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Re: VN and Freud
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Jim Twiggs [to JM's "Now I must make a 'mea culpa' to Jim Twiggs. I was certain that Nabokov couldn't have been acquainted with the story concerning Wittels's Irma, and still have written "Lolita" since, in the background, there's a very sick mind intent on using and tormenting a real child."] No apology needed (of course), but I'm pleased to have Jansy's new thoughts on the matter.
JM: Jim Twiggs indicates two articles in the TLS* and notes that he's "presented the Kraus-Wittels story only as paralleling Lolita in certain very limited respects, and not as an influence or even a source." The "new thoughts" his reference to Wittels stimulated in me were warmly received and kindly dismissed.
Thanks to him, though, I discovered that I'd been mostly considering Lolita's oedipic "central theme" as of a secondary importance ( i.e, reduced to a literary structural device) as regards the adventurous tales involving HH's and Lolita's love-affair. Besides, very often my focus aimed solely at the voiceless young girl, perhaps because the media, and even the book-cover, insistently cried out "Lolita" (Nabokov's). In a way, although very conscious of HH as an unreliable narrator, I forgot to seriously consider his narrator's place in the context of social exclusion and his isolation at the time he penned "Lolita, or the Confessions of a White, Widowed Male" (its title in full). Humbert's extended recollections of his passion for Lolita are so vivid in his confessions that it's almost as if I, myself, could watch her from my window, without suffering from hallucinations - as HH must have.
Actually, how important this girl, this Lolita, really is? Was real-life Sally Horner rescued from the "trash of life" to become "valuable and eternal" thanks to the story of Lolita's plight (cf. A.Dolinin's views)? What about Kraus-Wittels's, equally real, Irma?
How deeply did Nabokov care about "Lolita"? In "Strong Opinions" he recognizes, very objectively, that "my little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity."(25) ..."the heart is a remarkably stupid reader" (41). When asked why he wrote Lolita he answered: "It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty... I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions."
My non-Literary views definitely reject the hypothesis that Nabokov could have acquired his inspiration from the lives of real little girls, to the point of reproducing them in his writing ( but not that he didn't find it in the perverts's reports). The chief reason for my very personal belief lies in that Nabokov chose to have their story told by a kidnapper, who seldom allows us to see events from the girl's perspective, or to hear her directly. If Nabokov was reproducing an actual victim's most important features and impulses, in an enticing golden tale registered by a pervert, he would have become an accomplice (the pervert's, and perhaps the girl's). And Nabokov certainly wasn't either one or the other. What we get in Nabokov's novel is the unfolding of an unreliable oscillating "arc of character" and, most often, a report about the material consequences of a pervert's acting out his fantasies. If there's pity towards HH and Lolita it's not justified by any intellectual consideration that "art rescued her from 'the trash of life'," but something more concrete, after the book is closed, when the reader has acquired a different experience of perversion and now regards other counfounded erring perverts and their victims under a new light.
Freud once observed ( Tolle, lege "Three-Essays", 50**) that the dreams of a neurotic are a pervert's because "neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversions" (165). To follow HH's narration from his perverted perspective is, for a neurotic, to live them as pure dream-fantasy only. There's too much reality in Sally Horner or in Irma to warrant me, as a lay-reader, a place outside an actual perversion, should I pair them with Lolita. Or consider Lolita anything but "a figment of Nabokov's imagination": "We know that "Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book - the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinatorial talent to make it real."(15). Humbert "never existed. He did exist after I had written the book. While I was writing the book, here and there in a newspaper I would read all sorts of accounts about elderly gentlemen who pursued little girls: a kind of interesting coincidence but that's about all [...] Lolita didn't have any original. She was born in my own mind...I don't think I know a single little girl....Lolita is a figment of my imagination"(16) (Strong Opinions). Yes! ***
....................................................................................................................................
* - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/Subscriber_Archive/
Commentary_Archive/article6759012.ece
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/Subscriber_Archive/
Commentary_Archive/article6763765.ece
The Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 1998 Sources of inspiration for 'Lolita', by Ernest Machen, Berkeley. (excerpts)
The article begins mentioning the suit against Pia Pera's "Lo's Diary" which "purports to tell the story of Lolita from the girl's point of view"and offers "Ms Pera's postmodern notions of authorship," when Machen quotes Vladimir Nabokov, in 1959, "Dear Mr Girodias, . . . I wrote Lolita". The author states that "Nabokov read an anonymous Ukrainian paedophile's 108-page sexual autobiography that was appended to the French edition of Volume Six of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex. (We know Nabokov read it, because he says so in a letter to Edmund Wilson, who had sent him the piece.)" He says that several "features of Lolita, both trivial and less so, seem to derive from this erudite Ukrainian pervert's 'Confession'." E. Machen traces a few parallels between them and adds that "perhaps most fundamentally, both narrate their own stories, with the same disorienting effect, for the reader, of being taken into the confidence of an intelligent, sympathetic, practising sex offender.And it is precisely this effect that makes Lolita such an improvement on Nabokov's earlier novella on the same theme, The Enchanter." According to him "Nabokov scholars have resolutely ignored the Ukrainian's "Confession"...even though it was first brought to light as a source for Lolita as long ago as 1979 by Simon Karlinsky, and rendered into English by Donald Rayfield." Dmitri Nabokov "rebuts... what he takes to be Rayfield's contention 'about the 'central theme' of The Enchanter and Lolita. And yet, the author believes that Dmitri Nabokov and Donald Rayfield are both wrong, as it turns out. "The 'central theme'...goes back beyond Nabokov's 1937 novel The Gift...and even beyond his 1934 novel Invitation to a Beheading....where it makes its first appearance in Nabokov's work. As Alexander Dolinin has recently pointed out...the ultimate source seems to be a story that appeared the previous year, 1933, called 'Skazochnaia printsessa' (The fairytale princess), by Valentin Samsonov.... "
The Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 2005, What happened to Sally Horner? Alexander Dolinin (excerpts)
" A real-life source of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: Ever since Lolita was published...critics have spent much effort and learning to explicate the hundreds of allusions, identify concealed quotations and parodic echoes, and pinpoint possible sources for Vladimir Nabokov's novel. This exciting and productive paper-chase very rarely, however, goes beyond literature to the real world that Nabokov explored no less attentively than poetry and fiction...Working on Lolita, Nabokov, as his biographer Brian Boyd writes, 'undertook research of all kinds' and, in particular, noted newspaper reports of accidents, sex crimes and killings...But what Boyd seems to overlook is that Nabokov not only noted these newspaper reports in search of details but implanted them into Lolita in a most peculiar way."... " I have found a slightly different version of the same report in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, August 19, 1952. There La Salle is more bluntly called "a middle-aged sex offender" and Sally Horner his "cross-country love slave"... In his copy Nabokov crossed out the very euphemisms -'a middle-aged morals offender' and 'a cross-country slave' -that Humbert Humbert uses in his conversation with Lolita..." - "For the author of Lolita, the 'perfect dictator' in his imagined world, the short and unhappy life of a chubby brown-haired American teenager would have had a different meaning...Trampled Sally Horner... was a deserving object for Nabokov's 'piercing pity', and for the transformation of her story, through art, 'into something valuable and eternal.'. Referring to her in his masterpiece about an abused American girl somewhat like herself, he not only paid tribute to his 'given world' source but, in a sense, redeemed the cruelty of Sally's fate, which otherwise would have been for ever buried in 'the trash of life'."
**- Freud, S: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), SE vol.VII: "The sexual life of each one of us extends to a slight degree - now in this direction, now in that - beyond the narrow lines imposed as the standard of normality. The perversions are neither bestial nor degenerate in the emotional sense of the word. They are a development of germs all of which are contained in the undifferentiated sexual disposition of the child, and which, by being supressed or by being diverted to higher, asexual aims - by being sublimated - are destined to provide the energy for a great number of our cultural achievements. When, therefore, any one has become a gross and manifest pervert, it would be more correct to say that he has remained one, for he exhibits a certain stage of inhibited development. All psychoneurotics are persons with strongly marked perverse tendencies, which have been repressed in the course of their development and have become unconscious. Consequently their unconscious phantasies show precisely the same content as the documentarily recorded actions of perverts - even though they have not read Kraff-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, to which simple-minded people attribute such a large share of the responsibility for the production of perverse tendencies. Psychoneuroses are, so to speak, the negative of perversions." (50)
*** -Fritz Wittels (indicated by J.Twiggs) and the Ukranian pervert (retrieved by E.Machen) present a different perspective from the other true story (Dolinin's Sally Horner). Like in Nabokov's novel, the first two relate to the perpretators's emotions, fantasies, actions: they focus on the perverts. They invite the reader to witness, even enjoy it, how a pervert's mind and fantasies operate, how he acts in the world. The reader is free to surmise what kind of a threat he is to himself and to society. E.Machen notes that "perhaps most fundamentally," HH and the Ukranian "both narrate their own stories, with the same disorienting effect, for the reader, of being taken into the confidence of an intelligent, sympathetic, practising sex offender.And it is precisely this effect that makes Lolita such an improvement on Nabokov's earlier novella on the same theme.." That's exactly my point (now).
