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Re: AB on Remorse: comments by Vic Perry, D.Zimmer and JM
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AB:...The film is called Remorse simply because Remorse was the perfect title for a film from the Garbo/Dietrich era that gave us Possession, Obsession, Blue Angel and many other thrillers of class-boundary vaulting cruelty that began with Seduction! and ended satisfyingly with Disgrace! ...The reader should except Nabokov's minor twits and twists as the right of the writer doing all the work.
VP: I'm with you, Andrew, on the idea that Nabokov didn't need to use "real"cultural materials to fill his world. I hate the tendency, in fact, to try
to track down every last thing in ANYBODY's fiction to some "real" source outside of the imagination... I'm probably wrong about Conmal's use of vocabulary,
but I think I'm onto something in the meaning of his sonnet: he is "not slave", let his critic be a slave (to minor details), to be a scholar of Shakespeare requires a transcendent mind, not a pedant".
D.Zimmer: ...March night of 1957. What they saw was only a preview. The main actress was Marilyn Monroe. This is confirmed in a list of suggestions for the two French translators of 'Pale Fire'. Nabokov ... said that [ 'inane'] would certainly not apply to Marilyn Monroe whom he had in mind.
The plot would hardly justify the title 'Remorse'...[...] did Shade want to humor Kinbote by by mentioning a movie about King Charles of an imaginary country, but Kinbote failed to get the joke, as in other cases? Or is it a case of reverse suggestion, Kinbote telepathically prompting Shade?
JM: I agree with Andrew's suggestions about the title "Remorse" being perfect for the era of movies named "Seduction", "Possession", "Obsession"..
This does not exclude the possibility that VN, as D.Zimmer reminded us, might have seen "The Prince and the Show Girl" and, instead of recollecting the title, created a new one in addition to suggesting some kind of fitting "remorse".
Different from Vic Perry, I think that in many ways VN would have to be able to think like a pedant to trap a pedant. Besides, he was a very precise poet and his felicitously concise allusions are not pedantic: they often lead the attentive reader to even wider explorations he had not originally envisaged, or to confirm his "prophetic views". If it were confirmed by experts that the Gospels, in Greek, had indeed designated Christ's crown of thorns "acanthus", the capitalized "Master" would fit with Kinbote's own "mystical" inclinations. Even so, it recquires a long stretch of imagination to include this interpretation among the more plausible ones.
DZ introduced a new argument for the "integrationalistic" issue when he asked if Shade had intended to humor Kinbote (in my opinion, this would be very unlikely), or the reverse, Kinbote telepathically prompting Shade ...or VN's playing with the idea that both Shade and CK were just one and the same.
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VP: I'm with you, Andrew, on the idea that Nabokov didn't need to use "real"cultural materials to fill his world. I hate the tendency, in fact, to try
to track down every last thing in ANYBODY's fiction to some "real" source outside of the imagination... I'm probably wrong about Conmal's use of vocabulary,
but I think I'm onto something in the meaning of his sonnet: he is "not slave", let his critic be a slave (to minor details), to be a scholar of Shakespeare requires a transcendent mind, not a pedant".
D.Zimmer: ...March night of 1957. What they saw was only a preview. The main actress was Marilyn Monroe. This is confirmed in a list of suggestions for the two French translators of 'Pale Fire'. Nabokov ... said that [ 'inane'] would certainly not apply to Marilyn Monroe whom he had in mind.
The plot would hardly justify the title 'Remorse'...[...] did Shade want to humor Kinbote by by mentioning a movie about King Charles of an imaginary country, but Kinbote failed to get the joke, as in other cases? Or is it a case of reverse suggestion, Kinbote telepathically prompting Shade?
JM: I agree with Andrew's suggestions about the title "Remorse" being perfect for the era of movies named "Seduction", "Possession", "Obsession"..
This does not exclude the possibility that VN, as D.Zimmer reminded us, might have seen "The Prince and the Show Girl" and, instead of recollecting the title, created a new one in addition to suggesting some kind of fitting "remorse".
Different from Vic Perry, I think that in many ways VN would have to be able to think like a pedant to trap a pedant. Besides, he was a very precise poet and his felicitously concise allusions are not pedantic: they often lead the attentive reader to even wider explorations he had not originally envisaged, or to confirm his "prophetic views". If it were confirmed by experts that the Gospels, in Greek, had indeed designated Christ's crown of thorns "acanthus", the capitalized "Master" would fit with Kinbote's own "mystical" inclinations. Even so, it recquires a long stretch of imagination to include this interpretation among the more plausible ones.
DZ introduced a new argument for the "integrationalistic" issue when he asked if Shade had intended to humor Kinbote (in my opinion, this would be very unlikely), or the reverse, Kinbote telepathically prompting Shade ...or VN's playing with the idea that both Shade and CK were just one and the same.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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