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Re: Love for 7 Dolls
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Carolyn wrote "Although I can't see any connection even remotely to Pale Fire, since you brought up Lili, the movie..."*
JM: From your description, "Lili" (with its hints of pedophilia) would make more sense in relation to "Lolita"...Perhaps the hidden connection might lead us to Nabokov himself, and his "puppet show."
Let me rephrase my point:
Paul Gallico invented a puppeteer character, a "bad angry man" whose tender heart, sly thieving, feminine vanities, grossness, and whatnots, gained expression through his different puppets. Gallico also created a very innocent (gullible) orphan girl, aged 16, who reacts to the puppets as if they'd been alive and had independent voices.
That's the rub: how Lili looks at "reality," and slowly learns to integrate the puppets (which she loved) into only one guy, the 'bad man" (as such, quite distinct from Gallico), whom she feared and hated. It occurred to me that it was possible to have another author write about... author Gallico, Lili, the Bad Man and his Puppets.
I mean that, in this case - joining four contradictory facets (Puppets) into one (Bad Man), then relating them to a "Gallico" (now a fictional author) and to "Lili" so as to find, at a further remove, an Author (who invented them all) - might relate to what we get in "Pale Fire." One can achieve all sorts of good-bad, crazy-sane, American-Russian combinations - without needing to come up with the conclusion that Nabokov's novel was written solely by one mad character (either Shade, or Kinbote) who suffers from the Jekyl&Hyde syndrome and was expelled to the façade of a Gothic novel.
Nabokov made it explicit once that the reader is also transformed into one of his fictive characters to be subject to all sorts of illusions and seductions, ie, Nabokov can seduce his readers into a "Lili" and have them discover the puppeteer, then a fictional author (who even created that kind of reader!), without finding the Author who plans to keep out Freud, Annotators, Critics and Readers.
Pale Fire's "dotted" line 1000 is, actually, just that: a dotted line. Shall we bureaucratically inscribe in it "Pain" ("Dolores")? "Hereafter"? "Kinbote"?
There is, however, a shattering big difference bt. Gallico's "Lili" and Nabokov's readers (at all times and seasons). Gallico's girl is preternaturally innocent and a gullible subject to artistic illusions - but she is allowed to remain so and to figure things out alone.
Nabokov, on the other hand, always intervenes to break the spell. No reader should ever identify himself with any of his fictional beings.
This would have been OK as a stratagem, were it not that Nabokov has woven another bigger spell: he has split his readers into sapient critics, annotators, readers who search for a unified interpretation to recover their identity concerning one of these false roles.
What I enjoy in "Lili" is how deeply the character lets herself be taken in by enchantment, like anyone who's been in love with Beauty knows how it feels.**
Is anyone, any reader, essentially in love, even for a very short time, with any character created by Nabokov, without feeling cheated or a dumbhead in the end?
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* On May 14, 2010, at 9:13 AM, Jansy wrote: Yesterday I watched a "bizarre fable", dated 1953: "Lili" directed by Charles Walters, with Mel Ferrer and Leslie Caron. (written by Helen Deutsch and Paul Gallico), a puppeteer's various puppets representing various facets of his own personality.Helen Deutsch (one of the script-writers) has apparently split Dr. Samuel Johnson into "body" and "mystery" (perhaps, as I'm now suggesting, that we could proceed with fictional John Shade himself - but I haven't yet read her 2005 "Loving Dr. Johnson").
Dear Jansy, Although I can't see any connection even remotely to Pale Fire, since you brought up Lili, the movie and the story by Paul Gallico on which it was based, they and their other incarnation, the musical Carnival! are all old favorites of mine. The original story by Paul Gallico, "Love for Seven Dolls" is much darker, especially sexually, than the film. Rather as if Lolita were made into a film portraying Humbert Humbert as Lolita's "Mon Oncle." The Gallico is much more explicitely brutal than Lolita, by the way. But the film does have that lovely song "High Lily, High Lo" by Bronislaw Kaper that I have loved since I first heard it in infancy. Helene Deutsch wrote the screenplays for several films that were made into films by MGM in those early fifties, including another musical with Leslie Caron starring as Cinderella - - the film is called The Glass Slipper, which just misses being nabokovian I guess. Another stunning melody by Bronislaw Kaper, too. You will be pleased (or not) to know that Helene Deutsch was a Freudian and brought a psychoanalytic touch to her interpretations of the two stories, but with a delightful sense of humor that even our old humbug might have appreciated.
