The Politics of Retrospection and Memory in Edgar A. Poe
and Vladimir Nabokov:“Annabel Lee,” “First Love,” and Lolita
KATO Yuji
Edgar A. Poe’s posthumously published poem, “Annabel Lee,” has triggered speculations
concerning its origin and biographical sources for the character. It is, however, more relevant to
the understanding of Poe’s employment repetition and doubling in the working of retrospection
and memory than to such autobiographical speculations.
The past and the present in the poem are examples of Poe’s typical doublings that occur at
the same time with spatial doubling of the shore and the sea that constitute the whole vision of
the “Kingdom by the Sea.” The temporal dimensions of the poem therefore do not point to the
absolute difference in time between the present and the past but proves that they are repetitions
of one another. The doubling and repetition in “Annabel Lee” deconstruct the realistic, ontological
temporal perspective that retrospective literature only appear to present.
The impact of Poe’s influence on later writers often hinges on this aspect of his writings. For
example, Vladimir Nabokov introduces Edgar A. Poe’s character “Annabel Lee” in his novel Lolita,
whose precursor had already been published as a short story, entitled “First Love.” Nabokov
repeats the structure of doubling and repetition in “Annabel Lee” in both texts, deconstructing the
temporal relation of the origin and its repetitions in the chronological perspectives they present.
The playful deconstruction of the reality in retrospection and memory in Poe’s and
Nabokov’s texts has been understood as such by contemporary, postmodern writers such as Don
Delillo and Paul Auster that repeat the name “Annabel Lee” in their literary and cinematic texts,
and would also point to their affinity to modern writers such as Franz Kafka, whose textual
strategies in social critique is similar to theirs in spite of the conventional understanding that they
are very different kind of writers.