The subtitle of The Accursed Gioconda describes the stories collected in it as ‘grotesques’, which fits Lolita only partially. The tale is in fact a ghost story à la Hoffmann, whose theme, introduced in the first sentence, determines both outer and inner narratives. During a conversation among guests at the house of one Countess Beate, talk turns to the relations between art and reality: a conventional opening whose function is to introduce an inner plot.37 The lady of the house draws the young writer among her guests into a discussion. After half a page, a hitherto silent professor cuts in. He wishes to recount something that has burdened his mind for years – something that could be experience or fantasy, he still does not know which. So begins the real narrative: a highly Hoffmannesque story, whose core encapsulates the very theme which germinated in Nabokov’s fiction from the 1920s onwards.
The narrator is a student in a South German university town who frequents the tavern run by the Walzer brothers. Lichberg already scatters some small hints of a Spanish background. On an armchair lies a black silk headscarf, ‘of the sort Spanish girls wear on days of celebration’.38 It occurs to him that something odd may be going on in this place, which seems to be open only for him, but he wastes no further thought on it. One night, passing by the tavern, he hears angry, youthfully transformed voices, a violent quarrel and a terror-stricken cry from a woman’s throat. But the next morning everything at the brothers’ establishment seems so unchanged that he doubts his experience and is ashamed to ask them about it. Soon afterwards he sets off on the trip to Spain whose announcement so agitates the brothers. Lichberg has thus prepared everything for a finale in which the mystery’s solution will be revealed. It lies in a picture. In the pension in Alicante hangs a drawing that seems to depict Lolita. The impression, however, is deceptive. It is Lola, the grandmother of Lolita’s great-grandmother, ‘who was strangled by her lovers after a quarrel a hundred years ago!’.
Here is the solution to the mystery, and the crux of Lichberg’s plot. Lolita is not just any enchanting young girl. She is under a curse, and a demonic repetition compulsion. The narrator learns of this haunted background, once he finally – now in fear of Lolita’s dangerous love – decides to leave. Lolita’s father explains to him what has happened since the Ur-Lola drove her lovers mad, and paid for it by being murdered. Since then the women of the line would always have just one daughter, and then die insane a few weeks after the birth of their child. He predicts the death of his own daughter, and on the same evening the narrator finds a small red flower on his pillow.
‘Lolita’s farewell gift, I thought to myself, and took it in my hand. Then I saw that it was really white, and red only with Lolita’s blood.
‘That was the way she loved.’
The blood-drenched blossom in a bed, given as a love-token, seems to be a classic symbol of deflowering, if not of demonic nymphet-love in general, even if the author, later explaining that the blood is from a cut on Lolita’s arm, perhaps really had only a flower in mind.39 It is in any case a farewell. That night her father’s prophecy is fulfilled.40 Towards midnight the narrator is visited by a vivid dream. He is witness to a phantasmagoric scene of murder, as he sees the Ur-Lola – ‘or was it indeed Lolita?’ – driving two lovers into a white heat and finally being strangled by them. In the murderers he recognizes the twins Aloys and Anton Walzer. The next morning he discovers that Lolita has died during the night.
‘My beloved little Lolita lay in her small, narrow bed with her eyes wide open. Her teeth were clenched convulsively in her lower lip, and her fragrant blonde hair lay tangled.’
The diminutives underline once again that this is no woman, but a child, of whom the narrator takes leave with a broken heart. If he takes Lolita’s soul with him, in the words of the tale, this is an ambiguous consolation that implies he might not escape her.
Curse, demonism, repetition compulsion: these are undercurrents in the other Lolita too. Nabokov’s child-woman is also a revenant, the reincarnation of an earlier, fatal gamine sans merci. Annabel, his first love by the sea, burns desire for nymphets for ever into Humbert. She puts him under a spell that he can escape only by allowing her to rise again in Lolita.41 Nabokov’s novel, one could say, is about not paedophilia, but demonism. Humbert is under an erotic-demonic compulsion. Thirty years earlier, in Nabokov’s ‘Nursery Tale’, it was the devil who supplied the earliest, still nameless Lolita to the hero. That has not changed in the chef d’æuvre. According to Humbert’s caustic complaint, it is the devil himself who leads him on and makes a fool of him, who charms him with Lolita and then whisks her away from under his nose, and who must eventually give him some respite, if he wants to keep Humbert a while longer as a plaything.42 Humbert knows very well under whose spell he has fallen:
Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travellers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature, which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac).
