death first to vultures and scavengers

i. lolita: a summary (in which i try to explain the discourses of the novel that i think are most relevant to the locked tomb)

lolita is an account of the pedophilic ‘relationship’ between humbert humbert and dolores haze, told from humbert’s first-person perspective wherein dolores haze is referred to as ‘lolita’ and represented as an object of desire capable of seduction. humbert’s narrative voice is loquacious, pretentious, bombastic, and filled with references to authors of the western literary canon. it is also a very effective veneer that obfuscates the violences moving under the surface of the novel: his rape and entrapment of dolores, his murder of charlotte haze, the death of dolores’ younger brother, to give just a few examples, are all present in the text but subsumed in favour of humbert’s constructed version of events. i use the word ‘constructed’ deliberately: what humbert humbert does is subdue what we might call the ‘real’ dolores haze and replace her with ‘lolita,’ a being who exists largely as a composite of literary and artistic references, the most prominent of which is edgar allan poe’s ‘annabel lee.’ 

nabokov also imbues his novel with the subtle presence of the supernatural in ways that muir clearly takes and runs with. lolita is framed as humbert humbert’s memoir written from prison (v similar to how pale fire is framed as a fictional commentary—it helps to think of lolita as discursively equivalent to pale fire, wherein john shade is dolores haze and charles kinbote is humbert humbert.), and comes with a fictitious paratext: an introduction written by a freudian psychologist called john ray. nabokov deplored freudianism and clearly wrote john ray to be read as clueless and misguided; we see him valorise the family structure and extol the memoir as evidence of the need for tighter family units and sound psychiatric institutions, whereas we see in the text itself that the fabric of the family unit is the means by which humbert’s abuse became possible, and the psychiatric institutions were easily manipulable and thus evaded. anyway, john ray tells us at the start that almost all the parties involved in the story are dead: crucially, he informs us that ‘mrs. richard f. schiller died in childbirth.’ much, much later in the novel, we realise that ‘mrs. richard f. schiller’ is dolores haze. he goes on to say, sardonically, that ‘the caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.’ 

in the absence of, as it were, ‘material’ ghosts of the sort that john ray would recognise and say to be ‘walking,’ nabokov locates the ghosts of humbert humbert and dolores haze within the text itself. lolita is an act of necromancy(!); it is an account of the end of dolores haze’s life, starting with her meeting humbert humbert (and how humbert’s abuse was made possible) and ending with the pregnancy that we are told at the very beginning will kill her. what makes it effectively necromantic is a) the foreclosure of that death at the very beginning, before humbert’s memoir even starts, and b) the fact that humbert predicates the publication of his memoir on his and dolores’ death, expressing a desire for them each to be preserved in the literary immortality that the text will win him when they are no longer alive. that lolita is an extant text not only in ‘our’ world but within its own internal world (as the paratext establishes) means that both humbert and dolores are dead, and the ‘immortality’ that humbert imagined the book would elevate them to is now the only space where they can persist. (humbert, at one point, implores the reader to ‘imagine me, or i shall not exist!’.) to read and reread lolita is to kill and reanimate dolores haze over and over again, and the reanimated dolores, to borrow the parlance, comes back wrong; she comes back as ‘lolita,’ not a real person but an imagined, composite fantasy projected onto her by her rapist and encapsulating the sites of violence by which abuse can be enacted and rhetorically justified. 

death as the way in which a finite temporality is made possible, and by extension immortality as a disruption to finite temporality, is taken up in lolita along similarly supernatural lines, wherein nabokov conflates a detemporalised, suspended space where ‘nymphets’ can persist indefinitely with the literary immortality to which humbert aspires. the publication of lolita is the relegation of himself and dolores haze to that space; dolores dies in childbirth as a teenager, positioning her on the cusp of adulthood but never allowing her to make that transition. this suspended space is what humbert refers to as an ‘enchanted island haunted by those nymphets of mine and surrounded by a vast, misty sea.’ enchantment crops up in the novel multiple times; humbert rapes dolores at a hotel called ‘the enchanted hunters,’ and dolores later acts in a play of the same name (written by clare quilty, who also preys on her; the ‘hunters’ in question are ofc both humbert and quilty, and their pedophilia is likened to an ‘enchantment’). the kind of fairytale-type language that similarly makes up the atmosphere of poe’s ‘annabel lee’ (which is, as i will come to, a crux of sorts in nabokov’s novel from which most of what i’m explaining now springs) is also the substance of humbert’s ‘nymphet’ imaginary; there is something a little magical about the veneer that he puts over the violence he commits.

