
lust, which at last defeats his restitution of time, should be first reflected through the mirror
of a Parisian hotel with a pubescent prostitute. He confronts a “dreadful grimace of clenched-
teeth tenderness that distorted my mouth” (Nabokov 1955:24). Likewise, the seduction room
at the Enchanted Hunters is banked with mirrors:
There was a double bed, a mirror, a double bed in the mirror, a closet door with
mirror, a bathroom door ditto (Nabokov 1955:24).
And it is through these hotel/motel mirrors that Humbert realizes Lolita’s
“helplessness” (Nabokov 1955:285): “naked, her sulky face to a door mirror” (Nabokov
1955:139). Duplicates of people (the four sets of twins in Lolita’s class and Humbert’s five
doppelgängers, to name a few), cars, numbers, and houses all conspire in Lolita to augment
Humbert’s entrapment in time and self. When Lolita lies to him about her tryst with Quilty,
Humbert replies:
So that's the dead end (the mirror you break your nose against) (Nabokov 1955:227).
But from the onset, there is a parallel drive in Humbert to break through the mirrored
surface of reality. If the lake in Ramsdale, Our Glass/Hour Glass Lake, is a symbol of the
looking glass of actuality which binds man into self and time, then Humbert’s dream
illustrates his strategy toward it. After fantasizing an orgy with Lolita in a “Quest for Glasses”
(dark glasses which might represent the opaque underside of a mirror), Humbert dreams that
the lake “was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying

46
in vain to break it with a pickaxe” (Nabokov 1955:56). His earlier description of Eskimos as
hideous suggests that this one is Humbert the Terrible, especially given a pun on
“pockmarked” (Nabokov 1955:35) who, in a lecherous role, wants to penetrate the mirrored
exterior of life. His first attempt to pierce the looking glass and thereby fly the coop of time
and self is a scheme to drown Charlotte. Although he envisions the “twilight” interior of the
lake as a “silent ballet” (Nabokov 1955:88) and Charlotte upside down at the bottom, his
nerve fails and his watch, significantly, still works when he comes out of the water.
Mirrors and doubles, however, increase alarmingly on his second trip with Lolita, and
the pressure to get through the looking glass builds accordingly. There are now twin beds in
the motels surmounted by “identical twin” (Nabokov 1955:212) pictures; Lolita has learned
the art of duplicity as an actress, and her tennis forehand is the “mirror image” (Nabokov
1955:234) of her backhand. Numbers become reflections of each other, like the inhabitants of
Soda Pop. But the most threatening of all the mirrors that assail Humbert is his
doppelgänger, Quilty, who shadows him across the country in a car that finally
metamorphoses into one identical to his own. Like Humbert, he has a toothbrush mustache,
wears a purple robe, has the same mental “affinities” (Nabokov 1955:251), and is a sexual
pervert. His “brother” as well as a “red fiend” (Nabokov 1955:249) Quilty becomes Humbert’s
dark alter ego, the reflection (with the obvious word play) of his guilt. When Lolita tells him,
then, that it was Quilty who abducted her, Humbert’s response is immediate:
Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? (Nabokov
1955:274).
Through the murder of his mirror image, Humbert perceives a way to break the surface
of the looking glass, to foil his waterproof watch. What he could not accomplish by lust, he
can effect by a destruction of his evil genius. After the murder, which takes place in Quilty’s
“house of mirrors” Humbert does penetrate the nether side of the looking glass. His broken
watch is no longer waterproof, he loses “contact with reality” (Nabokov 1955:306); and now,
spiritually released from the fetters of fate, he drives “gently, dreamily sooner does he think
that he has achieved an escape, a “Hegelian synthesis” (Nabokov 1955:309), than he is
ironically arrested and entombed for life. At this point Humbert’s memoir, Lolita, begins and

