ความคิดเห็นที่ 30
Very cagey: Yes, the aesthetic or philosophical relevance is apparent (we all live in private realities, and what we think is Reality is just the painted bars of our perceptual cages). But then he adds a more convincing detail about "the ensuing train of thought, which resulted, however, in a prototype of my present novel, a short story some thirty pages long," which he wrote in Russian and then, he says, threw away (it resurfaced after his death as "The Enchanter" in 1986). Then the culminating impulse: "[T]he throbbing, which had never quite ceased, began to plague me again" in 1949, when hed come to the U.S. and ensconced himself at Cornell.
So thats his story of the birth of Lolita, and hes sticking with itor stuck with it until his death. Part of the reason for the scandale in Europe is that, according to Professor Maars research, von Lichberg would later turn up briefly as a pro-Hitler propagandist. Could this be the cause of Nabokov (who was fiercely anti-Nazi) omitting mention of the 1916 "Lolita"? Ifand again, it has not been proven that he read the 1916 "Lolita"he knew of the authors Nazi enthusiasms, he might not wish to trace his novels inspiration to von Lichbergs 1916 story. He might well want to give us some metaphysical soft-shoe shuffling about apes painting their cages, in the hopes that the obscure von Lichberg "Lolita" would never turn up connected with Nabokovs Lolita. (By the time Nabokov wrote that 1956 afterward, von Lichberg was five years dead; the author of "Lolita" never lived to see the publication of Lolita.)
But Professor Maar doesnt speculate on the possibility of such a conscious omission on Nabokovs part. He tends to believe there was an unconscious elision, an act of (you guessed it) cryptomnesia. Professor Maar examines three possible ways that "Lolita" could be related to Lolita. Firstand he does not rule this outhe concedes its possible that there is no connection between the two Lolitas, that it was just a coincidence that the 1916 story about an older man and an underage girl named Lolita seemed to anticipate the 1955 novel about an older man and an underage girl named Lolita.
Professor Maar then explores two possible ways in which Nabokov could have read and been influenced by the von Lichberg "Lolita." "The second possibility," he says, "is that Nabokov knew of Lichbergs tale, and half-revealing, half-covering his tracks, lent himself to that art of quotation which Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called the higher cribbing. Plagiarism?" Professor Maar asks, striving to sound incredulous at such a naïve question. "Nonsense," he answers. "After all, literature has always been a huge melting pot of motives, and always consisted, in part, of literature" (italics mine). Nonetheless, if this were true, Nabokovs failure to mention it could amount to a conscious covering-up.
But Professor Maar rejects a conscious elision for a third possibility: cryptomnesia. The previous explanation is unlikely, he says, because "Nabokov had no need to crib, nor would he have ennobled a von Lichberg by citing the name of his heroine." Professor Maar believes that Nabokov did read the 1916 Ur-Lolita. But he didnt crib from it, Professor Maar seems to imply, because he didnt consciously remember it: It was a story line, a name that floated to the surface of his mind dissociated from any specific memory of reading the von Lichberg "Lolita." Thus, cryptomnesia: Not amnesia, which would mean no memory, but cryptomnesia, because it was a disguised memorydisguised even from Nabokov himself. (Does the strange pale amnesiac who shows up, and disappears, in the latter stages of Lolita have any relevance?) Professor Maar takes the position that The Accursed Gioconda, the collection that contained the Ur-Lolita, probably "fell into [Nabokovs] hands. Leafing through it, he could have come upon the story of the nymphet and so the theme that had already begun to dawdle in his mind" was re-awakened.
Note for a moment that Professor Maar, apparently seeking to give Nabokov every benefit of the doubt, of creative primacy, has him "dawdle" over the theme first. This previous dawdling makes Nabokov not someone who cribbed wholesale from the 1916 "Lolita," but rather someone who, whenever he read it, found it fuel for a fire that had already been lit and then incorporated it into his already developing vision.
