My Discovery

I do not profess to have read the whole of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. However, I have been lightly paging through it and, in this manner, happened upon my discovery.

On pages 226 and 227 of Finnegans Wake, I found the following:

"...she'll stay daughter of Clare. Bring tansy, throw myrtle, strew rue, rue, rue. She is fading out like Journee's clothes so you can't see her now. Still we know how Day the Dyer works, in dims and deeps and dusks and darks. And among the shades that Eve's now wearing she'll meet anew fiancy, tryst and trow. Mammy was, Mimmy is, Minuscoline's to be. In the Dee dips a dame and the dame desires a demselle but the demselle dresses dolly and the dolly does a dulcydamble."

Though I cannot directly relate the above to a passage in Lolita, I feel that this may be where Nabokov found interest in the word and concept of Dolly. Clare. Rue rue rue (cue cue cue.)

Further down the page:

"So and so, toe by toe, to and fro they go round, for they are the ingelles, scattering nods as girls who may, for they are an angel's garland."

"Catchmire stockings, libertyed garters, shoddyshoes, quicked out with selver . . . And they leap so looply, looply, as they link to light. And they lookk so loovely, loovelit, noosed in a nuptious light. Withasly glints in. Andecoy glants out. They ramp it a little, a lessle, a lissle. Then rompride round in rout."

"Say them all but tell them apart, cadenzando coloratura! R is Rubretta and A is Arancia, Y is for Yilla and N for greeneriN. B is Boyblue with odalisque O while W waters the fleurettes of novembrance. Though they're all but merely a schoolgirl yet these way went they. I' th' view o' th'avignue dancing goes entrancing roundly."

"He was feeling so funny and floored for the cue, all over which girls as he don't know whose hue."

I noticed the RAYNBOW and thought of the day in Lolita when HH and Lo attended a summer theatre production in Wace where the gauze-draped pubescent girls danced as a rainbow. I reread Nabokov's scene finding it to entirely echo Joyce's.

Here is Nabokov's scene found on pages 220 and 221 of Lolita:

"I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces, more or less immobile, prettily painted, bare-limbed--seven bemused pubescent girls in colored gauze that . . . were supposed to represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely--Orange who kept fidgeting all the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector."

Oddly enough, it took me several readings of this short passage to notice the fact that Nabokov entirely admits lifting this passage from James Joyce via his anagrammatical name Vivian Darkbloom.
Bloomdark.
Bloodmark.

Also on page 227 of Finnegans Wake:

"He dove his head into Wat Murrey, gave Stewart Ryall a puck on the plexus, wrestled a hurry-come-union with the Gillie Beg, wiped all his sinses, martial and menial, out of Shrove Sundy MacFearsome, excremuncted as freely as any frothblower into MacIsaac, had a belting bout, chaste to chaste, with McAdoo about nothing and, childhood's age being aya the shameleast . . ."

The only reason I note this passage is Joyce's invention of MacFearsome, dreadfully similar to McFate.