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[NABOKOV-L] Die Lorelei and Kinbote's wistful mermaid
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Modulations in a PS to Dolores/Lorelei and Sudarg's "bottomless mirror."
As I quoted before, in "Lolita," there are variations on Dolores ..."Lore... dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas ...Ponderosa Lodge...Mirandola" (Cf. "Hotel Mirana"). These syllables, if they are linked to the echantment in Heine's "Lorelei" poem, suggest to me that unconscious determinants may have operated, in a significant way, in Nabokov's choice for naming his "Dolores - Lolita."*
As I see it, this certainly reduces the importance, attributed by Maar, to another Ur-Lolita story as having been the chief source of inspiration for Nabokov's famous novel. The way I grew up listening to old German folksongs and nostalgic lieder, which may be meaningless to modern day Germans, is a consequence of how isolated these songs remained from the melodic mainstream, because of my exiled grand-parents own nostalgia. Heine's poem (he was also an exile, just like some of the young half human and half fish sirens might feel, as in H.C.Andersen's "Little Mermaid"), touches an eerie emotional note of dejá-vecu which, I wager, has caught up with Nabokov while he was living in Germany.
Sudarg's bottomless mirror and its succession of images offer, at last, a "wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing". This "endless" indefinition reminded me, at first, of a diamond whose reflective facets repel the intrusive look or distract it with rainbow glitterings. Next I realized that "bottomless" also suggests a mirror that is like a reflective but empty window, like the waxwing's or like Shade's while writing in his study: a mirror that doesn't have its back lined with silver but, like a blinding diamond, is transparent through and through... Sudarg/Gradus's mirror is like a window that offers mirages and irreality...
The first indication of such a magic mirror may have been in Nabokov's "Colette" (part I, the windows of the train leading him to Biarritz)**
There are other surprises! Compare these descriptions:
"by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying in the motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circumstances was..." ( Lolita)
"Nor can one help the exile, the old man/ Dying in a motel, with the loud fan/Revolving.../ The nebulae dilating in his lungs." ( Pale Fire)
.....................................................................................................................................................................................
* - I have often encountered a "neoplatonic" nostalgia for a lost and vaguely remembered Golden Age, adding a depth to every trivial object as if linked to an infinite succession of archetypal beauties, in writers as distinct as Heine and Flaubert ("Sentimental Journey"). I'm certain that Nabokov was equally susceptible to that!
** Cp. "First Love" (part I) with Pale Fire, Shade-Waxwing window, Shade's fits, spirals in a marble, toys underneath a piece of furniture:
[...] "Although it was still broad daylight, our cards, a glass, and on a different plane the locks of a suitcase were reflected in the window. Through forest and field, and in sudden ravines, and among scuttling cottages, those discarnate gamblers kept steadily playing on for steadily sparkling stakes. ..
[...] I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side...There were drawbacks to those optical amalgamations. The wide-windowed dining car, a vista of chaste bottles of mineral water, miterfolded napkins, and dummy chocolate bars ...would be perceived at first as a cool haven beyond a consecution of reeling blue corridors; but as the meal progressed toward its fatal last course...the landscape itself went through a complex system of motion...the distant meadows opening fanwise, the near trees sweeping up on invisible swings toward the track...until the little witness of mixed velocities was made to disgorge his portion of omelette aux confitures de fraises...
[...] From my bed...in the semidarkness...I watched things, and parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows cautiously moving about and getting nowhere...It was hard to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth, with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible. ...And then, in my sleep, I would see something totally different - a glass marble rolling under a grand piano or a toy engine lying on its side with its wheels still working gamely...
[...] Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a lone lamp.... "
Other surprising echoes: "The breeze salted one's lips. At a tremendous pace a stray golden-orange butterfly came dashing across the palpitating plage...From him (the hunchback attendant) I learned, and have preserved ever since in a glass cell of my memory, that "butterfly" in the Basque language is misericoletea..."(Misericolete...Colette!)
The "Carmen" theme arises in Biarritz and follows Humbert to "Lolita."