Lolita is the ‘immortal daemon disguised as a female child’.43 The same is true of the Lolita of 1916. She too is half demon, half victim of a curse, and, like her lover, under the compulsion of the past.44 What compulsively repeats itself over the years always ends by exploding in violence. It is not only Lichberg’s tale that leads into the dream-like scene of a dramatic, grotesque murder. The finale of Nabokov’s novel is also a dream-like, phantasmagoric killing.45 Humbert and Clare Quilty, the two lovers of Lolita, intermingle in this scene, becoming the twins they were from the start in Lichberg. Lolita’s seducer, Quilty, is Humbert’s dark shadow and second self. In their tussle they lose even their grammatical identities:
We rolled all over the floor in each other’s arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.46
Finally Humbert succeeds in killing his alter ego – no easy task, since the bullets in Quilty’s body, instead of destroying him, seem to jab him with fresh energy. With the death of the billy goat, his own fate is sealed. A few weeks later Humbert too, the tragic satyr, is a dead man.
In Lichberg’s tale, it is not the rival but the woman who is murdered. Nabokov time and again plays with this variant too. Not only does a leitmotiv of quotations from Carmen, suggesting that the betrayed lover may finally shoot his faithless beloved, tempt his reader along this false track to the very end. Even at his farewell to Lolita, Humbert flirts with the image of drawing his revolver and doing something stupid.47 As we know, the pregnant Lolita is spared this end. Indirectly, however, the curse still seems to radiate from the Gioconda. Lichberg’s Lola is murdered shortly after the death of her daughter. Nabokov’s Lolita dies in the weeks following childbirth, having given issue to a stillborn girl.
Each time, though, the last word belongs not to death but to art. Lolita and her history, sticky with marrow and blood and beautiful bright-green flies, make Humbert into a writer. The novel ends with his hope of the only refuge that he and his muse can find together: ‘I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.’
The great novel’s famous ending: he who survives Lolita becomes through her an artist. The tale of 1916 ends not very differently. The professor, too, is initiated into art by Lolita. When he has finished his story, the countess – who has been listening to him with closed eyes – murmurs: ‘You are a poet’.
Might immortality smile on his Lolita too? Her only chance would be a hide-out in Nabokov’s novel. Not so small a chance in this majestic structure undermined by so many caverns and secret corridors. Appel’s commentary needs 140 closely printed pages to decipher only the most important allusions. The name Heinz von Lichberg, of course, does not occur in it. Still, there is a passage in which a tender mise en abîme appears to be concealed. Humbert watches Lolita in a circle of other nymphets by the swimming-pool, and recalls:
… today, putting my hand on my ailing heart, I really do not think any of them ever surpassed her in desirability, or if they did, it was so two or three times at the most, in a certain light, with certain perfumes blended in the air – once in the hopeless case of a pale Spanish child, the daughter of a heavy-jawed nobleman, and another time – mais je divague.
Why does Nabokov introduce this Spanish daughter of a nobleman – not the daughter of a Spanish nobleman, be it noted? No obvious function attaches to her. In the following pages she reappears inconspicuously as Lolita’s little Spanish friend. She is the ‘lesser nymphet, a diaphanous darling’, who skips with Lolita. Taking his leave, Humbert flashes a smile to ‘the shy, dark-haired page girl of my princess’.48 But who is smiling at whom here – Humbert at a missed chance, or his creator, with a tint to her hair, at the lesser Spanish nymphet of the aristocrat Von Lichberg? If Nabokov had wanted to hide a small thanks for certain page services, he certainly couldn’t have done so more elegantly.