47
its remarkable similarities to Through the Looking Glass in theme, language, and plot seem
to argue for Humbert’s continued behind-the-mirror perspective.
The Carrollian parallels to Humbert also become more overt through a comparison and
perhaps hint finally why Nabokov insisted on doubling his patronym. If there is a slightly
parodic note, though, the intent is nonetheless serious. The charm of the Looking-Glass
world is genuine and so is the double entrapment and loss of self (and possible insanity) that
it causes at the end. As Martin Gardner explains in The Annotated Alice, (1960) everything
goes the other way within the mirror; the left-right reversal implies a total inversion in
which space and time move backward and the ordinary world is turned upside down and
backward. Time in Through the Looking Glass constantly recedes rather than proceeds; one
not only becomes progressively younger but also knows what is going to happen before it
does. Just as the White Queen cries before she pricks her finger and Humpty Dumpty’s fall is
preordained when Alice first meets him, so Aubrey McFate is a ubiquitous, controlling
power through Lolita. McFate is accountable for Charlotte’s death, Lolita’s escape, and an
elaborately plotted destiny for Humbert:
In my youth I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics;
but that ... on that queer mirror side of the road (Nabokov 1955:308).
At one point, for example, Humbert imagines in the “telescopy of his mind or unmind”
(Nabokov 1955:176), a union with Lolita which produces three generations of nymphets for
him to enjoy incestuously until death. Space also moves in reverse order behind the looking
glass. No matter what path she takes through the garden, Alice “always comes back to the
house” (Carroll 1871:199), and the harder she and the Red Queen run, the more certainly
they remain under the same tree. The train in the Looking-Glass world even travels the
“wrong way” (Caroll 1871:218). Similarly, Lolita’s and Humbert’s tour of America circles on
itself. Their house in Beardsley is the twin of the Haze home in Ramsdale, and as Humbert
remarks afterward:
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing (Nabokov 1955:177).
Life on the other side of the mirror is a game in Through the Looking Glass. Place is
parceled into squares on a chess board and action, a series of moves across the board; all of
which seems correlated to the chess theme in Lolita. Humbert, who is “especially susceptible

48
to the magic of games” (Nabokov 1955:235), twice likens the American landscape to a “crazy
quilt” (Nabokov 1955:154 and 309), dramatizes Lolita’s loss through Gaston’s capture of his
queen, and imagines Quilty’s advantage in a chess metaphor:
One of the latticed o squares in a small… window among the unstained rectangles and
its asymmetrical position--a knight's move from the top-always strangely disturbed me
(Nabokov 1955:194).
Alice’s journey through Looking-Glass World is guided by a set of rigidly constructed
rules that guide her along her path to a preordained conclusion. Within the framework of
the chess game, Alice has little control over the trajectory of her life, and outside forces
influence her choices and actions. Just as Alice exerts little control of her movement toward
becoming a queen, she has no power over her inevitable maturation and acceptance of
womanhood. At the beginning of the game, Alice acts as a pawn with limited perspective of
the world around her. She has limited power to influence outcomes and does not fully
understand the rules of the game, so an unseen hand guides her along her journey,
constructing different situations and encounters that push her along toward her goal.
Though she wants to become a queen, she must follow the predetermined rules of the chess
game, and she frequently discovers that every step she takes toward her goal occurs because
of outside forces acting upon her, such as the mysterious train ride and her rescue by the
White Knight. As a pawn, Alice can only move forward once space at a time, with the
exception of her first move, in which she can move two spaces. Like a pawn, Alice can only
see one square ahead of her. When she reaches the final square and becomes a queen, she can
see the whole board because now she has the full mobility of the queen chess piece. Alice’s
move to take the Red Queen results in a checkmate of the Red King, ending the chess game
and causing Alice to wake up. By using the chess game as the guiding principle of the
narrative, Carroll suggest that a larger force guides individuals through life and that all
events are preordained. In this deterministic concept of life, free will is an illusion and
individual choices are bound by rigidly determined rules and guided by an overarching,
unseen force.
Similarly, the epistemological key that Humbert discovers is to approach the world of
the novel through game. As it must be to operate successfully in terms of the dialectical

