Adam Piette. Cultural Politics. Volume 4, Issue 3, November 2008.
This article considers Nabokov’s Lolita as an allegory of the Cold War’s obsession with uranium, correlating the uranium rush of the 1950s with the choice of some of the key locations in the book. The incursion into United States space by the foreign agent and corrupter of youth Humbert Humbert is read through the lens of Cold War anxieties about radiation, missile attack through the DEW Line and a “mapping” of America by subversive aliens. Lolita herself is the Uranium Girl, radiant child of nuclear America under threat from the death ray of the bomb’s fallout.
The Arctic zone in Nabokov’s Lolita serves as a preparatory zone for Humbert Humbert’s assimilation and dissimulation of, and immigration into, North America. Arriving in the US in 1940, he spends two years as academic researcher and ad-man in New York, and roughly a further two years in sanatoria for a breakdown, a result, he writes, of the “excruciating desires and insomnias” brought on by his unfulfilled paedophilia (1980: 32). He is encouraged to join a twenty-month research trip to Arctic Canada by a sanatorium doctor, an expedition he joins sometime in 1944. He travels north nominally as a recorder of the fieldworkers’ “psychic reactions,” but is puzzled by the whole operation. He had, he writes, “little notion of what object the expedition was pursuing” (p. 33), suspecting from the number of meteorologists engaged in the expedition that it must have something to do with tracking “the wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole” (p. 33). But the projects of the various groups are mystifying:
One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally misguided, collected plankton. A third studied tuberculosis in the tundra. Bert, a film photographer—an insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made to partake in a good deal of menial work (he, too, had some psychic troubles)—maintained that the big men in our team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of the arctic fox. (p. 33)
Despite the ludicrousness of these nominal projects, the suspicion that psychological misfits like himself are being used as a front for the secret project of the invisible “real leaders” is pacified by the odd ways the Arctic does in fact seem to have a healing effect on Humbert Humbert’s sexual mania. For the Arctic is a zone beyond desire, its “fantastic blankness and boredom” accompanied by the absence of paedophile temptations: “I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me”; the “little Eskimo girls” are repulsive to him (p. 33). “Nymphets,” he writes, “do not occur in polar regions” (p. 34).
The blankness of his libido is shadowed by a not dissimilar incuriosity concerning the veiled purposes of the expedition, though threaded through the wearisome jocularity of Humbert’s prose are intimations of war and Cold War. The Kremlin is alluded to: “I left my betters the task of analysing glacial drifts, drumlins, and gremlins, and kremlins” (p. 34). The Cold War is sketchily referred to: his work as psychophysician is jokingly called “cold labour” by his scientist colleagues (p. 34), in allusion to the uses of experimental psychology in the 1940s and 1950s to develop what were called human-machine systems, particularly with a view to maximizing the efficiency of radar operators. Humbert’s report on the expedition is published, he writes, in the Annals of Adult Psychophysics, and included “perfectly spurious” data on the fieldworkers’ reactions, as well as several bogus psychometric tests, and it is clear that both narrator and author are parodying experimental psychology. Nevertheless, Humbert is knowingly aware of the relations between the psychophysics he was asked to do and the secret military project: “that particular expedition … was not really concerned with Victoria Island copper or anything like that, as I learned later from my genial doctor; for the nature of its real purpose was what is termed ‘hush-hush,’ and so let me add that, whatever it was, that purpose was admirably achieved” (p. 34). Humbert’s coyness here is a signal of his playfully arch complicity in the mechanics and economy of wartime and Cold War secrecies, for they match his own secret sexual project. The choice of Canada’s Northwest Territories for the Arctic interlude is not random: the area was not only the bedrock of the radar DEW Line, but, in the years Humbert is sent there, the focus of intense exploration, for uranium.
The US government, as part of the Manhattan Project, requested the reopening of Eldorado Gold Mining Company’s uranium mine at Port Radium, Northwest Territories, situated at Great Bear Lake in the Arctic Circle. Uranium from the area ended up in the bomb that fell on Hiroshima. The Canadian government nationalized Eldorado in 1944, and soon after the war, through its Atomic Energy Control Board, lifted the private prospecting ban and offered incentives to private prospectors in 1946. This ushered in the “uranium rush,” leading to over 10,000 radioactive ore discoveries, most surreally at Uranium City on Saskatchewan’s Lake Athabasca. What wartime uranium prospectors would have been looking for in the secret expeditions before the uranium rush would have been the telltale pitchblende seam deposits, most commonly found in Pre-Cambrian granite, source of uranium. Nabokov hints that this is what the “big men” on Humbert’s expedition were really looking for in the juxtaposition, mock-innocently separated by a paragraph break, of these two sentences:
the big men in our team, the real leaders we never saw, were mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats of the arctic fox. We lived in prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian world of granite. (p. 33)
It is Arctic rocks the leaders are interested in, not the arctic fox, a rhyming act of camouflage that Humbert learns to exploit for his own purposes in his complex cryptogrammatic games. As noted above, it was particularly the pitchblende coloration of Arctic pre-Cambrian granite that prospectors would have been “mainly engaged in checking,” though the whole expedition aims to camouflage its geophysics under the guise of other, purer disciplines (it is striking that the list of scientists Humbert tells us are on the expedition include botanists, meteorologists, nutritionists, psychophysicians, but no mineralogists, and yet “Victoria Island copper” is suggested as the front).