in short: what lolita is concerned with is an examination of the various processes by which humbert humbert’s abuse of dolores haze became possible. one channel of this is the interrogation of the white, middle-class nuclear family unit, into which humbert interpolates himself in order to gain access to dolores and facilitate both his rape of her and his ability to hold her captive long-term. fatherhood for nabokov becomes a site of violence. we see that this violence is bolstered and naturalised by the social institutions around us—humbert humbert evades the imposition of psychiatric diagnoses and ‘cures,’ manipulates the social cues of the middle-class neighbourhood where the hazes lived to get away with his killing of charlotte haze and abduction of dolores, and the private school he sends dolores to becomes both another site where his abuse is naturalised and a means by which he can ogle other teenage girls. nabokov also considers the relationship between humbert’s abuse and the various authors + artists he makes reference to; if lolita represents a social mechanism within which rape is possible (if, indeed, the discursive ‘killing’ of dolores haze as explained above and creation of ‘lolita’ is equivalent to his rape of her, even), and the composite ‘lolita’ is made up of this rolodex of canonical creators, what does that tell us about what the literary canon can and does facilitate? if the imaginary that made poe’s annabel lee possible is the same as the one that allowed him to marry his thirteen year old cousin, what can we say about that imaginary? and what does it mean to couch rape and pedophilia and incest in the language of enchantment and fairytale and magic?

ii. a case for the presence of lolita in tlt

from the above section, you can probably get a sense of how the ideas that nabokov lays out are galvanising a lot of what muir does; however, i should actually make a solid argument for lolita being consciously gestured towards in the text before i go any further with this, lol. before getting into the text itself, it’s worth pointing out that muir has written about lolita before, multiple times, but most notably in her 2017 short story the magician’s apprentice, wherein she refigures those themes of magic and enchantment to be literally equivalent to grooming. at one point, the character being groomed suggests that lolita is about pedophilia, to which her groomer responds that it is also about ‘devouring someone’s life’—which we then see him follow through on, with the claim that he ‘ate her childhood’ coming at the very end. taking up what nabokov gestures towards—predation and grooming as a type of consumption (humbert at one point compares himself to a vampire; there’s a lot of eroticised consumptive language in the novel)—sets the stage for what she later does in tlt with eg. lyctorhood. besides anything else, i would argue that it’s near enough impossible for someone familiar enough with lolita that they write a responsive short story to reference annabel lee without knowing what such a reference could signify and developing it accordingly.

which ofc brings me to: the fact that annabel lee, which john reads to harrow in an attempt to introduce ‘A.L.’ and after which alecto is (re)named, is the principle driving text in lolita. when we meet humbert humbert, he first tells us about his childhood romance with a girl called ‘annabel leigh,’ whom he met with in a ‘princedom by the sea,’ and who died young; he tells us that ‘lolita began with annabel’ and that annabel sparked the ‘enchanted island’ nymphet imaginary. at one point, he searches for a ‘princedom by the sea’ (ie. a beach) on which he can rape dolores, then refers to her as ‘annabel haze, alias dolores lee, alias lo-lee-ta’; here + in the very beginning of the novel, the middle syllable of ‘lolita’ is elongated into ‘lee’ such that annabel lee is invoked (as a presence at the centre of the ‘lolita’ composite imaginary). annabel lee remains a constant presence throughout the text—from humbert calling dolores ‘my darling,’ to her mockingly retorting ‘my dahling,’ imitating poe’s ‘my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,’ to the slow death over the course of the poem (‘kingdom by the sea’ into ‘tomb by the sounding sea’) becoming the way in which the novel gradually ramps up to dolores’ inevitable death. its significance in the novel is paramount, such that—as i said—it’s inconceivable to me that muir could know lolita intimately enough to have written about it in the past, yet have that reference to annabel lee be a coincidence. i’ll come to what a reading of those references to annabel lee which assumes a covert lolita reference can do for understanding john and alecto, but for now i’m just noting it as indicative of a desire to signal lolita as shaping the momentum of muir’s text.