49
world of Lolita, the game approach is a synthesis of two dialectical opposites, each of which
Humbert uses to overcome his problem, to mediate his temporal-spatial discontinuity.
Humbert’s games annihilate time because they furnish an opportunity for Humbert to
participate in a child’s activity. On the other hand, games also function in an adult sense as a
stylized battle against an opponent, as in chess or tennis, thus allowing Humbert to use them
in his efforts to defeat his perversion. In this sense the game is played initially by Humbert
against himself (his full name is one indicator of his dual nature), but later against his alter-
ego Quilty, the personification of his lust. Humbert’s games are paralleled by Humbert’s (and
Nabokov’s) games with the reader, constructed through the use of parody, false
foreshadowing and word games.
Early in the book, Humbert delineates the concept of youth-oriented games as part of
his need to eradicate time by becoming a child’s playmate and thus gaining access to her
physically:
A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger's shivering child. Darling, this
is only a game (Nabokov 1955:21).
Almost all the characters in Lolita engage in games. Sometimes they consist of innocent
amusement, such as when Humbert tries to interest Lolita in tennis and dreams of making
her a tennis star. Humbert also plays many silly games with Lolita to get her attention and to
keep her compliant. This sense of play reinforces the fact that Lolita is still a child and that
Humbert must constantly entertain her. Games also distract characters from more serious
issues and allow them to hide sinister motives.
Humbert’s fascination with chess is described both in his games with Valeria’s father
and with Gaston Godin, a French emigrant who also teaches at Beardsley College. In the
games with Godin the division between game and reality breaks down-in some cases for
Humbert himself, in some cases for his opponent, who is one of Humbert’s doubles in the
book. Humbert describes the manner in which Gaston would pore over the chess board,
oblivious to all noise, until the sound of Lolita’s bare feet practicing dance steps in the living
room would intrude:

50
 Only then did my pale, pompous, morose opponent rub his head or cheek as if
confusing those distant thuds with the awful stabs of my formidable Queen (Nabokov
1955:166).
The identification of Lolita with queen recurs later in another game which foreshadows
“Quilty’s capture” of her (Nabokov 1955:185). Later, Humbert again refers to his games with
Gaston, and this time they openly display his epistemological approach:
I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of with Gaston I saw the board as a
square pool of limpid water with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the
smooth tessellated bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-
cloud (Nabokov 1955:154).
This observation is especially significant because it comes in the middle of one of
Humbert’s discourses on the other important game in Lolita, tennis. Unlike chess, which is
exclusively opponent-oriented (and which therefore is the exclusive domain of adults in the
book), tennis functions as another synthesis, since it may be both a form of juvenile game
and a stylized battle, depending upon whether one plays to win or not. Tennis played as a
juvenile game is related to the sex-as-play theme. It is one of the topics discussed by young
Humbert and Annabel at the Hotel Mirana (Nabokov 1955:14). Humbert cherishes a
memory of Annabel on the tennis court (Nabokov 1955:148). Ironically, and somewhat more
grotesquely, the parallel between juvenile sex and juvenile tennis is made even more explicit.
Laws of logical cause and effect are also suspended in the books. The White Queen
metamorphoses into a sheep and the unexpected is the rule, with cakes emerging from
mailbags and armies, from nowhere. This same dreamlike, irrational order also pervades
Lolita. Quilty merges into Trapp, Humbert’s first wife, Valechka, becomes a surrogate
monkey, and his staid neighbor surprisingly marries a Chilean ski champion:
We expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern,”
Humbert laments, for” Y ... was glazed with ruby and that raw wound ... never, never
betray us (Nabokov 1955:267).
Freak accidents, Humbert’s mother’s and Charlotte’s deaths, weird appearances, the
amnesiac in Humbert’s bedroom and Dick Tracy mask at his door, and coincidences,