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JM: Jim Twiggs indicates two articles in the TLS* and notes that he's "presented the Kraus-Wittels story only as paralleling Lolita in certain very limited respects, and not as an influence or even a source." The "new thoughts" his reference to Wittels stimulated in me were warmly received and kindly dismissed.
Thanks to him, though, I discovered that I'd been mostly considering Lolita's oedipic "central theme" as of a secondary importance ( i.e, reduced to a literary structural device) as regards the adventurous tales involving HH's and Lolita's love-affair. Besides, very often my focus aimed solely at the voiceless young girl, perhaps because the media, and even the book-cover, insistently cried out "Lolita" (Nabokov's). In a way, although very conscious of HH as an unreliable narrator, I forgot to seriously consider his narrator's place in the context of social exclusion and his isolation at the time he penned "Lolita, or the Confessions of a White, Widowed Male" (its title in full). Humbert's extended recollections of his passion for Lolita are so vivid in his confessions that it's almost as if I, myself, could watch her from my window, without suffering from hallucinations - as HH must have.
Actually, how important this girl, this Lolita, really is? Was real-life Sally Horner rescued from the "trash of life" to become "valuable and eternal" thanks to the story of Lolita's plight (cf. A.Dolinin's views)? What about Kraus-Wittels's, equally real, Irma?
How deeply did Nabokov care about "Lolita"? In "Strong Opinions" he recognizes, very objectively, that "my little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity."(25) ..."the heart is a remarkably stupid reader" (41). When asked why he wrote Lolita he answered: "It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty... I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions."
My non-Literary views definitely reject the hypothesis that Nabokov could have acquired his inspiration from the lives of real little girls, to the point of reproducing them in his writing ( but not that he didn't find it in the perverts's reports). The chief reason for my very personal belief lies in that Nabokov chose to have their story told by a kidnapper, who seldom allows us to see events from the girl's perspective, or to hear her directly. If Nabokov was reproducing an actual victim's most important features and impulses, in an enticing golden tale registered by a pervert, he would have become an accomplice (the pervert's, and perhaps the girl's). And Nabokov certainly wasn't either one or the other. What we get in Nabokov's novel is the unfolding of an unreliable oscillating "arc of character" and, most often, a report about the material consequences of a pervert's acting out his fantasies. If there's pity towards HH and Lolita it's not justified by any intellectual consideration that "art rescued her from 'the trash of life'," but something more concrete, after the book is closed, when the reader has acquired a different experience of perversion and now regards other counfounded erring perverts and their victims under a new light.
Freud once observed ( Tolle, lege "Three-Essays", 50**) that the dreams of a neurotic are a pervert's because "neuroses are, so to say, the negative of perversions" (165). To follow HH's narration from his perverted perspective is, for a neurotic, to live them as pure dream-fantasy only. There's too much reality in Sally Horner or in Irma to warrant me, as a lay-reader, a place outside an actual perversion, should I pair them with Lolita. Or consider Lolita anything but "a figment of Nabokov's imagination": "We know that "Lolita is a special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book - the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinatorial talent to make it real."(15). Humbert "never existed. He did exist after I had written the book. While I was writing the book, here and there in a newspaper I would read all sorts of accounts about elderly gentlemen who pursued little girls: a kind of interesting coincidence but that's about all [...] Lolita didn't have any original. She was born in my own mind...I don't think I know a single little girl....Lolita is a figment of my imagination"(16) (Strong Opinions). Yes! ***
....................................................................................................................................
