''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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says "well-read" Humbert Humbert, and Alfred Appel
points out that he plays in fact (often parodistically)
with the words and stylistic peculiarities of more than
fifty writers10, dramatists, poets and novelists of
different nationalities, from different ages and of widely
different character, including Horace, Catullus, E.
A. Poe, George Gordon Lord Byron, Hans Christian Anderson,
James Joyce, Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Laurence Sterne,
Francois Rene Chateaubriand and Charles Baudelaire; and
these are joined at one place by the unnamed author of
Baby Snooks, a "popular weekly radio program of the
forties"11, namely when the name of the place in which
Lolita seduces Humbert is given as Briceland.
Often Humbert's playful handling of his models does not
exceed the quotation of one line or one word, or even
only a name, and sometimes these do not do much more than
throw a comic sidelight on the immediate context and
scene in which they occur. This can be said of the passage
in which Humbert incongruously describes the effect that
he believes Lolita to have on others in Baudelairean
terms (159).
12
This can also be said of his characteriza-
tion of the yet unknown Quilty as a "heterosexual Erl-
könig" (234). Another example seems at first sight to
belong into the same category: an 18th century English
classical scholar (Thomas Morrell) and his song, "See the
Conquering Hero Comes" serve to describe a banal advertisement
which Lolita has pasted on the wall above her
13
bed (69). But the superficial playfulness of this is
deceptive: in retrospect the motto of the "conquering hero"