Following the accusation of plagiarism leveled at Nabokov
recently on the forum, I wish to add something which may help bring this episode
down to more reasonable proportions. Though I disagree with Julia Kristeva’s
claim that every book is a mosaic of bits from previous books, I agree with her
that intertextuality has always been part and parcel of literature, Shakespeare
having perhaps been one of the greatest “intertextualists” (read “plagiarists”)
of all times.
In a lecture I gave at the Nabokov Museum
in 2001 (available in French on Zembla), I listed a number of French books
published before Lolita which contained the name of that famous nymphet
in their titles (though no doubt Nabokov never read them), like Isidore Gès’s
En villégiature. Lolita published in 1894, René Riche’s La Chanson de
Lolita published in 1920 which obviously refers to Pierre Louÿs’s Chanson
de Bilitis (1894) which itself celebrated nymphets. And Valéry Larbaud’s
passage on the name of Lolita in his Des prénoms féminins (1927) has
often been quoted: “it is truly Spain which is best equipped in the Western
world as concerns first names. She has those boxed up names, fitted with a set
of diminutives capable of expressing all kinds of nuances: age, the degree of
familiarity one has with the people involved… Lolita is a little girl; Lola is
old enough to get married; Dolores is thirty years old; doña Dolores is sixty
(…). One day, inspired by love, I whispered: Lola. And during the wedding
night, I will have Lolita in my arms.” This passage strangely prefigures
the famous opening of Humbert’s narrative.
Two years
before the novel came out in France, Chriss Frager published a novel entitled
Cette saloperie de Lolita (1953), and since then the name has resurfaced
in countless works of doubtful literary value like Julien Roussillon’s Les
viols de Lila ou Lolita (1980), Michel Brice’s La Lolita du TGV
(1992), Orsalina’s Lolita Latex (1992) and even in the title of a book
for children, Lolita la tortue by Elizabeth Schlossberg (1995). In French
“literature”, the name seems to have been applied to two kinds of characters:
highly perverse prostitutes or saucy little girls.
Has
the name cropped up as much in other literatures, the Spanish one
included? I wonder. Let us not forget that Humbert was originally a French
speaker!
Maurice Couturier