Why shouldn’t Shade and Conmal, despite different lives in different
times, share the timeless phenomenon charlatanry, robust and steely
hirsute ill looks?
Anyway, back to the italicized TV viewing/Hazel blind date
section: I
started really wondering about "the
preview of Remorse" on TV that begins on
line 450. And you know, I can't find a single movie called Remorse in
the
All-Movie Guide, which has proven in general to be a remarkably thorough
listing.
Oddly enough the "Remorse" lines in "Pale Fire" have never been
discussed on
Nabokov L, according to my search of the archives; nevertheless,
perhaps I
missed the explanation of this ages ago, in a book. And if that turns
out
to be the case, all apologies for the following:
I discussed the Remorse lines in the poem not too many
centuries ago. God knows what my subject line would have been. I am
among those who think that:
... There’s a much, much
more straightforward explanation for what film the Shades watch that
night?
What the Shade couple makes that night is a quick circuit of the
American nocturnal cultural world of the 50s. Cowboys punching it our
in saloons; Louis Armstrong posing for his ground-breaking (for a Luce
publication) cover shot, depicting an actual Negro man, though
comfortably wide-eyed and grinning with trumpet to his lips; rock ‘n
roll, in a side burned Elvis or a contemporary; and a panel discussion
among academic commies. This is the modern world, every bit as damaged
and dangerous as the world of Pope
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. I doubt if VN needed any more
research materials for these lines than his memories, the current NYT,
and a TV seldom watched in earnest. There is too often a pedantic
belief that unsmiling strip-mined facts are worked over like carved
ivory for every reference VN uses. Can anyone imagine a more exhausting
way for a man who loved the outdoors, and his pleasure and research
reading, than to construct every sentence of all of his fiction, over a
lifetime, out of a tedious chain mail of rusting ephemeral references
just so scholars not-yet-born could gnaw like rodents on each volume’s
spine.
Whether Jean Gabin saves the beautiful Michele Morgan from some
“waters” somewhere or other does not seem to be a lightening bolt of
sufficient voltage to make VN drum up the pun “Remorques.” Does the
pun, such as it is, really ratchet up the drama of Hazel’s death? The
film seemed to me, instead, to be just the quick passage through the
night of ghostly glamour Hazel would not be forced to bear.
Don’t get too spooked by Stormy Waters. It isn’t like swampy waters,
murky waters, icy waters, or Watch Your Step.
Andrew