The development of the atom bomb is closely related to the Northwest Territories, as were the consequences of its development, the paranoid human-machine systems of the DEW Line. Nabokov is implying, cryptically, that the secret operations of the Second World War trained a whole generation of intellectuals, recruited into the war’s scientific projects, in the arts of secrecy and hush-hush camouflage. The training involved the development of ways of co-opting the human body, at the most basic levels of perception, to the human-machine technology of the Manhattan Project and the DEW Line: secretly looking for pitchblende modulates effortlessly into secretly looking for “kremlins” through the radar analysis of new kinds of visual signal. But more importantly for Humbert’s “real purpose” is the training in new forms of secrecy, the hush-hush techniques of camouflage learned on “that particular expedition.” The camouflage takes the form, specifically, of psychological/ psychiatric deception, a private counterintelligence technique to mislead Freudian interpretation, later refined into the methods used to control Lolita. Returning to the States, he suffers a further “bout with insanity,” but discovers that now, after his trip to the Arctic zone, he can deploy serious fictional techniques of image management:
I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists: cunningly leading them on; never letting them see that you know all the tricks of the trade; inventing for them elaborate dreams, pure classics in style (which make them, the dream-extortionists, dream and wake up shrieking); teasing them with fake “primal scenes”; and never allowing them the slightest glimpse of one’s real sexual predicament. By bribing a nurse I won access to some files and discovered, with glee, cards calling me “potentially homosexual” and “totally impotent.” The sport was so excellent, its results—in my case—so ruddy that I stayed on for a whole month after I was quite well (sleeping admirably and eating like a schoolgirl). And then I added another week just for the pleasure of taking on a powerful newcomer, a displaced (and, surely, deranged) celebrity, known for his knack of making patients believe they had witnessed their own conception. (pp. 34-5)
A predator has witnessed his own conception after his birth in the polar regions. The tricks of the trade, learned as part of the camouflaged Manhattan Project expedition, enable Humbert to become a creator of perverse secret fictions. What seems here a mere lame parody of psychiatry actually describes a set of displaced and deranged camouflage techniques soon to be unleashed on his victim, Lolita. He will impose fake primal scenes on her with his “parody of incest” (p. 286). He will invent nightmarish dreams for her, extort her imagination, cunningly lead her on into a web of camouflaged identities, make her, his “patient,” believe she has witnessed her own conception as nymphet, consuming her, the schoolgirl, all the while sleeping admirably in the safe disguise of father and guardian. It is not only the pseudo-knowledge of Freudian techniques that enables him to control her, though this is certainly at the root of one of his impersonations of himself: “The child therapist in me (a fake, as most of them are—but no matter) regurgitated neo-Freudian hash and conjured up a dreaming and exaggerating Dolly in the ‘latency’ period of girlhood” (p. 124). It is also the robust enjoyment involved in the act of mimicking the power games of wartime and Cold Wartime—the camouflage, the surveillance, the brainwashing, the paranoia, the Hooverite victimization, the spy shape-shifting, the propaganda, the play with secrets, code names, fake fronts, the nuclear terrorizing of children, the infiltrations and demonizations—these are some of Humbert Humbert’s favorite things.
If the polar regions educated him in the art of camouflage, what is being concealed most carefully is the analogy between “the nature of [that particular expedition’s] real purpose” and Humbert’s “real sexual predicament” (p. 34). The connection nevertheless seeps through the confession: in his 1947 diary, he specifically uses the story of his “arctic adventures” as a cover for “ethereal caresses” of Lolita under Charlotte’s very nose, though the adventures are trivialized into a fiction about shooting a polar bear (p. 45); planning to rape Lolita on a trip to Hourglass Lake, he dreams of himself as a “pockmarked Eskimo” desperately trying to break through the ice, acknowledging that the dream is an arctic parody of his attempts to gain sexual access to his stepdaughter (p. 53). The parallel between his deployment of his sexual mania and the secrecy of the mining operations is hinted at here, but for most of the novel remains muted, censored, just as he censors any reference to his psychiatric history: “a stupid lapse on my part [to Dr. Bryson] made me mention my last sanatorium, and I thought I saw the tips of his ears twitch. Being not at all keen for Charlotte or anybody else to know that period of my past, I had hastily explained that I had once done some research among the insane for a novel” (p. 94).
But the Arctic episode returns to haunt the confession late in the fiction he does write, once he knows that he has lost Lolita. Dick Schiller, her husband and veteran of the war, has been offered a job, Lolita tells him in her letter, “in Alaska in his very specialized corner of the mechanical field, that’s all I know about it” (p. 264). When he meets him, he discovers he has “Arctic blue eyes” (p. 271). Odd and unsettling questions of patriotism are raised by Dick’s deafness, a disability resulting from his service, as Humbert confuses the Schillers’s move north with his own trip to the Northwest Territories, and Dick mishears the question as being about his one-armed neighbor, Bill:
“And so,” I shouted, “you are going to Canada? Not Canada”—I re-shouted—”I mean Alaska, of course.”
