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London's Daily Telegraph reviews Michael Maar's The Two Lolitas
sceptically:
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/11/13/bom
aa06.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/11/13/bomain.html
Thursday 17 November 2005
The great Lolita rip-off
(Filed: 13/11/2005)
Jeremy Noel-Tod reviews The Two Lolitas by Michael Maar.
From the hapless Russian lecturer Timofey Pnin to the deluded exile Charles
Kinbote (whose rambling commentary on a poem comprises the bulk of Pale Fire),
Nabokov's novels mock the profession of professing literature mercilessly but
intimately. Professor of Russian literature himself at Cornell University,
Nabokov knew the vanities of the lecturing mind. One of these is to read a
text's teases as a come-on. Consequently, literary professors have a soft spot
for Nabokov. There is nothing an academic likes better than the clever mockery
of other academics.
Literary editors have a weakness for Nabokov the Tease too - in particular,
Lolita, the story of a middle-aged émigré scholar (again) with a desperate
passion for a 12-year-old American girl. Fifty years after publication, its
lilting title still shimmers with scandal - and scandal sells. So when Michael
Maar, a German academic, reported another "Lolita" last year, the Times
Literary Supplement made her their cover girl.
Maar's hypothesis was that "Lolita", a short story published in 1916 by a
forgotten German author, Heinz von Lichberg, might plausibly have come to the
attention of Nabokov, who lived in Berlin from 1922 to 1937. There is no
mention of such a source in the annotated edition of Lolita, despite Nabokov's
co-operation in identifying literary allusions. Moreover, Nabokov claimed that
his knowledge of German was negligible. Yet the coincidence was tantalising,
and controversy ensued. The Two Lolitas reprints Maar's essay in extended form,
incorporating some of the correspondence that followed the original piece, and
giving Lichberg's original story (and another) as an appendix. By the end,
however, the case is far from closed. Rather, Maar packs it to overflowing with
possibilities, then elegantly sits on the lid.
"Some law of logic," Nabokov once wrote, "should fix the number of coincidences,
in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead,
the living organism of a new truth." Maar is aware of the Nabokovian aspect of
his argument when he imagines Lichberg's book crossing Nabokov's path "by one
of those coincidences in which life is richer than any novel should be". Yet
this, of course, would have been a "coincidence" only in the literal sense.
Narrative significance comes retrospectively, when Nabokov consciously or
unconsciously - Maar allows for both possibilities - works the story into his
own far superior fiction, and thus turns meaningless happenstance into destiny.
Lacking proof of this primal scene, The Two Lolitas busies itself instead with
discovering enough subtle coincidences to discount the possibility of a single,
uncomplicated one: that Nabokov never read Lichberg.
Maar's consequent bending of the evidence is apparent in his opening summary of
Lichberg's story. "A cultivated middle-aged man," we are told, recalls his
relationship (as a much younger man) with the daughter of a house in which he
lodged. "She is very young, but her charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of
her tender age, he becomes intimate with her."
Seventy pages later, the original text reveals quite how coloured this
description is by the need to fit Lichberg's lifeless protagonist to Nabokov's
multi-hued monster, Humbert Humbert. There is no suggestion of gross
impropriety in the original, and the girl's exact age is far from clear.
Certainly, her father seems untroubled by his amorous lodger - who, in his own
words, is only temporarily "entranced", and not "enslaved". The tale's focus is
actually a rather crude ghost story, concerning two elderly brothers who
murdered Lolita's great-great-great-grandmother.
Maar finds a dubious allusion to them in a little-known play by Nabokov, which
in turn partly resembles the plot of another Lichberg story. But by this point
we are footling in the footnotes of literary history, and the promised
revelation has given way - as Humbert Humbert says of his own elaborately
indeterminate confessions - "to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds
the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives".
At the end of Lichberg's "Lolita", the "Countess" who has been listening to the
tale extends her hand to the man - a "scholar" - and says, "You are a poet". It
is the same compliment with which Nabokov lures his scholarly critics: to be
fellow poets in the processes of imaginative creation. But, imaginative as
Maar's methods are, they do not produce "the living organism of a new truth",
and he strains to connect two books which, without the coincidence of a title,
nobody would ever have compared. Any debt of inspiration that Nabokov, the word
connoisseur, might possibly owe to the uninspired Lichberg is not a story, or a
character, but simply the three syllables with which his novel begins and ends:
"Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate
to tap, at three, on the teeth."
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005. Terms & Conditions of reading.
Commercial information. Privacy and Cookie Policy.
