Darryl Schade located a phrase, which might
have been written by Nabokov in his 1936 novel "Despair" - in its
transposition to English in 1965 - in a report about the script.
David Powelstock, before him, gave 99,9% garantee that
these lines were not to be found in the novel itself.
Schade sent: Despair
(1978)/ Screen: Nabokov's 'Despair':A Cousin of Lolita/ By Vincent Canby /
Published: February 16, 1979.
Excerpts: "IN the 1965 preface to his revised edition of
"Despair," his novel first published in 1936. Vladimir Nabokov described the
original Russian title, "Otchayanie," as being "a far more sonorous howl" than
the English word he had chosen. But "Despair" will do for both the novel and for
Rainer Werner Fassbinder's elegant, comic, purposely precious film version,
adapted by the playwright Tom Stoppard, who has been inspired by Nabokov to
attain new heights of splendid lunacy, and acted by Dirk Bogarde, who gives one
of the wittiest performances of his entire career...When Hermann makes love to
Lydia (Andrea Ferreol), his plump, pretty wife who has a fondness for baby talk
("intelligence" says Hermann, "would take the bloom off your carnality"), he
mentally separates himself from the scene, sitting in the living room of their
flat while he watches and stage-manages their play in the bedroom./Hermann is
truly impossible — dandified, sarcastic and dishonest even about the details of
his background. But, as he says at one point, "All the
information I have about myself is from forged documents." With that
acute sensitivity that often heralds approaching illness, Hermann responds to
all of the world's vulgarities as if they were a kind of physical torture...The
Stoppard script is a joy for anyone who likes the English language. There are
very few puns here. Instead, he has miraculously turned Nabokov's exposition
into spoken dialogue that matches the tone of the original. "A line has length
but no breadth," says Hermann. "If you could see it, it wouldn't be a line."
That's pure Stoppard, inspired by Nabokov, and the result is perfectly
seamless."
In a discussion about the acceleration that follows new
technological improvements in writing, reading texts and images, Jean
Claude-Carrière explains how movies pass from long planes to a
sequence of decoupages by which the action no longer resides in the action
that is taking place through the motions of a character on screen. "It is the
technique that expresses the action, as if the action resided in the camera and
not in what it shows." *
JC Carrière notes that "many novelists believe
that they can move on from writing a novel to readying a script.They are
mistaken. They don't see that these two written objects - a novel, a script -
demand two different kinds of writing..." We are all familiar about
Nabokov's comments in connection to Kubrick's "Lolita" and what he thought of
the director's alteration of his original screen-play. We can also witness how,
in "Ada, or Ardor", quite often the passage from thought into action, dreamlife
and "real time" dialogue, sets of views about characters in motion
employs "cinematic" resources. However, Nabokov, for all his genius, was not
sufficiently familiar with the acceleration demanded by modern techniques and
languages nor would he be able to compete with a child's abilities in dealing
with fast-moving challenges as we get in present-day computer-games or
Play-Station 3 shifts of perspectives, or its increasing levels of
complexity.
My interest, here, is not so much about Nabokov's
abilities as a screenplay writer, if we consider present day movie-making
(a sequence of 3 sec planes, for example), or his innovative insertion of
movie-making tactics into his novels.
By the
actual developments in games and movies, with the emergence of
different languages and velocity to express human ordeals and
sentiments, also by the speed in which they supersede one another, I
started to wonder if last century's novels, their written text I
mean, shall one day become incomprehensible to modern readers,
trained as they are in the fast moving resources which are now available for
them.
Another perspective on Fassbinder's film "Despair",
"which was adapted from Nabokov's 1934 novel of the same name, also abounds
with scenes that need to be tactfully handled, for all that the actress who
plays Herman's dim-witted wife has been overly sexualized...The comic effect
that Fassbinder thus achieves serves to reinforce the audience's awareness that
Herman has 'slipped out' of normality and now exists in the parallel world of
his imagination. Fassbinder intensifies this feeling with the set design;
he fills the apartment with a multitude of mirrors. The intersecting reflections
support the illusion of duality..." and, probably, some answers to
the item I propose for the discussion of the Nab-List, can be found in the
internet. I refer to Yuri Leving, "Filming Nabokov" ( On the
Visual Poetics of the Text) published in Russian Studies in Literature,
vol. 40, n.3, Summer 2004, p 6-31.
* - "não contem com o fim do livro" (Ed.Record,2010)
"N´espérez pas vous débarasser des livres" by U. Eco and J-C Carrière,2009.