He nursed his glass and, nodding sagely, replied: “Well, he cut it on a jagger, I guess. Lost his right arm in Italy.” (p. 273)
In context, the exchange ignites a whole series of anxieties about Humbert’s un American status—he is in his own description “a brand-new American citizen of obscure European origin” (p. 105), a shabby emigre (p. 194) from “sweet, mellow, rotting Europe” (p. 280) treated like one of those suspicious “foreigners—or at least naturalized Americans” by the public (p. 194), whose citizenship and nationality is dubious (“Mrs. Hays … asked me if I were Swiss perchance” [p. 237]). His confusion over Canadian Arctic and Alaska signals how insufficiently American his knowledge might be—as when, earlier in his jaunt around the States with Lolita, he seems not to know about Independence Day (p. 243). At the time of the exchange, September 1952, Alaska would have still been a US colonial territory, bought from the Russians in 1867, awaiting its star—it would become the 49th American state in January 3, 1959, the year Lolita is published.
The clumsy ignorance of the distinction between a European ex-colonial dominion, Canada, and US-controlled territory is damned by Dick’s allusion to the American role in liberating old Europe—Dick’s war-wound deafness, in the innocence and simplicity of the mistake, and in adding ordinary, heroic soldier-citizenship to the mix, makes the indictment even more damning. Humbert’s own sense of his slippery allegiances is deliberately inviting, and outrageously satirizing, the traditional US patriotism and the Americanism of the solid-citizen warrior ethic. Nabokov underlines the connection between the weak anti-Americanism of Humbert’s desire for Dick and Lolita to relive his own Arctic experience, rather than go to Alaska, and criminal insensitivity to patriotic sentiment in the little exchange with Mrs. Chatfield just before the murder. He informs Mrs. Chatfield that his stepdaughter “had just married a brilliant young mining engineer with a hush-hush job in the north-west.” “Hush-hush” and the vagueness of “north-west” identify their future Alaskan life with his past experiences in the Northwest Territories; a faux pas as great as maligning a dead patriot. Humbert goes on to slander Charlie Holmes as debaucher of his mother’s little charges, and Mrs. Chatfield rounds on him with: “for shame, Mr Humbert! The poor boy has just been killed in Korea” (p. 288).
The episode fits in with the whole final movement of the book, in which Humbert Humbert turns upon himself in bitter-seeming judgement on his own betrayal of Lolita, and of the country which so foolishly let him in with his subversive secret freedoms. And again, the connection between girl-child and nation is developed round the trope of uranium. If we ask, where else in the novel do we find Humbert sitting on granite, meditating upon his own desire from beyond that desire, and in hush-hush proximity to uranium, then it is after the murder of Quilty, as he awaits the police. He remembers a day soon after Lolita’s disappearance being forced by “an attack of abominable nausea” up the “ghost of an old mountain road” (p. 305). He walks to a low stone parapet on “the precipice side of the highway,” and hears “a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapour from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold in the valley” (p. 306):
One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and grey roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colours—for there are colours and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company—both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapoury vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapour of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord. (p. 306)
It is a moving moment, and almost succeeds in winning readers over to his side. The “abominable nausea” is a sickness at the evil he has done in robbing Lolita of her childhood, and the all-American town, laid out at his feet like a biblical temptation, sings its heavenly song damning him for ever as sick pervert Satan on the mount.
But it is a mining town, like the mining town Dick and Lolita will be escaping to in Alaska. What rich ore is mined in the great timbered mountains around? Humbert does not say; but Nabokov does. Several times, during the composition of Lolita, Nabokov made sure in letters to friends (most importantly Edmund Wilson) that the town would have a name and location. He made doubly sure again afterward, in his butterfly-hunting publications and in the 1956 Afterword, that the name be there as identifiable, locatable, researchable. It is the most sustained act of relevance footnoting done by Nabokov with one of his own texts, as though to underline, and underline again, the importance of mapping his (and Humbert’s) invented America onto the real sociopolitical United States. Clearly the auditory epiphany is at the heart of how we interpret Lolita, and the interpretation lies in the identity of the mining town—this is what the extratextual network of writings insists upon.
