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.