51
particularly the recurrent, all bespeak a reversal of rational, sequential experience in his
memoir.
Another similarity between the worlds of Lolita and the Looking-Glass is the shared
theme of the mirage, the inaccessibility of beauty. As soon as Alice looks at a desired object
in the sheep’s shop, it vanishes, and the rushes “fade and... lose all their scent and beauty”
(Carroll 1871:257) the moment she picks them, with the prettiest ones always on the
horizon. The parallels to Humbert’s nymphet worship are obvious. A “certain distance” he
explains in the beginning, is necessary to the “nymphet’s spell” (Nabokov 1955:19) and after
Lolita’s despoliation at his hands, he realizes that nymphets must always be “out of reach,
with no possibility of attainment” (Nabokov 1955:266) in order to remain perfectly lovely.
As a complement and an extension of the mirror theme of the inner story, the doubles in
Lolita are also characteristic of Through the Looking Glass vision. Every chess piece has its
pair, Tweedledee is tied to his Tweedledum, twin messengers, one to fetch and one to carry,
all proliferate within the mirror realm. In keeping, Humbert the narrator perpetually sees
double. Twins emerge everywhere, on Lolita’s class list, at Pavor Manor, at Miss Opposite’s
house, and even names are phonetically paired; Gaston Godin, Harold Haze, Kenneth
Knight, etc. Numbers, cars, beds, houses, among the many inanimate objects, have already
been mentioned, but Humber’s insistence on locating a doppelgänger is his greatest double
fixation. Each of his identities has a parallel counterpart in a character, from the cultivated
émigré, Mr. Taxovich, at the beginning, to the amnesiac, Jack Humbertson, to the final
incarnation of his guilt, Clare Quilty. Even after, Quilty’s murder, Humbert still believes in
psychical duality, a demonic alter ego.
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.
Nonetheless, in an interview, Nabokov said that he did not think Carroll’s invented
language share any roots with his, and it is true that his linguistic sophistication and artistry
are far more highly developed. However, whether intentionally or not, Humbert’s style has
distinct Carrollian echoes in Lolita. The rationale behind Carroll’s verbal legerdemain,
Gardner explains in The Annotated Alice, is that language, too, reverses behind the looking
glass:

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 Nonsense itself is to Lolita, is fundamental to Humbert/Nabokov’s technique and it is
chiefly in his puns, spoonerisms, neologisms, and phonological pairings that he bears a
resemblance to Carroll in Through the Looking Glass (Gardner 1960:62).
Nabokov and Carroll can be said to belong to the same literary tradition of puzzles and
puns in fiction, and that might account for the stylistic affinities but the repeated references
Nabokov makes to Carroll compel us to consider the affinities, more direct links between the
two writers.
For a book known for being very risqué, Lolita has no four-letter words or graphic sex;
that is because of Humbert’s style, which combines the lyrical and clinical, the poetic and
the academic, evoking Edgar Allan Poe and then height-charts, road maps, post cards,
evidence and exhibits. Our narrator, Humbert, riddles the narrative with wordplay and wry
observations of American culture, while his black humor provides an effective counterpoint
to the pathos of the tragic plot.
The novel’s humorous and ornate style is the result of double entendres, multilingual puns,
anagrams, and coinages.
Like the novel’s genre, style often changes to serve Humbert’s purpose. Half-way
through the novel, he reminds us:
My lawyer has suggested I give a clear, frank account of the itinerary Lolita and I
followed, and I suppose I have reached here a point where I cannot avoid that chore
(Nabokov 1955:101).
Despite claiming an inconvenience at having to relate the details, Humbert clearly
relishes it. He is at his best when he lapses into the lyrical language of enchantment that is
when he gets really fancy. Speaking of a shopping trip for Lolita, Humbert muses:
Life-size plastic figures of snug-nosed children with dun-colored, greenish, brown-
dotted, faunish faces floated around me. I realized I was the only shopper in that rather
eerie place where I moved about fishlike, in a glaucous aquarium. I sensed strange
thoughts (Nabokov 1955:71).
Although the Alice books are stories for children, they are probably above the reading
level of children of Alice’s own age. The introduction of longer vocabulary words and
Victorian customs also adds to the difficulty for twenty-first-century readers. Still, for the