** - A line by Baudelaire's Semper Eadem: "Laissez, laissez mon coeur s'enivrer d'un mensonge." (Fowlie, page 53: "Let,yes, let my heart grow passionate on a lie" )
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JM: From your description, "Lili" (with its hints of pedophilia) would make more sense in relation to "Lolita"...Perhaps the hidden connection might lead us to Nabokov himself, and his "puppet show."
Let me rephrase my point:
Paul Gallico invented a puppeteer character, a "bad angry man" whose tender heart, sly thieving, feminine vanities, grossness, and whatnots, gained expression through his different puppets. Gallico also created a very innocent (gullible) orphan girl, aged 16, who reacts to the puppets as if they'd been alive and had independent voices.
That's the rub: how Lili looks at "reality," and slowly learns to integrate the puppets (which she loved) into only one guy, the 'bad man" (as such, quite distinct from Gallico), whom she feared and hated. It occurred to me that it was possible to have another author write about... author Gallico, Lili, the Bad Man and his Puppets.
I mean that, in this case - joining four contradictory facets (Puppets) into one (Bad Man), then relating them to a "Gallico" (now a fictional author) and to "Lili" so as to find, at a further remove, an Author (who invented them all) - might relate to what we get in "Pale Fire." One can achieve all sorts of good-bad, crazy-sane, American-Russian combinations - without needing to come up with the conclusion that Nabokov's novel was written solely by one mad character (either Shade, or Kinbote) who suffers from the Jekyl&Hyde syndrome and was expelled to the façade of a Gothic novel.
Nabokov made it explicit once that the reader is also transformed into one of his fictive characters to be subject to all sorts of illusions and seductions, ie, Nabokov can seduce his readers into a "Lili" and have them discover the puppeteer, then a fictional author (who even created that kind of reader!), without finding the Author who plans to keep out Freud, Annotators, Critics and Readers.
Pale Fire's "dotted" line 1000 is, actually, just that: a dotted line. Shall we bureaucratically inscribe in it "Pain" ("Dolores")? "Hereafter"? "Kinbote"?
There is, however, a shattering big difference bt. Gallico's "Lili" and Nabokov's readers (at all times and seasons). Gallico's girl is preternaturally innocent and a gullible subject to artistic illusions - but she is allowed to remain so and to figure things out alone.
Nabokov, on the other hand, always intervenes to break the spell. No reader should ever identify himself with any of his fictional beings.
This would have been OK as a stratagem, were it not that Nabokov has woven another bigger spell: he has split his readers into sapient critics, annotators, readers who search for a unified interpretation to recover their identity concerning one of these false roles.
What I enjoy in "Lili" is how deeply the character lets herself be taken in by enchantment, like anyone who's been in love with Beauty knows how it feels.**
Is anyone, any reader, essentially in love, even for a very short time, with any character created by Nabokov, without feeling cheated or a dumbhead in the end?
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* On May 14, 2010, at 9:13 AM, Jansy wrote: Yesterday I watched a "bizarre fable", dated 1953: "Lili" directed by Charles Walters, with Mel Ferrer and Leslie Caron. (written by Helen Deutsch and Paul Gallico), a puppeteer's various puppets representing various facets of his own personality.Helen Deutsch (one of the script-writers) has apparently split Dr. Samuel Johnson into "body" and "mystery" (perhaps, as I'm now suggesting, that we could proceed with fictional John Shade himself - but I haven't yet read her 2005 "Loving Dr. Johnson").
Dear Jansy, Although I can't see any connection even remotely to Pale Fire, since you brought up Lili, the movie and the story by Paul Gallico on which it was based, they and their other incarnation, the musical Carnival! are all old favorites of mine. The original story by Paul Gallico, "Love for Seven Dolls" is much darker, especially sexually, than the film. Rather as if Lolita were made into a film portraying Humbert Humbert as Lolita's "Mon Oncle." The Gallico is much more explicitely brutal than Lolita, by the way. But the film does have that lovely song "High Lily, High Lo" by Bronislaw Kaper that I have loved since I first heard it in infancy. Helene Deutsch wrote the screenplays for several films that were made into films by MGM in those early fifties, including another musical with Leslie Caron starring as Cinderella - - the film is called The Glass Slipper, which just misses being nabokovian I guess. Another stunning melody by Bronislaw Kaper, too. You will be pleased (or not) to know that Helene Deutsch was a Freudian and brought a psychoanalytic touch to her interpretations of the two stories, but with a delightful sense of humor that even our old humbug might have appreciated.
** - A line by Baudelaire's Semper Eadem: "Laissez, laissez mon coeur s'enivrer d'un mensonge." (Fowlie, page 53: "Let,yes, let my heart grow passionate on a lie" )
Search archive with Google:
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/