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"
)