But isnt this more conscious than cryptomnesia? Not according to Professor Maars reconstruction of Nabokovs creative process: "Nabokov forgot the tale completely or thought he had forgotten it. Of this phenomenon too, cryptomnesia, the history of art offers enough examples." But Professor Maar doesnt cite any of these examples in his TLS essay, and he doesnt leave it as clear as one might wish how Nabokov "forgot the tale completely, or thought he had forgotten it."
How does one think one had forgotten it except by remembering it again? Is this cryptomnesia? What is cryptomnesia? Fortunately, I was able to reach Professor Maar by e-mail in Germany and ask him for a clarification, and for one of those examples of cryptomnesia in "the history of art," which he was kind enough to supply:
"I promised at least one exact example for cryptomnesia, and here I have it," he wrote me. "In 1936 Robert Musil marks in his diaries that reading Jens Peter Jacobsens Niels Lyhne for the third time he remarked that he was influenced by it while composing a conversation between Agathe and Ulrich in the second volume of his Man Without Qualities. He adds: without knowing it, this scene was the Vorbild [the model]."
In other words, hes suggesting that Nabokov lost track of the 1916 short storys influence on him, but never had the experience that Musil did of coming upon some journal entry or other artifact that would have made him conscious afterward of the source.
Im not completely convinced that Nabokov could have completely forgotten a short story about an older mans infatuation with an underage girl called Lolita, but we may never know.
The fact that he named his Lolita "Lolita" and so did the Ur-Lolita author, von Lichberg, could point either way. One thing that Professor Maar does not do is raise explicitly the possibility of Nabokov covering up the origin of Lolitawhether because of von Lichbergs later Nazi proclivities, or from a desire to make himself the "only begetter" of Lolita and not have to share her with another. Was von Lichberg akin to Humberts rival and nemesis in Lolita, Clare Quilty?
Professor Maar addresses Nabokovs choice of the name by asking why, if Nabokov was covering up the connection, would he name his heroine Lolita? Perhaps, one can speculate, just so we would ask that question.
To return to the question of cryptomnesia, I spoke to my friend Jesse Sheidlower, the principal North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, about "cryptomnesia" and, searching the OED data base, he traced its earliest reported use to the early 1900s and found references to it in Freud and Jung, all the way up to an X-Files episode in which someone was shown a movie under hypnosis and later "recalled" fragments of the movies plot as if it were a real memory. "Its a condition called cryptomnesia," someone says. Actually, this is a kind of negative or crypto-cryptomnesiaa fake (rather than real) experience surfacing as a real (rather than fictional) memory.
But cryptomnesia in its broadest definition seems to be a signature of our time, from the "recovered-memory" scandals of the 1980s and early 1990s to Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass and other fabulists, faking memories of reporting they never did. Note how often plagiarists say, "It must have been unconscious"that they read something by someone else, entered it into their computer notes, and then later forgot that they read it and assumed it was their own formulation.
I know the specter of cryptomnesia haunts many writers. Whenever I come up with a phrase Im particularly pleased with, one of my first thoughts is: "Could I be remembering something someone else wrote that I once read?" In fact, Ive refused to use many brilliant witticisms for precisely this reason (youll just have to take my word for it).
But let me move now from Nabokovs most famous work to what I consider his greatest work, the novel that surpassed Lolita, Pale Fire. Pale Fire is not easy to summarize without sounding as mad as its narrator: Its the story of a madman academic who calls himself Charles Kinbote, who is convinced that the last work by a great American poet who happened to be his neighbora long poem called "Pale Fire" is really about him, about Kinbote and his elaborate, demented fantasy that he is the exiled king of a "northern land" named Zembla.
Kinbote has run off with the manuscript of "Pale Fire," and the bulk of the novel called Pale Fire consists of Kinbotes brilliantly ridiculous discursive footnotes on the poemcomically self-subverting footnotes that read into the poem the "buried" story of his Zemblan kingdom and exile.
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BlueWhiteRed 
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