The Afterword is most immediately germane, since it was designed to serve as the Author’s Last Word and to be published at the end of the novel:
Every summer my wife and I go butterfly hunting. The specimens are deposited at scientific institutions, such as the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard or the Cornell University collection. The locality labels pinned under these butterflies will be a boon for some twenty-first century scholar with a taste for recondite biography. It was at such of our headquarters as Telluride, Colorado; Afton, Wyoming; Portal, Arizona; and Ashland, Oregon, that Lolita was energetically resumed in the evenings or on cloudy days. (p. 311)
This twenty-first-century scholar followed the hint of the first location label on the list, Telluride, and consulted that extraordinary volume Nabokov’s Butterflies, which tells us that it was here in the summer of 1951 that Nabokov discovered “the first known female of Lycaeides sublivens” which “led him to commemorate the locale in the celebrated ‘final’ scene in the novel, Humbert’s vision from a mountain road of the mining town below, its tranquillity broken by the sounds of children at play.” The experience is based on one of his own at Telluride in July 1951, as he made sure of detailing to Edmund Wilson in a letter written in early September 1951:
I do not recall if I told [you] of some of my experiences in the San Miguel Mts. (Southwestern Colo., Telluride and vicinity) and near or in Yellowstone Park. I went to Telluride (awful roads, but then-endless charm, an old-fashioned, absolutely touristless mining town full of most helpful, charming people—and when you hike from there, which is 9000′, to 10000′, with the town and its tin roofs and self-conscious poplars lying toy like at the flat bottom of a cul-de-sac valley running into giant granite mountains, all you hear are the voices of children playing in the streets—delightful!) for the sole purpose, which my heroic wife who drove me through the floods and storms of Kansas did not oppose, of obtaining more specimens of a butterfly I had described from eight males, and of discovering its female. I was wholly successful in that quest, finding all I wanted on a steep slope high above Telluride—quite an enchanted slope, in fact, with hummingbirds and humming moths visiting the tall green gentians that grew among the clumps of a blue lupine, Lupinus parviflorus, which proved to be the food plant of my butterfly. (Boyd and Pye 2000: 478-9)
He spoke of the discovery again to Elena Sikorski in a letter of September 6, 1951: “It will be hard for you to understand what a joy it was for me to find at last my exceedingly rare god-daughter, on a sheer mountainside covered with violet lupine, in the sky-high, snow-scented silence” (ibid.: 479). He published a paper on the find in Lepidopterists’ News in August 1952: “Telluride turned out to be a damp, unfrequented, but very spectacular cul-de-sac (which a prodigious rainbow straddled every evening) at the end of two converging roads, one from Placerville, the other from Dolores, both atrocious … The female of sublivens is of a curiously arctic appearance … somewhat resembling argyrognomon(idas) forms from northwestern Canada and Alaska” (ibid.: 481-2). He recalled the trip and other trips to the region to an interviewer in June 1959: “‘The Southwest is a wonderful place to collect,’ he said over his soft-boiled eggs. ‘There’s a mixture of arctic and subtropical fauna. A wonderful place to collect”‘ (ibid.: 530).
It is clear from these letters, notes, and butterfly writings that Nabokov wished to leave a textual trace of the relations between his daytime hunting of the female sublivens (his goddaughter) and the evening compositional quest for stepdaughter Lolita’s body and soul. Humbert is a predator seeking Lolita as prey, as he several times admits. His lust for her is a killing act of pseudo-scientific collection (“Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer” [p. 87]). More specifically, the names Humbert and Dolores are signaled as issuing from the locality: Telluride is a ridge away from Dolores County and the Dolores River. Humbert is likened to a hummingbird in some of the wordplay, as when at Conception Park, he and Lolita see “hundreds of grey hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim flowers” (p. 155); though he shoots one when practicing for the Quilty murder (p. 214), further proof of the alter-identity of the two men. The find and locale are also demonstrated as the origin of the Arctic motif, with the character of the local fauna, and the Canadian and Alaskan resemblances of the female sublivens, the Wilson parenthesis making sure that the motif is woven into connection with the attention to children at play.
What Nabokov does not tell us, but which would have been clearer to his contemporaries, notoriously so, is the connection between “Southwestern Colo., Telluride and vicinity” and uranium. The Four Corners region, where the states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, was the site of the biggest uranium rush and boom of the century. It became a public phenomenon in 1952, when Charlie Sheen, an unemployed geologist, discovered an enormous uranium deposit in the Lisbon area, south of Moab, Colorado, in 1952. Before that, as Raye C. Ringholz has shown in her study, Uranium Frenzy, the Manhattan Project had ordered hundreds of secret Army Corps of Engineers geologists to seek for uranium in the States. Stocks of uranium from Canada and the Congo were expensive and insufficient, and the US desperately needed domestic sources. The Four Corners was the most likely area, as it had already been the scene of the radium and vanadium booms of the 1910s and 1930s. The Manhattan geologists, with the help of local legends, like Fendall Sitton, vanadium miner dubbed “Uranium King,” converted the vanadium mills in Colorado towns of Durango, Rifle, Naturita, and Uvaran into uranium mills, and scoured the canyons for ore with Geiger counters: “They were the ones,” writes Ringholz, “who pioneered the method for seeking the elusive ore. Carrying out their hugely classified wartime mission, they ushered in a brand new field of mineralology” (2002: 15-17). With the end of the Second World War, the Atomic Energy Commission replaced the Manhattan Project and launched, in 1948, “the first federally-controlled, federally-promoted and federally-supported mineral rush in the nation’s history” (ibid.: 16). The AEC promised to maintain artificially high prices for uranium ore, further agreeing to pay prospectors a $10,000 bonus for each separate discovery. This was backed up by sensational accounts of easy riches in newspapers and magazines; Charlie Sheen was galvanized into action by an article in the December 1949 issue of the Engineering and Mining Journal, entitled “Can Uranium Mining Pay?” which urged prospectors to look to Colorado (ibid.: 12). He also recalled reading racy accounts of the secret Geiger counter searches of the Army Corps of Engineers (ibid.: 15-16)—the wartime secrecy and the connection with the Manhattan Project made the prospect of following in their footsteps all the more attractive. The announcement led to a rush to the region, with Charlie Sheen competing with hundreds of amateurs with store-bought Geiger counters.
