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Dieter Zimmer on Michael Maar and the von Lichberg "Lolita"
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EDNOTE. Dr. Dieter Zimmer is the leading German Nabokov expert and editor of the excellent Rowohlt Nabokov collected works.
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----- Original Message -----
From: Dieter E. Zimmer
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 12:57 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: A modest proposal from Michael Maar
Mr. Maar rightly claims that strictly speaking he is innocent. It is true that it was not he who brought up the silly charge of plagiarism. That arose from the Valley of Ignorance where he certainly does not reside. Ok. So the plagiarism fuss was the idea of the media who don't know either "Lolita", have no idea what literature is, how it is made and what constitutes plagiarism. In my humble opinion, however, some of the blame does fall on Mr. Maar. Being no newcomer to the scene, he should have foreseen what would happen. In the name of intertextuality he should have presented his nice find in a manner that would have prevented everybody but the boldest blockheads from getting it the wrong way. That is, he should not have emphasized the vague parallels between v.Lichberg's and Nabokov's "Lolita" without emphasizing the much greater differences, even as far as the basic plot is concerned.
v.Lichberg's Lolita is a young woman of I would guess between 15 and 17, not a child of 11. There is no hint that the age difference between her and the narrator is a problem to anybody. There is her father, and he does not seem to mind her having an affair with his lodger. There is no mother to marry in order to gain access to the daughter. The narrator enjoys her love-making for a few weeks but is not exactly infatuated with her and quite glad to leave her native Alicante. He obviously wants to get away because her crush on him has become a nuisance. In the end she dies, but not because the narrator interfered with her life either directly or indirectly but because there is a spooky "curse" on her that simply makes her drop dead. She is no demon, no witch, no belle-dame-sans-merci, even if she bites, not in herself nor in the eyes of her lover, but rather the poor victim of some sort of Gothic ancestral demonism. If you read the story as you would a fairy tale, its logic would be that the narrator might have saved her by not running away. Etc.
Mr. Maar's hypothesis is that there is no plagiarism involved but that the "resemblance" cannot be a coincidence either and that Nabokov must have known v.Lichberg's story. It eludes me how the fact that for some time they both lived in the same city of four and a half million should have facilitated their meeting in person or the one reading the other's books. Brian Boyd tells us (VNRY p.202) that Nabokov remembered meeting Kafka on a Berlin tram he used when he went to see his fiancee Miss Siewert in Lichterfelde: "One could not forget that face, its pallor, the tightness of the skin, those most extraordinary eyes, hypnotic eyes glowing in a cave. Years later when I first saw a photo of Kafka I recognized him immediately." However, Kafka arrived in Berlin only after Nabokov's engagement was broken, and he would have been on the wrong tram anyway. That reminiscence was a fabrication, perhaps a deliberate one, as Véra acknowledged. I am wary of all allegations that he purposefully misled his readers in maintaining that his German was poor while it actually was fluent and so may well have been influenced by all kinds of German writers (which was Field's claim). It was not. I don't see Nabokov avidly reading a story so shoddy that he wouldn't have read it even if his German had been better. But it certainly would have been sufficient to get the gist of v.Lichberg's story which is mercifully short. However, Nabokov simply was not interested in German literature and in Germany as a whole and would not have wasted his time on a third-rate piece of German writing. So it is not likely that he knew the story. Mr. Maar's claim is that he perhaps did after all and then forgot about it, but that it somehow survived in his unconscious, and some thirty years later the memory surfaced and made him unconsciously work a few elements from v.Lichberg's plot into his novel in progress, mainly rebaptizing his Juanita Lolita. The unconscious, of course, is a very pliable medium. You may fill it with anything you wish, and as nobody can ever prove the contrary, you're always on the safe side. (Try and disprove the claim that there is a smiley painted on the back of the moon.) That's why non-Freudians insist on some positive evidence that would support the guesses as to what may have been going on in somebody's Unconscious. Mr. Maar certainly has not come up with a scrap of positive evidence.
I am surprised nobody so far has come up with a fourth theory that would be much more in line with Nabokov, especially with his ideas on mimicry. It would go like this (and I hasten to say that I am not being serious). Nabokov must have known the story. For instance, he may have seen a fellow on a tram who looked as if he had written something interesting, made his acquaintance, asked if he was really the writer he looked and in turn was presented an old volume entitled "Die verfluchte Gioconda" which he dutifully read even though the reading was tough and he needed a dictionary. Or perhaps one day he lay up with a flu and somebody brought him a pile of German books from the Russian/German lending library on Passauer Strasse he frequented. At that moment he had nothing better to do, so he browsed through them. v.Lichberg's story struck him and he presently decided to write a "Lolita" of hiw own. To this purpose he preserved all its detail in his (conscious) memory for future use. When he finally carried out the plan thirty years later, after hinting at it several times in various previous works, he thought it only fair to gratefully remember the originator of the idea. There would be an acknowledgment, though not an open but a Nabokovian one. So he purposefully called his girl Lolita, hoping that some day somebody as clever as Mr. Maar would turn up and discover the coincidence, I mean the resemblance, along with a number of other subtle and slight resemblances Nabokov had wilfully planted. For Nabokov considered the discovery of overlapping patterns arranged by some higher creative force a sublime joy and was intent on procuring his good readers this kind of aesthetic bliss wherever he saw a chance.
Convinced? It is always hard to tell at which point the noble efforts to uncover the riches of intertextuality grade into Fantasy and that in turn into "referential mania" (cf. "Signs and Symbols").