* - http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/Subscriber_Archive/
Commentary_Archive/article6759012.ece
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/Subscriber_Archive/
Commentary_Archive/article6763765.ece
The Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 1998 Sources of inspiration for 'Lolita', by Ernest Machen, Berkeley. (excerpts)
The article begins mentioning the suit against Pia Pera's "Lo's Diary" which "purports to tell the story of Lolita from the girl's point of view"and offers "Ms Pera's postmodern notions of authorship," when Machen quotes Vladimir Nabokov, in 1959, "Dear Mr Girodias, . . . I wrote Lolita". The author states that "Nabokov read an anonymous Ukrainian paedophile's 108-page sexual autobiography that was appended to the French edition of Volume Six of Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex. (We know Nabokov read it, because he says so in a letter to Edmund Wilson, who had sent him the piece.)" He says that several "features of Lolita, both trivial and less so, seem to derive from this erudite Ukrainian pervert's 'Confession'." E. Machen traces a few parallels between them and adds that "perhaps most fundamentally, both narrate their own stories, with the same disorienting effect, for the reader, of being taken into the confidence of an intelligent, sympathetic, practising sex offender.And it is precisely this effect that makes Lolita such an improvement on Nabokov's earlier novella on the same theme, The Enchanter." According to him "Nabokov scholars have resolutely ignored the Ukrainian's "Confession"...even though it was first brought to light as a source for Lolita as long ago as 1979 by Simon Karlinsky, and rendered into English by Donald Rayfield." Dmitri Nabokov "rebuts... what he takes to be Rayfield's contention 'about the 'central theme' of The Enchanter and Lolita. And yet, the author believes that Dmitri Nabokov and Donald Rayfield are both wrong, as it turns out. "The 'central theme'...goes back beyond Nabokov's 1937 novel The Gift...and even beyond his 1934 novel Invitation to a Beheading....where it makes its first appearance in Nabokov's work. As Alexander Dolinin has recently pointed out...the ultimate source seems to be a story that appeared the previous year, 1933, called 'Skazochnaia printsessa' (The fairytale princess), by Valentin Samsonov.... "
The Times Literary Supplement, September 9, 2005, What happened to Sally Horner? Alexander Dolinin (excerpts)
" A real-life source of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: Ever since Lolita was published...critics have spent much effort and learning to explicate the hundreds of allusions, identify concealed quotations and parodic echoes, and pinpoint possible sources for Vladimir Nabokov's novel. This exciting and productive paper-chase very rarely, however, goes beyond literature to the real world that Nabokov explored no less attentively than poetry and fiction...Working on Lolita, Nabokov, as his biographer Brian Boyd writes, 'undertook research of all kinds' and, in particular, noted newspaper reports of accidents, sex crimes and killings...But what Boyd seems to overlook is that Nabokov not only noted these newspaper reports in search of details but implanted them into Lolita in a most peculiar way."... " I have found a slightly different version of the same report in the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, August 19, 1952. There La Salle is more bluntly called "a middle-aged sex offender" and Sally Horner his "cross-country love slave"... In his copy Nabokov crossed out the very euphemisms -'a middle-aged morals offender' and 'a cross-country slave' -that Humbert Humbert uses in his conversation with Lolita..." - "For the author of Lolita, the 'perfect dictator' in his imagined world, the short and unhappy life of a chubby brown-haired American teenager would have had a different meaning...Trampled Sally Horner... was a deserving object for Nabokov's 'piercing pity', and for the transformation of her story, through art, 'into something valuable and eternal.'. Referring to her in his masterpiece about an abused American girl somewhat like herself, he not only paid tribute to his 'given world' source but, in a sense, redeemed the cruelty of Sally's fate, which otherwise would have been for ever buried in 'the trash of life'."
**- Freud, S: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), SE vol.VII: "The sexual life of each one of us extends to a slight degree - now in this direction, now in that - beyond the narrow lines imposed as the standard of normality. The perversions are neither bestial nor degenerate in the emotional sense of the word. They are a development of germs all of which are contained in the undifferentiated sexual disposition of the child, and which, by being supressed or by being diverted to higher, asexual aims - by being sublimated - are destined to provide the energy for a great number of our cultural achievements. When, therefore, any one has become a gross and manifest pervert, it would be more correct to say that he has remained one, for he exhibits a certain stage of inhibited development. All psychoneurotics are persons with strongly marked perverse tendencies, which have been repressed in the course of their development and have become unconscious. Consequently their unconscious phantasies show precisely the same content as the documentarily recorded actions of perverts - even though they have not read Kraff-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, to which simple-minded people attribute such a large share of the responsibility for the production of perverse tendencies. Psychoneuroses are, so to speak, the negative of perversions." (50)
*** -Fritz Wittels (indicated by J.Twiggs) and the Ukranian pervert (retrieved by E.Machen) present a different perspective from the other true story (Dolinin's Sally Horner). Like in Nabokov's novel, the first two relate to the perpretators's emotions, fantasies, actions: they focus on the perverts. They invite the reader to witness, even enjoy it, how a pervert's mind and fantasies operate, how he acts in the world. The reader is free to surmise what kind of a threat he is to himself and to society. E.Machen notes that "perhaps most fundamentally," HH and the Ukranian "both narrate their own stories, with the same disorienting effect, for the reader, of being taken into the confidence of an intelligent, sympathetic, practising sex offender.And it is precisely this effect that makes Lolita such an improvement on Nabokov's earlier novella on the same theme.." That's exactly my point (now).
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
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Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
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