So while Nabokov was hunting for his butterflies in 1951, other collectors were scouring the same landscape for uranium to boost the nuclear programme. The Southwest was indeed a wonderful place to collect. Before 1952 and Sheen’s discovery, the uranium rush had not yet turned into a boom, but retained the mystique and kudos of the Manhattan Project. After 1952, the boom got seriously underway, with massive investment in mines, terrible ecological consequences from the radioactive tailings, and an ethnocidal death rate for the Native American tribes on whose land the uranium mines were mostly sited and who provided the cheap expendable labor, with little need for costly health protection. The boom was satirized by Hollywood in films like Uranium Boom (1956) (billed as the “inside-story of the atom-age boomtowns”) and the Bowery brothers’ Dig That Uranium (1956) (“They’re huntin’ for the HOT ROCKS in the uranium search that panicked the west!”).
When Nabokov signals to his readers in 1959, two or three years after the height of that boom, that Humbert is remembering looking down at Telluride, a town at the heart of the Four Corners, in late 1952, smack in the middle of the Charlie Sheen years of private uranium prospecting, and has his perverse scientist recall his wonder at the “rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump,” how he listened keenly for a “vapoury vibration of accumulated sounds” alerting him to something “majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic,” he is deftly and deliberately associating Lolita with the elusive ore, and Humbert’s quest with Manhattan Project Geiger counter prospecting. It works something like an analogy which superbreeds comparisons, e.g. children are America’s real source of power and energy and wealth, not the greedy radioactivity of nuclear power. Or, the uranium boom and the baby boom are interlocked forces defining the heartlands of the Cold War US, meshing domestic and international policies and ideologies. Or, the uranium mined to protect our children may be used by the enemy to destroy them, the energy both sustaining the safe breeding grounds of middle America and threatening them with holocaust. Or, lust for nuclear fuel is like lust for the child, nucleus of the nuclear family.
Every adjective describing the Telluride children has been pre-corrupted by the exclusive and obsessive ascription to “nymphets.” “Majestic” recalls “My Frigid Princess” (p. 164). “Minute” recalls “Under my glancing finger tips I felt the minute hairs bristle ever so slightly along her shins. I lost myself in the pungent but healthy heat which like summer haze hung about little Haze” (p. 59). “Remote and magically near” recalls “her haunch was working its way toward me under the soft sand of a remote and fabulous beach; and then her dimpled dimness would stir, and I would know she was farther away from me than ever” (p. 131). The magic of children, for Humbert, is only ever really “the perilous magic of nymphets” (p. 133). “Frank” recalls Lolita in the car describing herself as a bad, bad girl: “Juvenile delickwent, but frank and fetching” (p. 113). “Divinely enigmatic” recalls “the enigmatic nymphet” (p. 35) and the deep solipsism of the paedophile: “Lolita had been safely solipsized … we were fantastically and divinely alone; I watched her, rosy-gold-dusted, beyond the veil of my controlled delight, unaware of it, alien to it … Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss” (pp. 59-60). The precipice above Telluride and its vision of innocent children at play cannot be dissociated from the brinks of orgasmic abysses which have punctuated and destroyed Lolita’s life. The vibrations of the childish voices do not redeem, but are infected by the scenes readers have witnessed, those vibrating on the textual screen of Humbert’s abusive imagination: “vibrating all along my optic nerve, visions of Lo” (p. 158).
If Lolita is like uranium for Humbert, it is because she is a precious metal he can rip from her environment, out of rank lustfulness for her “rosy-gold-dusted” body—the uranium rush replaying the tropes of the gold rush—for solipsistic “controlled delight” and the ruthless satisfaction of desire. That “controlled delight” is a vicious sexualization of the atom and H-bomb’s controlled explosions, consuming what fuels their destructive cores. Like a thermonuclear blast, Humbert feeds off the child’s “pungent but healthy heat,” profiting from the terrible forces released by its transformation into sexual energy. He imagines himself as exploding off her heat, with her as the innocent observer “beyond the veil,” as though she were one of the safe scientists watching the blast behind their smoked glasses. But she is expendable fuel, solipsized and annihilated within the sexual machine which is Humbert Humbert.
He dies November 16, 1952, the month of the world’s first thermonuclear controlled explosion, based on radiation implosion, code-named “Ivy Mike” (“m” for “megaton”), on Elugelab Island, in the Eniwetok Atoll of the Marshall Islands, and on the very day of the Ivy King test (“k” for “kiloton”), dropped by bomber on Runit Island, Eneweta—more appropriate to bomber-height Humbert at Telluride since its core was pure uranium (highly enriched uranium, oralloy). The bomb, called a Super Oralloy Bomb, was the most powerful fission device ever built to be dropped on a town or city, and had the evil acronym SOB—”her sobs in the night—every night, every night” (p. 173). The mushroom cloud produced by such bombs haunts Lolita as a figure for the threat posed by paedophile “fathers” to innocent children: Quilty writes a play titled The Strange Mushroom significantly before his next, Fatherly Love (p. 31), and Lolita’s classroom at Beardsley is “Mushroom” in which hangs a print of Reynolds’s The Age of Innocence (p. 195).