Dieter E. Zimmer, Berlin
April 12, 2004 -- 11am
mail@d-e-zimmer.de
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----- Original Message -----
From: Dieter E. Zimmer
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Tuesday, April 13, 2004 12:57 AM
Subject: Re: Fw: A modest proposal from Michael Maar
Mr. Maar rightly claims that strictly speaking he is innocent. It is true that it was not he who brought up the silly charge of plagiarism. That arose from the Valley of Ignorance where he certainly does not reside. Ok. So the plagiarism fuss was the idea of the media who don't know either "Lolita", have no idea what literature is, how it is made and what constitutes plagiarism. In my humble opinion, however, some of the blame does fall on Mr. Maar. Being no newcomer to the scene, he should have foreseen what would happen. In the name of intertextuality he should have presented his nice find in a manner that would have prevented everybody but the boldest blockheads from getting it the wrong way. That is, he should not have emphasized the vague parallels between v.Lichberg's and Nabokov's "Lolita" without emphasizing the much greater differences, even as far as the basic plot is concerned.
v.Lichberg's Lolita is a young woman of I would guess between 15 and 17, not a child of 11. There is no hint that the age difference between her and the narrator is a problem to anybody. There is her father, and he does not seem to mind her having an affair with his lodger. There is no mother to marry in order to gain access to the daughter. The narrator enjoys her love-making for a few weeks but is not exactly infatuated with her and quite glad to leave her native Alicante. He obviously wants to get away because her crush on him has become a nuisance. In the end she dies, but not because the narrator interfered with her life either directly or indirectly but because there is a spooky "curse" on her that simply makes her drop dead. She is no demon, no witch, no belle-dame-sans-merci, even if she bites, not in herself nor in the eyes of her lover, but rather the poor victim of some sort of Gothic ancestral demonism. If you read the story as you would a fairy tale, its logic would be that the narrator might have saved her by not running away. Etc.
Mr. Maar's hypothesis is that there is no plagiarism involved but that the "resemblance" cannot be a coincidence either and that Nabokov must have known v.Lichberg's story. It eludes me how the fact that for some time they both lived in the same city of four and a half million should have facilitated their meeting in person or the one reading the other's books. Brian Boyd tells us (VNRY p.202) that Nabokov remembered meeting Kafka on a Berlin tram he used when he went to see his fiancee Miss Siewert in Lichterfelde: "One could not forget that face, its pallor, the tightness of the skin, those most extraordinary eyes, hypnotic eyes glowing in a cave. Years later when I first saw a photo of Kafka I recognized him immediately." However, Kafka arrived in Berlin only after Nabokov's engagement was broken, and he would have been on the wrong tram anyway. That reminiscence was a fabrication, perhaps a deliberate one, as Véra acknowledged. I am wary of all allegations that he purposefully misled his readers in maintaining that his German was poor while it actually was fluent and so may well have been influenced by all kinds of German writers (which was Field's claim). It was not. I don't see Nabokov avidly reading a story so shoddy that he wouldn't have read it even if his German had been better. But it certainly would have been sufficient to get the gist of v.Lichberg's story which is mercifully short. However, Nabokov simply was not interested in German literature and in Germany as a whole and would not have wasted his time on a third-rate piece of German writing. So it is not likely that he knew the story. Mr. Maar's claim is that he perhaps did after all and then forgot about it, but that it somehow survived in his unconscious, and some thirty years later the memory surfaced and made him unconsciously work a few elements from v.Lichberg's plot into his novel in progress, mainly rebaptizing his Juanita Lolita. The unconscious, of course, is a very pliable medium. You may fill it with anything you wish, and as nobody can ever prove the contrary, you're always on the safe side. (Try and disprove the claim that there is a smiley painted on the back of the moon.) That's why non-Freudians insist on some positive evidence that would support the guesses as to what may have been going on in somebody's Unconscious. Mr. Maar certainly has not come up with a scrap of positive evidence.
I am surprised nobody so far has come up with a fourth theory that would be much more in line with Nabokov, especially with his ideas on mimicry. It would go like this (and I hasten to say that I am not being serious). Nabokov must have known the story. For instance, he may have seen a fellow on a tram who looked as if he had written something interesting, made his acquaintance, asked if he was really the writer he looked and in turn was presented an old volume entitled "Die verfluchte Gioconda" which he dutifully read even though the reading was tough and he needed a dictionary. Or perhaps one day he lay up with a flu and somebody brought him a pile of German books from the Russian/German lending library on Passauer Strasse he frequented. At that moment he had nothing better to do, so he browsed through them. v.Lichberg's story struck him and he presently decided to write a "Lolita" of hiw own. To this purpose he preserved all its detail in his (conscious) memory for future use. When he finally carried out the plan thirty years later, after hinting at it several times in various previous works, he thought it only fair to gratefully remember the originator of the idea. There would be an acknowledgment, though not an open but a Nabokovian one. So he purposefully called his girl Lolita, hoping that some day somebody as clever as Mr. Maar would turn up and discover the coincidence, I mean the resemblance, along with a number of other subtle and slight resemblances Nabokov had wilfully planted. For Nabokov considered the discovery of overlapping patterns arranged by some higher creative force a sublime joy and was intent on procuring his good readers this kind of aesthetic bliss wherever he saw a chance.
Convinced? It is always hard to tell at which point the noble efforts to uncover the riches of intertextuality grade into Fantasy and that in turn into "referential mania" (cf. "Signs and Symbols").
Dieter E. Zimmer, Berlin
April 12, 2004 -- 11am
mail@d-e-zimmer.de