transformation

Issue: Transformation "But let us be prim and civilized. Humbert Humbert tried hard to be good. Really and truly, he did. He had the utmost respect for ordinary children, with their purity and vulnerability, and under no circumstances would he have interfered with the innocence of a child, if there was the least risk of a row. But how his heart beat when, among the innocent throng, he espied a demon child, "enfant charmante et fourbe," dim eyes, bright lips, ten years in jail if you only show her you are looking at her. So life went. Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for. The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles." "'There is another man in my life.' Now, these are ugly words for a husband to hear. They dazed me, I confess. To beat her up in the street, there and then, as an honest vulgarian might have done, was not feasible. Years of secret sufferings had taught me superhuman self-control. So I ushered her into a taxi which had been invitingly creeping along the curb for some time, and in this comparative privacy I quietly suggested she comment her wild talk. A mounting fury was suffocating me--not because I had any particular fondness for that figure of fun, Mme Humbert, but because matters of legal and illegal conjunction were for me alone to decide, and here she was, Valeria, the comedy wife, brazenly preparing to dispose in her own way of my comfort and fate. I demanded her lover's name. I repeated my question; but she kept up a burlesque babble, discoursing on her unhappiness with me and announcing plans for an immediate divorce. "Mais qui est-ce?" I shouted at last, striking her on the knee with my fist; and she, without even wincing, stared at me as if the answer were too simple for words, then gave a quick shrug and pointed at the thick neck of the taxi driver. He pulled up at a small cafè and introduced himself. I do not remember his ridiculous name but after all those years I still see him quite clearly--a stocky White Russian ex-colonel with a bushy mustache and a crew cut; there were thousands of them plying that fool's trade in Paris. We sat down at a table; the Tsarist ordered wine, and Valeria, after applying a wet napkin to her knee, went on talking--into me rather than to me; she poured words into this dignified receptacle with a volubility I had never suspected she had in her. And every now and then she would volley a burst of Slavic at her stolid lover. The situation was preposterous and became even more so when the taxi-colonel, stopping Valeria with a possessive smile, began to unfold his views and plans. With an atrocious accent to his careful French, he delineated the world of love and work into which he proposed to enter hand in hand with his child-wife Valeria. She by now was preening herself, between him and me, rouging her pursed lips, tripling her chin to pick at her blouse-bosom and so forth, and he spoke of her as if she were absent, and also as if she were a kind of little ward that was in the act of being transferred, for her own good, from one wise guardian to another even wiser one; and although my helpless wrath may have exaggerated and disfigured certain impressions, I can swear that he actually consulted me on such things as her diet, her periods, her wardrobe and the books she had read or should read. "I think," - he said, "She will like Jean Christophe?" Oh, he was quite a scholar, Mr. Taxovich." (The transformation here is two-fold: HHs tone transforms from anger to indifference, and his memory transforms from not knowing the "ridiculous name" to ending the passage with it.) "A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron would of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had possessed her--and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder."

Annabel

"Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew 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 Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark 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)." This passage comes at the beginning of section three, where Humbert Humbert gives us the initial description of Annabel. This is not the first reference to her; we see her first in the opening section, and the Annabel Lee allusion is made clear from the get go. Here though, it is furthered. First, in this passage, like the poem, there is a huge focus on eyes. Then, also like the poem, there is a focus on the supernatural, substituting the demons from the poem for ghosts here. Annabel is in the sepulchre of Humberts mind by this point.

John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.

Who is John Ray, Jr., Ph.D.? John Ray is, in short, the editor of Humbert Humbert's manuscript. He is Humbert's lawyer's cousin, and an academic, so the lawyer thought it a good idea to have him edit and write the foreword to the text. His foreword tells us much about the coming story. First, though it is clearly a fictional foreword, it situates the text in the real world. By including this faux-academic preamble, which starts with the backstory of how John Ray came to edit the piece in the first place, the reader is convinced that this is a true-crime story. Second, it tells us that the names have been changed. From the first time Humbert is mentioned in quotation marks, we know that there is something off. Then, in the second paragraph, Ray explains that all he did to the manuscript was change names to protect the innocent. He goes on to give us the present day whereabouts of characters we have obviously not yet met, which serves to further the idea that this is a "true" story. Then he gets into the literary criticism, which is where his choice in language changes slightly from the wordy roundabout techniques he uses in introducing himself and the novel. His sentences shorten. His word choice itself sometimes seems plain wrong. So who is John Ray? Probably a bad professor at a bad school. A fictional character unto himself who serves to introduce a crazy story in a novel way.