The sexualization of nuclear technology is the most important of what Nabokov in the Afterword calls “the secret points, the subliminal co-ordinates” of the novel (pp. 314-15). The process of sexualization is a perverse act of solipsism which internalizes the mining, processing, and deployment of uranium-sourced energy, and succeeds because the technological process is itself already sexualized.
We can see this in the ways the pulp Hollywood films about the uranium boom paralleled the mining of the hot rocks with sleazy plots about dangerously “hot” women. Uranium Boom has two men discover uranium but fight over a woman; Dig That Uranium pitches the sultry Mary Beth Hughes as femme fatale. The naming of the uranium mines reveals a similar troping: one of the mines in the Colorado area is called “Uranium Girl”; Charlie Sheen’s mines all had Spanish names like “Mujer Sin Verguenza,” “Mi Corazon,” “Te Quiero,” “Linda Mujer,” “Mi Amorcita” (Ringholz 2002: 22). The trope repeats the gold rush convention of identifying precious metal with the sexual object of desire, most notoriously with The Gold Rush, Chaplin’s 1925 film. Chaplin’s child-wife Lillita McMurray (of Spanish-Scottish-Mexican background), professional name Lita Grey, was initially given the part of the girl the Tramp dreams about in his gold rush cabin in the snows. The dream girl is a sexual sublimation of the desired mineral: Lita Grey was fifteen during the shooting, but was replaced once she became pregnant and Chaplin secretly married her. There is no doubt that she was one of the secret sources of the name Lolita, the gold rush precursor to the atomic age Dolores.
The name Dolores, taken from the river that runs through the uranium mines and mills of the Four Corners, contains the word “ore” within itself, a pun the early miners doubtless appreciated. Uranium ore processing facilities operated along the Dolores River Valley in the 1940s and 1950s, leaving a million tons of radioactive tailings with considerable risk of groundwater contamination. Nabokov/Humbert covertly alludes to this controversial issue in the manner of Lolita’s death—she “died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl” (p. 6). The relationship between radioactivity and the rate of stillbirths and cancer in children was a highly emotive and “hush-hush” issue in the years of the main composition of Lolita up to December 1953. Scientific studies of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki between 1947 and 1952 looked at genetic damage, incidence of leukaemia, and stillbirth rates. A great deal of information was also available in the annual reports of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. Its 1950 report, The Effects of Atomic Weapons, for example, notes coldly that one of the symptoms in the pathology of radiation sickness is “an increased incidence of miscarriages and premature births, and an increased death rate among expectant mothers” (Los Alamos 1950: 353). The facts were chilling, as Jim Garrison observed:
Perhaps the most insidious characteristic of radiation is that the younger one is the more vulnerable one is to its effects, particularly children in utero. All recorded cases of pregnant women within 3,000 metres of Ground Zero resulted in miscarriages or premature births at which time the infants died. Pregnant women beyond 3,000 metres suffered a 66% miscarriage and stillbirth rate. (1980: 30)
J.V. Neel and W.J. Schull, in their 1956 The Effect of Exposure to the Atomic Bombs on Pregnancy Termination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on behalf of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, summed up much of the research since the war. It is an ugly document, attempting to downplay most of the evidence of genetic malformation on the children even of men and women who suffered direct irradiation. But it does give an indication of the abiding fear since 1945 that irradiation led directly to stillbirth. In the hideous language of the Commission, the report provides statistics on the effects of “genetic and somatic damage” and “maternal exposure” on stillbirth rates (Neel and Schull 1956: 124), noting a distinct rise in frequency in what it calls “category 1 mothers” (those in the two cities when the bombs fell), and a correlation between high rates and “very young mothers” (ibid.: 196), their “maternal radiation history” (ibid.) making them particularly likely to suffer the consequences observed in lab experiments on rats and mice, since the 1930s, in the field of “mammalian radiation genetics” (ibid.: 199).
There was also considerable hush-hush research in 1949 and 1950 into the carcinogenic effects of radon and radon daughter contamination at uranium mines in the Colorado Plateau. William F Bale’s Memorandum in July 1951 was the first substantial statement of the likely dangers associated with radon daughters, the decay products of radon, on uranium miners in Colorado. It formed part of a series of health reports and investigations by the AEC, the Public Health Service and the Bureau of Mines, which culminated, according to a 1964 chronology of the investigations drawn up by Duncan Holaday, in an AEC conference in December 1950 where “Dr. William Bale pointed out that the immediate daughters of radon (RaA, RaB, and RaC) were more important sources of radiation to lung tissue than was radon itself.” A medical survey of miners at the main uranium mills in Colorado was undertaken in the summer of 1951, just as Nabokov was hunting his butterflies at Telluride. The survey was accompanied by Occupational Health meetings which informed official agencies and mining companies of “the health hazards connected with uranium mining and … methods of measuring radon daughters.”
