----- Original Message -----

From: D. Barton Johnson

To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 2:32 PM

Subject: Maurice Couturier re Plagiarism & LOLITA

EDNOTE. Maurice Couturier is the leading French authority on VN. He is editor of the Pleiade edition of the novels.

 

----- Original Message -----

From: Maurice Couturier

To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum

Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 1:42 AM

Subject: Re: Plagiarism

    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