Times Literary Supplement May 7 2004, Letters to
the Editor (p. 17)
Lolita's Spanish friend
Sir, - Dieter E.
Zimmer's letter on the first Lolita (April 23) deserves a reply, since his
services to the German edition of Vladimir Nabokov's works are exemplary. It
is, however, not always easy to identify the argument in the matted tendrils of
his communication. The less said about the punitive irony of his "fourth
possibility", the better for the reputation of German humour. What Zimmer's
story of Nabokov's ostensible meeting with Kafka is supposed to show, apart from
the fact that Nabokov was prone to confused memories or mystifications, remains
as inscrutable as his side-swipe at Nabokov's first biographer, Andrew Field,
who has no more to do with my essay than the author of Metamorphosis. Such
distractions aside, the kernel of Zimmer's argument comes down to
this. First, it "seems unlikely" to him that Nabokov knew Heinz von
Lichberg's story; which is his right, but not a sentence in court.
Zimmer's second, and more germane, contention is that the differences between
Nabokov's novel and Lichberg's story are greater, and the resemblances smaller,
than I have represented them. His principal claims are that Lichberg's Lolita is
neither a child nor has anything demonic about her, and that the narrator is
glad to be rid of her. In fact, Lichberg does not tell us the precise age of
his Lolita (Nabokov's is not eleven, as Zimmer would have it, but
twelve-and-a-half when Humbert takes her to the hotel). But this is how the
narrator who, like Humbert, falls in love with her at first sight, describes
her. Lolita is "very young according to our Northern conceptions"; the
narrator wants to take "the child" into his arms; his little Lolita seems to him
a "begging child"; and in the depiction of her death-bed the diminutives alone
indicate that she is no woman, but a child: "My beloved little Lolita lay in her
small, narrow bed [ihrem schmalen Bettchen] with wide-open eyes". If, as Zimmer
has it, this is a sexually mature "young woman between fifteen and eighteen", my
name is Quilty. After Lolita's parting gift, moreover, the narrator remains
under her spell. (She leaves a white flower, soaked in her blood, on his
bed. An obscene variant of this sanguinary flower will appear at Humbert's
parting from Lolita.) Lichberg's Lolita is, of course, not simply the victim of
a curse, but herself connoted as demonic - why otherwise does the narrator flee
her threatening love; why does her mark, the bite in his hand, still burn
twenty-five years later; and why does she merge in a dream-scene withe the femme
fatale and murdered ur-Lola: "It was not Lolita, it was Lola - or was it Lolita
after all?". Now to resemblances. Here are the parallels between the two
narratives: 1) The title is identical, and the heroine has the same name. 2) She
is very young. 3) She is the daughter of a figure who lets a room by the sea
(lake), where the narrator wants to take a break. 4) She has an affair with the
narrator and seduces him. 5) She is, like the later nymphet, half-demon and
half-child. 6) The finale is a grotesque, dream-like murder scene. 7) Nabokov's
Lolita dies after giving birth to a daughter; Lichberg's Lola is murdered after
the birth of her daughter. Each narrator is left alone, brokenhearted, but
Lolita makes him a writer. Coincidence? It seems more likely that Nabokov
should at some point in his Berlin years have come upon a slender volume, whose
title "The Accursed Gioconda" might have appeared to promise revelations about
the secret of the Mona Lisa. One cannot exclude pure accident - which I
expressly did not, contrary to what Zimmer suggests. The field of intertextual
relations rarely allows of hard proofs. As long as no actual diary entry noting
a particular reading - or some other proof that perhaps lies under our nose -
turns up, plausibility is the most that can ever be attained. There is a
misunderstanding at work in the reactions of some Nabokovians.. Even if Nabokov
felt that a novel that was to be written already existed platonically preformed
in another sphere and all he had to do was transport it into the reality of
words, his books did not swim towards him neatly wrapped in willow
baskets. The creative process works otherwise and, to a real poet, nothing
is lost: scraps of newspapers and daydreams, mythologies and advertisements,
Proust and the jukebox, Shakespeare and sexologists - everything that shimmers
through Lolita. Nabokov's play with implications and allusions was moreover
inexhaustible. Alfred Appel's commentary on Lolita occupies 140 densely printed
pages. The name of Heinz von Lichberg does not occur in it. But there is a
passage in the novel that leaves even the third possible explanation I advanced,
of cryptomnesia, wobbling slightly. In the second chapter, Humbert Humbert
watches Lolita among other nymphets at the swimming-pool, and recalls that none
ever surpassed her in desirability, with a few exceptions: "once in the hopeless
case of a pale Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman, and
another time 'mais je divague'". Why did Nabokov introduce this Spanish daughter
of a nobleman as the only child capable of competing with Lolita? She lacks any
obvious function in the text. On the following pages she appears inconspicuously
once again as Lolita's little Spanish friend. She is "the lesser nymphet, a
diaphanous darling", with whom Lolita jumps a rope. On leaving the scene with
Lo, Humbert flashes a smile at this "shy, dark-haired page-girl of my princess",
who thereupon disappears from the novel. Who is smiling here to whom - the
paedophile Humbert at a missed chance, or his creator at the lesser Spanish
nymphet of the aristocrat Lichberg, who had supplied the services of a page to
the true princess? Referential mania? If only one ever knew with this
Rastelli.