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Fw: Maurice Couturier re Plagiarism & LOLITA
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----- Original Message -----
From: STADLEN@aol.com
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2004 1:23 PM
Subject: Re: Maurice Couturier re Plagiarism & LOLITA
In a message dated 02/04/2004 18:33:55 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@cox.net writes:
And Valéry Larbaud’s passage on the name of Lolita in his Des prénoms féminins (1927) has often been quoted: “it is truly Spain which is best equipped in the Western world as concerns first names. She has those boxed up names, fitted with a set of diminutives capable of expressing all kinds of nuances: age, the degree of familiarity one has with the people involved… Lolita is a little girl; Lola is old enough to get married; Dolores is thirty years old; doña Dolores is sixty (…). One day, inspired by love, I whispered: Lola. And during the wedding night, I will have Lolita in my arms.” This passage strangely prefigures the famous opening of Humbert’s narrative.
Could this not have been a deliberate ascription by Nabokov to Humbert of plagiarism, intertextuality, or cryptomnesia? Humbert, a "French scholar", admired Joyce, referring both to the Ormond Hotel chapter of "Ulysses" and a passage of "Finnegans Wake"; he might be expected to know Larbaud, Joyce's French advocate. Why should the beginning of "Lolita" be treated as Nabokov rather than Humbert, any more than Humbert's pitiful imitation of Eliot's "Ash Wednesday" is?
Anthony Stadlen