Lolita, then, was composed in a country on the cusp of the uranium boom, at a time when the AEC was establishing domestic sources of uranium in Colorado to replace the Canadian Arctic supply and issuing heavy propaganda to prospectors about the gold rush riches in the Four Corners. At the same time, the US was still absorbing the terrible research into the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and was very scared indeed about the radiation effects of radon daughters in those same uranium mines. The double nature of uranium—at once source of wealth, destructive power and energy, and agent of lethal radioactivity—secretly structures the encounter between Humbert and Lolita. Though for Humbert, she represents the forbidden and secret precious metal, radiating nymphet energy, it is he who is the lethal, sterilizing force, causing her deep somatic damage, sealing her fate as a very young mother, condemning her and her girl-child to death after the “radiation history” he has exposed her to. Though she is the “daughter,” it is his obsession with daughters which creates the invisible but killing atmosphere, a radon daughters effect.
Radon’s decay and degradation are hinted at: “it was still a nymphet’s scent that in despair I tried to pick up, as I bayed through the undergrowth of dark decaying forests” (p. 76); “my degrading and dangerous desires” (p. 25). The dangerous dust of radioactive waste, lodged in bone tissue, is insisted on in the first vision of Lolita’s body: “the little bone twitching at the side of her dust-powdered ankle” (p. 41). It is continued in an extended dust motif: “the sun-dusted air” (p. 57), “rosy-gold-dusted” (p. 59). It becomes threatening when associated with Charlotte’s death: “dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita” (p. 104). And it is finally directly aimed at Lolita herself, in the form of the amethyst phials of sleeping draught used in the rape plan: each of the phials from his “boxful of magic ammunition” is described as a “microscopic planetarium with its live stardust” (p. 109). The dangerous emanation from the “ore-like glitter of the city dump” is not the rare nymphet, but Humbert himself, the decaying, corrupt set of desires: “And I shall be dumped where the weed decays, / And the rest is rust and stardust” (p. 255).
Humbert believes Lolita to be the source of radiation, in the ways he associates her with Annabel the moment he first sees her in Ramsdale. It is a vision he remembers throughout the book, and it returns to him the very last day he sees Lolita: “For some reason, I kept seeing—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damn retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, ‘pinging’ pebbles at an empty can” (p. 277). But as the “retina”—”radiant” rhyming confirms, it is something in his own projective radiating gaze, vibrating all along his optic nerves, which is the real radioactive force, creating a lethal nuclear threshold for Lolita. The rhyming recalls the Annabel tryst because it was that defining inaugural moment of unfulfilled desire which had already been infected and inflected by the Waste Land context of uranium hot rocks, the “violet shadow of some red rocks” (p. 13) associated with the “faint radiance” imagined as emitted by Annabel’s “face in the sky” (p. 14). The radiation goes deep, deep into Humbert’s somatic machinery, “my heart, my throat, my entrails” (p. 15). The nuclear force of this transgressive desire is “mined” in the Arctic episode as secret technology and unleashed on Lolita in the form of an ogre’s hunger for her somatic interiority: “My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys” (pp. 162-3). This is X-ray cannibalism as atomic death ray, discreetly linked in Nabokov’s Cold War—secretive prose to radios and radioactivity: “Ray-like, I glide in through to the parlour and find the radio silent” (p. 49). Humbert uses radio to mask the sounds of his repeated rapes, and rays of sinister X-ray light (“skeleton glow,” “intercrossed rays”) to reveal Lolita’s body to his nighttime gaze: “The door of the lighted bathroom stood ajar; in addition to that, a skeleton glow came through the Venetian blind from the outside arclights; these intercrossed rays penetrated the darkness of the bedroom and revealed the following situation” (p. 127). The “situation” is Lolita’s sleeping form, “lightly veiled body and bare limbs” revealed and penetrated down to her bone structure: “a band of pale light crossed her top vertebrae” (p. 127). The ray is his sexual gaze in the form of a blazing, radio-active blast of energy which aims to penetrate her body, like a dildo (the meaning of “olisbos”): “I had put the radio at full blast. I had blazed in her face an olisbos-like flashlight” (p. 94).
The gaze is sterilizing, as lethal to the organs of reproduction as category 1 irradiation. Humbert knows this, as the strange juxtaposition of “conception,” a threshold he dares not cross, and a trope for his sexual penetration makes clear: “Conception Park, in a town on the Mexican border which I dared not cross. There and elsewhere, hundreds of grey hummingbirds in the dusk, probing the throats of dim flowers” (p. 155). The ray is a concentration of his “grand peche radieux,” a radiating transgression which has at its heart “sterile and selfish vice” (p. 276). His attitude to Charlotte’s body collocates imagination of pregnancy, Lolita as foetus, bedtime light rays, and a sterile touch: “This was the white stomach within which my nymphet had been a little curved fish in 1934. This carefully dyed hair, so sterile to my sense of smell and touch, acquired at certain lamplit moments in the poster bed the tinge, if not the texture, of Lolita’s curls” (pp. 75-6). The neutralizing sterility is secretly to do with uranium: 1934 was the crucial year of the discovery of artificial radioactivity and fission by Enrico Fermi when he irradiated uranium with neutrons. And that sterilizing radiation is aimed at Lolita’s womb, her powers of conception; the numbing perversion of it all is the analogy deep in Humbert’s textual credences between that creative space and the murderous unconscious within his own body:
“Mr Uterus [I quote from a girls’ magazine] starts to build a thick soft wall on the chance a possible baby may have to be bedded down there.” The tiny madman in his padded cell. Incidentally: if I ever commit a serious murder … (p. 47)
The walls of her uterus form the cell he wishes to occupy, as though she must bear the burden of providing his radiating madness with a new habitat, a new killing ground for his sterilizing processes.
