My Quest

So I keep going back to the camp where Lolita was (chapter 27). I keep wondering what was the full name. Q couldn't be the entire name, could it? Humbert says that the cabins were named after Disney characters (p. 110), so my initial search was for Disney names. Nothing really comes up; and if the individual cabins were named after Disney characters, shouldn't the camp have a name that encompasses the whole genre? I did find reference to a Queen Clarion, who was supposed to be the head fairy for the pixies in Never Land. However, this seems to be a recent addition to Peter Pan's story (roughly 2008) so no chance that Nabokov would have considered this character even for one of the cabin names.

So I decided to look at slang and nicknames that it could possibly be. And I discovered that the letter Q could be slang on it's own! Referring to the cue (yep, also Quilty's nick name) ball in a game of billiards, Q means to initiate a deception! This reference comes from A Dictionary of the Underworld, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London, 1949. The term appears to have been coined sometime in the 19th century.

Other possible "q" names that the camp may have been named include:

• quail-an attractive young woman (New Dictionary of American Slang), and
• a word that refers to a particular part of the female anatomy, which I won't post (but you can e-mail me and ask), and which may make sense since the camp lake is called Climax Lake.

Also in chapter 27, Lolita reveals that she had a lover at camp (p. 112, "Fact I've been revoltingly unfaithful to you..."), spoiling the "innocence" of the nymphet for H.H. (the fact of which he doesn't get yet), although (unless you've read A.A.'s annotations) we don't know who, yet.