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?