It is the very first rape that seals her fate—she is killed inside: “More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed” (p. 139). The act of incest causes lethal inner somatic damage, she a Dolores of pains deep within: “Presently, making a sizzling sound with her lips, she started complaining of pains, said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her” (p. 140). Humbert is a death ray, lethally dosing Lolita with killer gamma rays, with sustained exposure to the “radon daughters” of his paedophilia: “‘… If you really wish to triumph in your mind over the idea of death—’ ‘Ray,’ said Lo for hurrah, and languidly left the room, and for a long while I stared with smarting eyes into the fire” (one of the reasons, presumably, that Nabokov chose John Ray, Jr. as the receiver and publisher of Humbert’s text) (p. 285). He thinks she says “hurrah,” but Lolita knows his dirty little nuclear secret and says the secret word: his radioactive eyes smart at this her triumph over the idea of Humbert Humbert.
Lolita’s death ray is a compound of science fiction and a memory of the New Yorker—Yugoslav inventor Nikola Tesla’s design for a charged-particle beam weapon. It hit the headlines in 1940 as Tesla’s death ray:
Nikola Tesla, one of the truly great inventors who celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday on July 10, tells the writer that he stands ready to divulge to the United States Government the secret of his “teleforce,” with which, he said, “airplane motors would be melted at a distance of 250 miles, so that an invisible Chinese Wall of Defence would be built around the country against any attempted attack by an enemy air force, no matter how large.” … This “teleforce” … would operate through a beam one-hundred-millionth of a square centimetre in diameter, and could be generated from a special plant … A dozen such plants, located at strategic points along the coast, according to Mr. Tesla, would be enough to defend the country against all possible aerial attack. The beam would melt any engine, whether Diesel or gasoline-driven, and would also ignite the explosives aboard any bomber.
The Chinese Wall of Defense created by Humbert’s radiating and irradiating gaze is there both defending the mapped space of North America, and deep within his victim Lolita’s body, invading and contaminating its “thick soft wall,” his “padded cell.” Research into beam weapons was being undertaken in both the Soviet Union and the US during the 1950s, based on Tesla’s wartime invention, in the quest for an ultimate antiaircraft and antimissile defense system. The covert reference to science-factional Cold War defense systems confirms that what is being beamed upon Lolita is as much a lethal projection of cold warrior paranoid aggression as it is a sexually voracious invasion of her mind and body. It is clear that the late 1952 hush-hush project in Alaska, which Dick Schiller is invited to join as a brilliant young mining engineer, must be the DEW Line—mining engineers were used to construct the stations in 1952-3. The DEW Line, as a warning system designed to protect the body of the United States against nuclear attack, is an apt figure for the new measures of security Lolita must align herself with to protect her own body from invasion by Humbert’s gamma-ray gaze and desire. Yet Alaska is not quite US territory—it was still in 1952 a landscape bought from the contemporary enemy. The DEW Line is not sufficiently distinguishable from the paranoid machinery invented by Tesla, a death ray aimed at incoming aircraft, which is being investigated as a line of defense against nuclear bombers. If Humbert, as somatic machine, has internalized Tesla’s rays, the DEW Line is also a projection of his Cold War sexualized technology. Going north to Alaska, as a form of escape from a United States corrupted by Humbert’s On the Road tour and survey, is not only not going far enough: it may very well be entering into the very Arctic zone which fostered Humbert’s incorporation of Cold War intelligence techniques. The DEW Line hoped to master the forces unleashed by the history connecting Manhattan Project uranium mining in the Northwest Territories to the traumatized culture generated by Hiroshima, including the uranium frenzy in the Four Corners. Yet the Line is just as much a creature of that history as Tesla’s death ray is a proleptic anticipation of it.
Dolores Haze dies a month after Humbert, in Gray Star, “a settlement in the remotest northwest” (p. 6). The secret uranium text has come full circle, to the Arctic Circle where Humbert first learned his techniques of stealth, controlled delight, and “polar” camouflaging of his nuclear secret purposes. She dies at Gray Star not only because a gray man has extinguished her star, but because Alaska is an intermediate zone: bidding for a star which it would receive only in 1959, still in the gray zone between a fully fledged American state and dubious ex-Russian territory. The Arctic zone is also dusty with the history of nuclear weapons, the future US state gray with the idea of radioactive dust lying behind Humbert’s cant-romantic uses of “stardust.” The Arctic is a zone that ends a life poisoned by Humbert’s incorporated systems of predatory nuclear paranoia. Just as Humbert identifies the car that tails them during the tour of the States with “a sickness, a cancer,” “a pain in a fatal disease” which creates (or is generated by) the contagious “interspace” between the two vehicles, “a zone of evil mirth and magic” (pp. 216-17), so too is Alaska fraught with the radiation sickness emanating from the interspace separating the two superpowers. It is a zone beyond coordinates, beyond desire, yet also a place beyond possible decontamination, fallout zone for the secret nuclear energies which have defiled the dreamy country of the States (p. 73).