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[NABOKOV-L] Amis, Bellmer, Lolita
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Below, two images by Hans Bellmer, an artist who might scare away Nabokov scholars - although he shares many things with the latter. Both Bellmer and Nabokov lived in Berlin during the same period, with occasional trips to Paris and showed visible peculiarities, such as a fascination with palindromes, puns, childhood loves, toys, dolls and marbles, aso. They lived in the atmosphere of a waning German Expressionism, Dadaism and Surrealistic language experiments. And they were fond of Flaubert, Baudelaire, ETA Hoffman, Wilde, E.A.Poe...
The first one image is named "Peppermint tower in praise of greedy little girls" (1934/oils 1942). The second is part of his "Die Puppe" series (from Peter Webb and R.Short's book on Bellmer,1985, Quartet Books, NY)
The motivation to return to Bellmer came from my reading Martin Amis' 1992 article ("Revisiting Lolita") which, unfortunately, I can only find in Portuguese. Martin Amis pulled to the fore lots of scenes and images which, for me, had remained in the background. His reversal of perspective created an extremely ellucidating connection to the theme of Nabokov & cruelty. His extensive quotes from Lolita, though, are accessible and here are some:
1 It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll.
2. It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning a carpet upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl-child of Lolita's size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a much taller veiled bride, quite perfect and intacta except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.
3. she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball's bladder. I would bind myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.
btw: In my translation of Amis's article I find: "Hum is Lo's stepfather and three times older than she is; for two years he rapes her at least twice a day" I find it strange that Amis would ignore that this choice for demonstrating the age distance between stepfather and child would only work during a one-year period. According to his model, should Lolita have reached 20, Hum would then be 60! What could he be trying to demonstrate by this kind of multiplication?
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The first one image is named "Peppermint tower in praise of greedy little girls" (1934/oils 1942). The second is part of his "Die Puppe" series (from Peter Webb and R.Short's book on Bellmer,1985, Quartet Books, NY)
The motivation to return to Bellmer came from my reading Martin Amis' 1992 article ("Revisiting Lolita") which, unfortunately, I can only find in Portuguese. Martin Amis pulled to the fore lots of scenes and images which, for me, had remained in the background. His reversal of perspective created an extremely ellucidating connection to the theme of Nabokov & cruelty. His extensive quotes from Lolita, though, are accessible and here are some:
1 It was now empty save for a monstrously plump, sallow, repulsively plain girl of at least fifteen with red-ribboned thick black braids who sat on a chair perfunctorily nursing a bald doll.
2. It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning a carpet upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl-child of Lolita's size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a much taller veiled bride, quite perfect and intacta except for the lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three slender arms, and a blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.
3. she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte, or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball's bladder. I would bind myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly mislaid, in horrible chambres garnies where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-à-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.
btw: In my translation of Amis's article I find: "Hum is Lo's stepfather and three times older than she is; for two years he rapes her at least twice a day" I find it strange that Amis would ignore that this choice for demonstrating the age distance between stepfather and child would only work during a one-year period. According to his model, should Lolita have reached 20, Hum would then be 60! What could he be trying to demonstrate by this kind of multiplication?
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/