there’s also, for example, this:

“I understand why cavaliers primary carry their House titles,” said God. “It makes sense. But it is a corruption of the original. D’you know why you’re really the First? Because in a very real way, you and the others are A.L.’s children ... There would be none of you, if not for her.”

to me at least, is clearly written to echo this:

‘[...] for I must confess that depending on the condition of my glands and ganglia, I could switch in the course of the same day from one pole of insanity to the other—from the thought that around 1950 I would have to get rid somehow of a difficult adolescent whose magic nymphage had evaporated—to the thought that with patience and luck I might have her produce eventually a nymphet with my blood in her exquisite veins, a Lolita the Second, who would be eight or nine around 1960, when I would still be dans la force de l’âge; indeed, the telescopy of my mind, or un-mind, was strong enough to distinguish in the remoteness of time a vieillard encore vert—or was it green rot?—bizarre, tender, salivating Dr. Humbert, practicing on supremely lovely Lolita the Third the art of being a granddad.

In the days of that wild journey of ours, I doubted not that as father to Lolita the First I was a ridiculous failure.

here we can see the play on numerical titles (typically associated with monarchy, in turn often associated with the sort of fairytale-type fantasy that nabokov plays with—the ‘magic nymphage,’ as he puts it here) to present an account of pedophilic incestuous rape; if we assume that alecto/‘annabel’ as john recounts her ‘is’ lolita (not dolores; lolita), as far as muir’s intertextual engagement with lolita is concerned, then we see this process playing out as an establishment of a ruling class and a population of an imperial core. this specific reference tethers the text to what i will later argue is one of the key developments that muir makes on nabokov’s text; muir expands the gestures nabokov makes towards sites of social violence that facilitate abuse to consider how those logics of abuse make up the sinew of the process by which imperialism becomes possible. the discourse encoded in the act of sexual violence is held up against the violence of conquest and subjugation, and lolita is the conduit for doing so.

this is hopefully enough to demonstrate that lolita is consciously woven into the text of tlt, and deliberately gestured towards by muir when she invokes annabel lee. (another one—we know that the opening sentences of alecto the ninth make reference to the divine comedy; at one point, humbert says: ‘lolita, you are my girl, as vee was poe’s and bea dante’s.’ ‘vee’ here is virginia clemm poe, largely believed to have inspired annabel lee.) if not, then, idk, treat this as a thought experiment examining what tlt would look like if lolita was an intertext, i guess.

iii. how does muir build on nabokov’s text?

so if john and alecto can be read as humbert humbert and dolores haze—if alecto is the figure onto whom the ‘annabel lee’ imaginary is being projected by john, and if the ‘annabel lee’ imaginary is intended to encode a reference to lolita—it then follows that what john ‘does’ to alecto should a) be read as discursively concerned with sexual violence, and b) stand in dialogue with what nabokov renders equivalent to sexual violence in lolita itself. john’s killing and reconstituting alecto follows the lines drawn by nabokov, wherein ‘lolita’ is a composite construction made up of references to western canonical art and poetry, and whilst i don’t read john’s fashioning alecto as a barbie doll from his childhood as necessarily being a moment where he consciously sexually covets barbie, it still draws upon the connotations that barbie carries; artificial, patriarchally constructed womanhood sold as a product. the violence of patriarchy as the violence of capitalism. & the composite nature of it all is really emphasised here:

He said, From my blood and bone and vomit I conjured up a beautiful labyrinth to house you in. I was terrified you’d find some way to escape before I was done. I made you look like a Christmas-tree fairy ... I made you look like a Renaissance angel ... I made you Adam and Eve … Galatea. Barbie. Frankenstein’s monster with long yellow hair.