----- End forwarded message -----
sceptically:
http://www.opinion.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/11/13/bom
aa06.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/11/13/bomain.html
Thursday 17 November 2005
The great Lolita rip-off
(Filed: 13/11/2005)
Jeremy Noel-Tod reviews The Two Lolitas by Michael Maar.
From the hapless Russian lecturer Timofey Pnin to the deluded exile Charles
Kinbote (whose rambling commentary on a poem comprises the bulk of Pale Fire),
Nabokov's novels mock the profession of professing literature mercilessly but
intimately. Professor of Russian literature himself at Cornell University,
Nabokov knew the vanities of the lecturing mind. One of these is to read a
text's teases as a come-on. Consequently, literary professors have a soft spot
for Nabokov. There is nothing an academic likes better than the clever mockery
of other academics.
Literary editors have a weakness for Nabokov the Tease too - in particular,
Lolita, the story of a middle-aged émigré scholar (again) with a desperate
passion for a 12-year-old American girl. Fifty years after publication, its
lilting title still shimmers with scandal - and scandal sells. So when Michael
Maar, a German academic, reported another "Lolita" last year, the Times
Literary Supplement made her their cover girl.
Maar's hypothesis was that "Lolita", a short story published in 1916 by a
forgotten German author, Heinz von Lichberg, might plausibly have come to the
attention of Nabokov, who lived in Berlin from 1922 to 1937. There is no
mention of such a source in the annotated edition of Lolita, despite Nabokov's
co-operation in identifying literary allusions. Moreover, Nabokov claimed that
his knowledge of German was negligible. Yet the coincidence was tantalising,
and controversy ensued. The Two Lolitas reprints Maar's essay in extended form,
incorporating some of the correspondence that followed the original piece, and
giving Lichberg's original story (and another) as an appendix. By the end,
however, the case is far from closed. Rather, Maar packs it to overflowing with
possibilities, then elegantly sits on the lid.
"Some law of logic," Nabokov once wrote, "should fix the number of coincidences,
in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead,
the living organism of a new truth." Maar is aware of the Nabokovian aspect of
his argument when he imagines Lichberg's book crossing Nabokov's path "by one
of those coincidences in which life is richer than any novel should be". Yet
this, of course, would have been a "coincidence" only in the literal sense.
Narrative significance comes retrospectively, when Nabokov consciously or
unconsciously - Maar allows for both possibilities - works the story into his
own far superior fiction, and thus turns meaningless happenstance into destiny.
Lacking proof of this primal scene, The Two Lolitas busies itself instead with
discovering enough subtle coincidences to discount the possibility of a single,
uncomplicated one: that Nabokov never read Lichberg.
Maar's consequent bending of the evidence is apparent in his opening summary of
Lichberg's story. "A cultivated middle-aged man," we are told, recalls his
relationship (as a much younger man) with the daughter of a house in which he
lodged. "She is very young, but her charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of
her tender age, he becomes intimate with her."
Seventy pages later, the original text reveals quite how coloured this
description is by the need to fit Lichberg's lifeless protagonist to Nabokov's
multi-hued monster, Humbert Humbert. There is no suggestion of gross
impropriety in the original, and the girl's exact age is far from clear.
Certainly, her father seems untroubled by his amorous lodger - who, in his own
words, is only temporarily "entranced", and not "enslaved". The tale's focus is
actually a rather crude ghost story, concerning two elderly brothers who
murdered Lolita's great-great-great-grandmother.
Maar finds a dubious allusion to them in a little-known play by Nabokov, which
in turn partly resembles the plot of another Lichberg story. But by this point
we are footling in the footnotes of literary history, and the promised
revelation has given way - as Humbert Humbert says of his own elaborately
indeterminate confessions - "to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds
the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives".
At the end of Lichberg's "Lolita", the "Countess" who has been listening to the
tale extends her hand to the man - a "scholar" - and says, "You are a poet". It
is the same compliment with which Nabokov lures his scholarly critics: to be
fellow poets in the processes of imaginative creation. But, imaginative as
Maar's methods are, they do not produce "the living organism of a new truth",
and he strains to connect two books which, without the coincidence of a title,
nobody would ever have compared. Any debt of inspiration that Nabokov, the word
connoisseur, might possibly owe to the uninspired Lichberg is not a story, or a
character, but simply the three syllables with which his novel begins and ends:
"Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate
to tap, at three, on the teeth."
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005. Terms & Conditions of reading.
Commercial information. Privacy and Cookie Policy.
----- End forwarded message -----