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As I quoted before, in "Lolita," there are variations on Dolores ..."Lore... dreaming of Oloron, Lagore, Rolas ...Ponderosa Lodge...Mirandola" (Cf. "Hotel Mirana"). These syllables, if they are linked to the echantment in Heine's "Lorelei" poem, suggest to me that unconscious determinants may have operated, in a significant way, in Nabokov's choice for naming his "Dolores - Lolita."*
As I see it, this certainly reduces the importance, attributed by Maar, to another Ur-Lolita story as having been the chief source of inspiration for Nabokov's famous novel. The way I grew up listening to old German folksongs and nostalgic lieder, which may be meaningless to modern day Germans, is a consequence of how isolated these songs remained from the melodic mainstream, because of my exiled grand-parents own nostalgia. Heine's poem (he was also an exile, just like some of the young half human and half fish sirens might feel, as in H.C.Andersen's "Little Mermaid"), touches an eerie emotional note of dejá-vecu which, I wager, has caught up with Nabokov while he was living in Germany.
Sudarg's bottomless mirror and its succession of images offer, at last, a "wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing". This "endless" indefinition reminded me, at first, of a diamond whose reflective facets repel the intrusive look or distract it with rainbow glitterings. Next I realized that "bottomless" also suggests a mirror that is like a reflective but empty window, like the waxwing's or like Shade's while writing in his study: a mirror that doesn't have its back lined with silver but, like a blinding diamond, is transparent through and through... Sudarg/Gradus's mirror is like a window that offers mirages and irreality...
The first indication of such a magic mirror may have been in Nabokov's "Colette" (part I, the windows of the train leading him to Biarritz)**
There are other surprises! Compare these descriptions:
"by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying in the motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circumstances was..." ( Lolita)
"Nor can one help the exile, the old man/ Dying in a motel, with the loud fan/Revolving.../ The nebulae dilating in his lungs." ( Pale Fire)
.....................................................................................................................................................................................
* - I have often encountered a "neoplatonic" nostalgia for a lost and vaguely remembered Golden Age, adding a depth to every trivial object as if linked to an infinite succession of archetypal beauties, in writers as distinct as Heine and Flaubert ("Sentimental Journey"). I'm certain that Nabokov was equally susceptible to that!
** Cp. "First Love" (part I) with Pale Fire, Shade-Waxwing window, Shade's fits, spirals in a marble, toys underneath a piece of furniture:
[...] "Although it was still broad daylight, our cards, a glass, and on a different plane the locks of a suitcase were reflected in the window. Through forest and field, and in sudden ravines, and among scuttling cottages, those discarnate gamblers kept steadily playing on for steadily sparkling stakes. ..
[...] I saw a city with its toylike trams, linden trees, and brick walls enter the compartment, hobnob with the mirrors, and fill to the brim the windows on the corridor side...There were drawbacks to those optical amalgamations. The wide-windowed dining car, a vista of chaste bottles of mineral water, miterfolded napkins, and dummy chocolate bars ...would be perceived at first as a cool haven beyond a consecution of reeling blue corridors; but as the meal progressed toward its fatal last course...the landscape itself went through a complex system of motion...the distant meadows opening fanwise, the near trees sweeping up on invisible swings toward the track...until the little witness of mixed velocities was made to disgorge his portion of omelette aux confitures de fraises...
[...] From my bed...in the semidarkness...I watched things, and parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows cautiously moving about and getting nowhere...It was hard to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth, with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible. ...And then, in my sleep, I would see something totally different - a glass marble rolling under a grand piano or a toy engine lying on its side with its wheels still working gamely...
[...] Like moons around Jupiter, pale moths revolved about a lone lamp.... "
Other surprising echoes: "The breeze salted one's lips. At a tremendous pace a stray golden-orange butterfly came dashing across the palpitating plage...From him (the hunchback attendant) I learned, and have preserved ever since in a glass cell of my memory, that "butterfly" in the Basque language is misericoletea..."(Misericolete...Colette!)
The "Carmen" theme arises in Biarritz and follows Humbert to "Lolita."
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/