the ‘renaissance angel’ line especially captures my interest, since dolores haze is twice compared to botticelli’s venus. and ofc, part of what drives nona the ninth is the inevitability of nona remembering this process, and ‘becoming’ alecto again once she does. we see the echoes of trauma without an anchor, and what shape of its source we do get—entrapment, embodiment as terrifying to nona—is figured in language that, to me at least, seems designed to invoke sexual assault. for instance:

Nona dropped to her haunches and clutched her hand between her thighs, afraid to look at it. Her heart was beating so hard that she was worried it would burst. Her gaze lurched drunkenly, as though her eyes were independent of herself. For a moment she wanted to yell, Help, like she had done before, pretending to be the Captain. She wanted to shout. She wanted to be listened to. She wished the barrier had taken her hands. She wished she had thrust herself into it—become that big seething mass of flesh and meat and tendrils—ruined her body, just melted it; come back messed up, so that nobody could want her body but her, so that it would be hers and nobody else’s.

the hand between the thighs here to me is quietly suggestive of a sexual violation. (not literally, of course—it’s a metaphorical invocation. interestingly, this whole sequence comes from nona going through an entropy field—the other time we saw an entropy field dealt with in significant detail was in gideon the ninth, with gideon and cytherea. there’s an argument to be made for the avulsion chapter representing a similar metaphorical sexual violation between cytherea and gideon, whose entire relationship is conducted as a form of predation that maps onto naturalised sites of social violence, but that’s a whole other tangent.) the final sentences are near enough self-explanatory—wanting to mutilate your body such that nobody but you could ever ‘want’ it connects dots between nona’s in-text desire for agency and selfhood outside of who she ‘was’ or might be or could be used for to the subtextual sexual trauma figured through metaphor.

& there is, of course, the fact that what causes her to come apart at the end is ianthe saying ‘John loves Alecto—John needs Alecto’; by this point, kiriona has already referred to alecto as alecto, meaning that the thing which nona remembers (and can no longer go on existing as nona, having remembered) is specifically the naming of john’s relationship to her—ie. his having ‘loved’ her. (her first chapter opens with ‘Late in the year of nobody she really thought about that much in particular,’ the ‘nobody’ here of course being john.) 

so what john ‘does’ to alecto, or to the earth—kills it and fashions its resurrected soul into the body of a woman who is made up of cultural touchstones of womanhood that coalesce ideas of classical and biblical beauty along with the commodification of such beauty under capitalism, in an act of violence that prefigures and galvanises the violence by which he carries out his long campaign of imperialism—can be read as discursively equivalent to what humbert ‘does’ to dolores. sexual violence and murder and imperialist violence here become one and the same. 

i would argue, however, that john’s extension of power as a humbert humbert-equivalent figure has a far broader reach than alecto; in fact, several characters are pulled into alecto’s orbit for the specific purpose of figuring them in similar positions of subjectivity as that which we see her occupy. there’s a throwaway line in nona the ninth during ianthe and corona’s reunion scene whose implications drove me absolutely wild:

“Judith Deuteros, who, when we played Marry, Kill, Reanimate, you used to say reanimate because nobody would be able to tell the difference? That Judith Deuteros?”

instead of fuck, marry, kill, it’s marry, kill, reanimate. in the barest sense, to reanimate is to fuck. we understand the process of reanimation to be a site of violence; necromancy is the base unit of imperialism as john enacts it, death in the world of tlt is wholly reduced to its utilitarian function (to the point where they make soap out of human fat, even), and this figuring of ‘reanimating’ and ‘fucking’ as equivalent brings that violation into the discursive field of sexual violence. with this in mind, it’s worth then looking at the passage where john first resurrects ulysses + titania:

He said, You know, I can’t even remember how it came together now. There was no catalyst, no revelation. I was too far gone for revelations. It was like I’d been dozy and now I was waking up. So, my two kids, the guinea pigs, they were U— and T— on their certificates, you know, their old names. I thought about using those but it didn’t seem appropriate. They weren’t around to say yes or no. I was starting to really care about that. What they would’ve thought, what they would’ve wanted. My two kids with their frozen brains and their perfect internal temperatures. There wasn’t a place on the poor bastards I hadn’t breached with a thermometer, and now I was knocking before I came into their room. Yeah, I was nuts. But I was waking up.