53
most part, the books are written in simple language that most readers can understand. Most
sentences are relatively short and straightforward, and when the language does become
complicated, the narrator usually makes fun of it for us before it gets too heavy.
What makes literary texts attractive to the reader is its ability to convey meanings
through different indirect ways known as literary devices. These linguistic devices function
as techniques adding aesthetical effects to the text. One of many devices is wordplay. To
show what we mean let us have a look at some instances of puns in Alice tales:
…..flamingoes and mustard both bite (Carroll 1865:38).
The pun here which is homonymic is used by playing on the word bite which has two
different senses in this phrase. The first meaning of the verb is to use teeth to cut something
or someone and the second meaning is a strong or sharp taste of food. The resulted effect of
using this pun is creating humor and wit as well as showing mastery over the use of
language. This example of pun can be confused with double entendre because the pun is
made of polysemy with the two different meanings leaving the statement with ambiguity.
Having said that let us give another example:
We called him Tortoise because he taught us (Carroll 1865:40).
This pun is made of allusion because Carroll played on the phonological features of the
phrase taught us by the use of paronomasia through the creation of the name Tortoise which
in the British pronunciation sounds the same as taught us. By mixing the meaning of
Tortoise, the name of an animal with a thick hard shell, and that of taught us which means
the exact literal meaning of the phrase, Carroll created a sense of humor and highlighted the
linguistic features of word formation. However, another pragmatic function can be inferred
here which is satire. By using rhetorical devices, particularly puns, Carroll manages to
criticize the Victorian educational system which exaggerates the role of the teacher.
The use of puns is an effective linguistic tool that adds various distinctive effects on the
text such as humor, satire, and many more among various literary devices. It is also implied
that puns can be used as a functional critical device to comment on, criticize or reevaluate
certain social practices and values. Another example follows:
Reeling and Writhing (Carroll 1865:40).

54
 Carroll produced these two allusive puns reeling and writhing as school subjects that
the animal characters in the novel once had by hinting at normal school subjects: reading
and writing. To reel means to move from side to side while about to fall when standing and
to writhe means to make large twisting movements with the body. Hence, a great sense of
humor definitely results from such playing on words. However, by linking the two
meanings: the acts of moving and twisting and the acts of reading and writing (as school
subjects), Carroll is again criticizing the Victorian era’s educational system through humor
and satire.
In the same way Nabokov’s Lolita abounds with puns and ambiguity. The author uses
different types of this stylistic device: his writing includes allusions from Classical and
Renaissance categories to contemporary humorous play on words. For instance, Hour Glass
Lake is the lake near Ramsdale where Humbert, Charlotte and Lolita spend time everyday
just before Dolores was sent to Camp Q. At first, Humbert thought that the spelling of it is
“Our Glass Lake”:
We (mother Haze, Dolores and I) were to go to Our Glass Lake this afternoon, and
bathe, and bask; but a nacreous morn degenerated at noon into rain, and Lo made a
scene (Nabokov 1955:86).
This is a perfect example of the play on homophonies because although “Our Glass” and
“Hourglass” have the same sound, they are spelled differently. The name of the lake may
suggest Humbert’s unfulfilled desire for Lolita. What is more, the change of the spelling may
suggest that at first Humbert thought that the lake will be the place for him and Lolita –
“our” place – but after she went to camp, the lake changed into “hour glass,” which may
suggest waiting and longing for another occasion to meet her.
Humbert often gives himself a lot of nicknames – Humbert the Cubus is one of them.
This is a play on the word “incubus,” which denotes a demonic creature seeking to have a
sexual intercourse with women while they are asleep. Humbert invented this nickname just
after he read a love letter from Charlotte and dreamed about behaving just like a demon after
marrying Charlotte and giving her and Lolita sleeping pills to use Dolores while she would
be totally unconscious:

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 So Humbert the Cubus schemed and dreamed and the red sun of desire and decision
(the two things that create a live world) rose higher and higher, while upon a
succession of balconies a succession of libertines, sparkling glass in hand, toasted the
bliss of past and future nights (Nabokov 1955:81).
Another instance of a wordplay connected to a proper name is Papa’s Purple Pills is the
name that Humbert created for the sleeping tablets he gave Lolita to make her unconscious
during their first sexual intercourse. To create this pun, Nabokov uses alliteration and
hypocoristic name for the father to make this phrase looking more childishly. This
combination of words can be associated with a caring father who wants to cure his daughter.
However, this situation is a violation of the image of an attentive parent. Instead, Humbert
wants to take advantage of Lolita without really caring about her mental health after using
her:
When the dessert was plunked down a huge wedge of cherry pie for the young lady
and vanilla ice cream her protector, most of which she expeditiously added to her pie I
produced a small vial containing Papa’s Purple Pills (Nabokov 1955:154).
These two authors are quiet, quirky, and somewhat eccentric and they are able to bring
their magical world to life through their writing. They cared deeply for the sounds, colors,
and shapes of words. In addition to their attention to the sounds and colors and other
mechanical aspects of his writing, people often enjoy Carroll’s and Nabokov’s works because
their style is often humorous. The humor comes in part because of the blatant
pretentiousness of the narrators, but also because of the language they use. Clearly, they
cared deeply not just for what they wrote about, but for how they wrote it. Every sound and
punctuation is placed precisely for its oral and/or humorous qualities, demonstrating just
how meticulous they were.
The main conclusion that can be drawn is that the style of both books is extremely
clever. Plays on words, puns, homophone confusion, and metaphors becoming literal
embellish and embroider Lewis Carroll’s and Vladimir Nabokov’s works. These clever
permutations of language add richness to the texts and another level of enjoyment for adults
or more educated readers.

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 CONCLUSION

The world literatures are interlinked and interrelated to each other in one way or
another. The quality, any specific aspect, a glimpse or reflection, a recreation, manipulation
of one piece of art and literature is seen in another in any particular aspect. The reason is that
no text or a piece of literature can exist in isolation. The process of development in the arts
and literatures is like the growth of an organism which is an ongoing process of advancement
and addition to the main body. The intertextual references enhance the imagination of the
readers to the vivid and clear level of comprehension
The thorough study of the present paper both theoretically and practically has led us to
the following conclusions:
 Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita continues to provoke scholarly interest through its
texture of characters, action, allusions, and motifs. Allusions to the Alice books are far
more important to the story. They have structural and thematic purpose, and thus
important consequences for understanding the novel.
 Throughout Nabokov’s career, Lewis Carroll seems to have been a powerful influence.
He has always been very fond of Carroll. Not only is the wonderland motif recurrent,
but Nabokov also conceived an affinity between Lewis Carroll and Humbert
Humbert.
 The allusions to Alice and Lewis Carroll in Lolita are undeniably significant. The
explicit connection Nabokov made between Humbert Humbert and Lewis Carroll
only confirms what appears to be a pervasive use of Carroll’s affinity for Alice as
leitmotif in Lolita. Discovering all the allusions to Alice is a delicate work, leading
into an infinity produced by two parallel mirrors, in which the reflection is reflected
in the reflection, continuing until there is no more light for us to see. Being in a
receptive mood for allusions to Carroll is a dangerous source of fallacy.

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 Carroll’s influence goes far beyond specific clues. Lolita, a continuation of Alice,
portrays the adventures of a sophisticated child, far wiser than her tender years, after
she has reached puberty. In Nabokov’s hands it becomes a story for adults who
admire ambiguity and appreciate wit. In Humbert, a cultured, mentally agile and
sometimes endearing narrator, Nabokov explores Carroll’s obsessive inner life.
 Humbert and Lolita inhabit the real world; yet, in an almost dreamlike state, they flee
the college town and take to the road. Like Alice’s, Lolita’s world is unreal and has
almost no relation to the normal life of an adolescent.
 It was Vladimir Nabokov’s contention that all fictional works are fantastic in nature,
and that any novel can be considered a type of fairy tale. Emphasizing that aspect of
his own fiction are the numerous allusions to tales appear in his texts. Nabokov’s
novels portray characters who transform their lives into illusory fantasies. Ultimately,
characters like Humbert Humbert are themselves artist-figures, who turn reality into
fantasy through the process of writing.
 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.
 The style of both books is extremely clever. Plays on words, puns, homophone
confusion, and metaphors becoming literal embellish and embroider Lewis Carroll’s
otherwise simple prose. These clever permutations of language add richness to the
text and another level of enjoyment for adults or more educated readers.

58
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