The Two Lolitas

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Thomas Mann's story, Death in Venice, about an old man lusting after a young boy has similarities.  It's the classic German theme of "Liebestod,"  love-death, or dissolution through bodily lust/love.  Obvious Pynchonian context.


-----Original Message-----
From: geeaysun <geeaysun at yahoo.com>
Sent: Dec 14, 2005 12:49 PM
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Subject: Re: The Two Lolitas

Considering the obvious similarities of the texts,
it’s hard not to at least entertain Jung’s notion of
the archetype, particularly in relation to the
collective unconscious.  And not entirely unlike Jung,
I suppose, Joseph Campbell’s ideas of underlying
structures in myth.  Who knows, maybe Nabokov
deliberatly lifted the plot.  In all likelihood, this
is the more probabable scenerio.  But even if this is
true, Nabokov was compeled to tell this particular
kind of story, had the writerly impulse to re-tell it.
 Does anyone know of any other fictions, or perhaps
myths, that are similar to this tale?  Maybe in such a
way that’s not as obvious?  Which is to ask, is it
possible that von Lichberg’s tale is itself a
monomythic-like re-telling of something much earlier? 
Or, is this simply a case of somebody ripping off an
interesting idea?

jason




Very cool...I'm surprised scholars didn't discover the
connection, if any, to Heinz von Eschwege soooner;when
I read that novel in high school I was most impresed
by Nabokov's writerly talents and found the premise
rather banal and ancient - there's nothing
particularly gripping about an older dude losing his
mind over a "nymphet"; that theme is as old as the
hills, and, being a guy who finds young women icky and
daft and has always been "hot for teacher" and
generally for women over 35, I found it
psychologically ludicrous...BUT, in Nabokov's
rendering, it seems ultimately to be about what
Humbert Humbert loses in himself more than what he
loses ex amore;and am very curious to see how Eschwege
angled it; since clearly such an obsession is not
about "love" but Lust...the question is, lust for
What, exactly?...I wouldn't be surprised if Nabokov
lifted the plot - he was more of an Architect of
stories than an Secreater like Kafka , say, who sort
of oozed out his stories more than deliberatley
"searched" for them...


--- Dave Monroe <monropolitan@[omitted]> wrote:

> 
> A leading German scholar reveals the secret history
> of
> Nabokov’s infamous novel.
> 
> Does it ring a bell? the first-person narrator, a
> cultivated man of middle age, looks back on the
> story
> of an amour fou. It all starts when, traveling
> abroad,
> he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the
> daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a
> pre-teen,
> whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her
> age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she
> dies, and the narrator 
 marked by her forever 

> remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the
> title
> of the story: Lolita.
> 
> Maar, Michael.  The Two Lolitas.
>    Trans. Perry Anderson.  London and New York:
> Verso,
> 2005.
> 
> We know the girl and her story, and we know the
> title.
> But the author was Heinz von Eschwege, whose tale of
> Lolita appeared in 1916 under the pseudonym Heinz
> von
> Lichberg, forty years before Nabokov’s celebrated
> novel took the world by storm. Von Lichberg later
> became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and
> his
> youthful work faded from view. The Two Lolitas
> uncovers a remarkable series of parallels between
> the
> two works and their authors. Did Vladimir Nabokov,
> author of an imperishable Lolita who remained in
> Berlin until 1937, know of von Lichberg’s tale? And
> if
> so, did he adopt it consciously, or was this a
> classic
> case of “cryptoamnesia,” with the earlier tale
> existing for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged
> memory?
> 
> In this extraordinary literary detective story,
> Michael Maar casts new light on the making of one of
> the most influential works of the twentieth century.
> 
>
http://www.versobooks.com/books/klm/m-titles/maar_m_two_lolitas.shtml
> 
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