He said, I can’t remember how or why I brought M— and A— into the room. I was like, Hey you two, I want you to meet someone. I wasn’t trying to be a dick. I think I hadn’t slept for two days.

So I brought them into the room with the bodies and I was all, Let me introduce you to ... Ulysses. Let me introduce you to ... Titania.

if we read this moment—john’s ‘first’ reanimated corpses—along the line that ‘marry, kill, reanimate’ makes possible, ie. where to reanimate means to fuck, it clearly reads as an account of sexual violence, and the language used in this passage seems to want to guide the reader towards such a conclusion. the emphasis on U— and T— being ‘kids,’ that they ‘weren’t around to say yes or no’ (john’s suggestion that using their birth names might not be ‘appropriate’ and changing them somehow constituted a respect for their capacity to consent rings incredibly hollow when you consider that at every other point in this series, (re)naming is used to indicate an extension of ownership and authority—annabel, kiriona, to point to the most obvious examples, in contrast with the communal naming practices of BOE for example), their having ‘frozen brains and perfect internal temperatures’ (invoking the detemporalisation of the ‘enchanted island’ and alecto’s ‘closed eye and stilled brain’—as in lolita itself, the enchanted island is a state of death), the thermometer that ‘breaches’ them (figuring penetration as a violation). ulysses, titania, and alecto, as the three ‘first’ resurrections & the three catalysts for john’s necromancy, together posit that sexual violence as nabokov rendered it (as a violence facilitated and naturalised by the social paradigms of western hegemony) is near enough axiomatic to necromancy, and necromancy in turn is axiomatic to imperialism. 

& the other major figure onto whom we can graft this reading is gideon/kiriona. this ofc becomes clear through the renaming that takes place in nona; like earth into alecto and alecto into annabel, gideon into kiriona is an expression of john’s ownership; like dolores into lolita, it’s a stripping of her independent agency and a fashioning of her into a reflection of his own desires and a means to his own ends. what makes this so interesting to me is the form that john’s ownership over kiriona + remaking of her in his image takes in the text:

“My father has made my body’s bones denser than titanium plex,” said the Crown Prince coldly. “My father has made my skin turn away bullets. I am the perfect sword hand and the final expression of the art of the Nine Houses. Don’t you get it? I am the Emperor’s construct.”

ie. as a weapon of empire. what this suggests is that we can consider sexual violence as, again, the crucible from which the weapons of empire emerge, and emblematic of the social relations and paradigms that make empire possible. to reanimate is to fuck and to fuck is to create a weapon of empire, all of which falls in line with our understanding of necromancy as the currency of imperialism. the parallels between gideon/kiriona & alecto run deep; as corpses that harrow is in love with, as harrow’s cavaliers (at least as of the end of nona), as characters figured as god’s children (gideon in the literal sense, alecto as having been created by him + as what can be inferred from ‘For John so loved her that he had made her she. For John had loved the world.’ being a reference to john 3:16), as subjected to grooming and abuse (both from john; in gideon’s case, also from cytherea, arguably also from harrow).

harrow, too, gets pulled into this net of subjugation and dolores haze-ism; she is made functionally john’s daughter in harrow the ninth (‘You’d make a hell of a daughter, Harrowhark. I almost wish you’d been mine.’), takes alecto’s place in the john chapters of nona to the point where john addresses the story to her; and of course, there’s this bit:

In the dream, they were back on the beach with their backs to the sea. The sand was soft and wet and grey—so fine that it dried as they plucked at it, then crumbled through their fingers like ash. The beach was a long, smooth stretch relieved only by hummocks, here and there, of thin grass and silvery driftwood sticking out of the dunes like exposed bone. He was scooping indentations in the sand, making big, print-block child’s letters with the tip of his forefinger. As she watched, he made a pothook—J—then the finned spine of E. He wiped that E clean, and replaced it with A. He wiped that clean, and he drew the prison bars of H. This J and H he barred around with an uneven heart.

