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."