(the ‘beach,’ incidentally, echoes the beach in lolita—the ‘princedom by the sea’ where humbert rapes dolores. imo, the beginning of nona when they eat meat on the beach echoes parts of the magician’s apprentice, where eating (human) meat is central to muir’s grooming metaphor.) not only is harrow ‘replacing’ alecto here; she undergoes the same process by which alecto became alecto (or annabel; it’s ofc not clear what the A stands for). john tells us in harrow that ‘[Alecto] had a real name, but I buried it with her, and no one says it anymore’; we learn here that that real name was earth. in substituting alecto/annabel for harrow, harrow is pulled into the process by which john names-owns-abuses. (from lolita, during the beach scene, the same quote i highlighted earlier: ‘Annabel Haze, alias Dolores Lee, alias Lo-Lee-Ta.)

the purpose of the misdirections in nona wherein the narrative tried to suggest that nona was either gideon or harrow (or both!) rather than alecto was less to wholly mislead the reader (it’s pretty obvious from early on that nona is alecto if you’ve been paying attention) and more to draw focus to what it is that makes gideon, harrow, and alecto one and the same: in particular, nona’s panicking at being shackled, entrapped echoing gideon (and later harrow—the ‘prison bars’ of her initial), the shared swordsmanship between gideon and alecto, the dreams. 

even beyond individual characters, we see the power relation that lolita encodes being reconfigured on a mass scale to make up the kind of social paradigm that facilitates imperialism; we could well read lolita as a process of humbert humbert killing and consuming dolores haze, and using that consumption as an instrument by which he facilitates his and putatively her literary immortality wherein she serves as a passive prop to his active agency. this is the relationship that muir maps onto lyctorhood, with john and alecto as necromancer/cavalier being inextricable from john and alecto as humbert and dolores. or even the process of puppeting—what cytherea does to protesilaus is rendered equivalent to what she does to gideon (and arguably what she does to loveday); killing and reanimating a person is seducing them is violating them is subjugating them in a hegemonic social relationship is killing and batterising them to become a lyctor. here, again, muir posits sexual violence as a core tenet of the broader forms of violence, oppression, social stratification etc. that need to take place in order for imperialist hegemony to organise and assert itself. even the resurrection beasts—in a sense, embodied consequences of imperialist violence—contain echoes of lolita; at the end of part one, after humbert rapes dolores, he says that he feels as though he were ‘sitting with the small ghost of somebody he had just killed.’ as lolita is a text obsessed with infanticide as a parallel to the violence done to dolores haze—dolores’ death, the death of her younger brother, the death of annabel leigh, the death of a barber’s child—so too is tlt; john and kiriona both wear a crown of infant fingerbones, harrow’s parents kill 200 children to make her birth possible, wake asks john ‘how many babies died in the bomb,’ the deaths of children produce significant thanergetic reactions, alecto sees a ‘crowd of dead children’ on the shore of the tomb, etc. etc. etc. in a sense, sexual violence and death each become metaphors for one another, and those metaphors converge on imperialist social paradigms.

so—what do we do with all of this? like, what does this interpretation actually do—how does it build on nabokov’s text? imo, muir posits the following: if nabokov understands fatherhood to be a site which affords the sort of social protection by which abuse can be covertly carried out, muir asks how this could disrupt notions of god as ‘the father.’ if fatherhood as humbert carries it out is not a site of safety, but a social relation orchestrated to shore up whiteness, then god as a father becomes a similar instrument of whiteness encoded in the christian imperialism to which we see muir appeal throughout. the sexual violence that ‘fatherhood’ as a social paradigm makes possible is connected to the imperialist violence that a paternalistic understanding of the christian god is designed to facilitate. from here, she interrogates all sorts of things, from gender (lesbian gender in particular) to the internal conditions of empire to the external imposition of imperial hegemony to christianity to the legacy of nuclear testing in polynesia. but the core of it seems to be expanding on the social violences towards which nabokov gestured such that the imperialist dimension in particular is made clearer, and incorporating questions about imperialist christianity into that discursive fold.