Pale Fire: VN, TP, and film

[MalignD at aol.com]

ynchon's use of film in his novels is hardly in need of mentioning.   An 
early essay on GR by a man named Lippman (Bertram?) called "The Reader of the 
Movies,"--I'll give a full cite when I track it down (The Denver Quarterly?), or 
someone else may have it-- is a useful reference.

Alfred Appel wrote this about VN:

Nabokov's novels abound in the slapstick elements, the cosmic sight gags, as 
it were, of Keaton, Clair, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx Brothers.   Pale 
Fire's kingdom of Zembla recalls the funhouse place of Duck Soup (1933), with its 
ludicrous functionaries, uniformed guards and mirror walls, as well as the 
sequence in A Night at the Opera in which, managed by Groucho, the others 
disguise themselves as the three identically bearded Russian aviators, Chicoski, 
Harpotski, and Baronoff.   Witness Kinbote in Pale Fire as King Charles, modestly 
"lectur[ing] under an assumed name and in a heavy makeup, with wig and false 
whiskers (his real, immense, American-grown beard will earn him his sobriquet, 
The Great Beaver), or the vision of him making his escape from Zembla, 
abetted by a hundred loyalists who, in a brilliant diversionary ploy, don red caps 
and sweaters identical to the King's , in their apprehension packing the local 
prison, which is "much too small for more kings" (shades of A Night at the 
Opera's crowded cabin!).   The activities of The Shadows, that regicidal 
organization of stooges, recall Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops, and "The Shadows" 
grotesque, bumbling, but lethal agent, assassin Gradus, is a vaudevillian, jet-age 
Angel of Death, imagined as "always streaking across the sky with black 
traveling bag in one hand and loosely folded umbrella in the other, in a sustained 
glide high over sea and land."   And in The Defense (1930), Luzhin's means of 
suicide is suggested to him by a movie still, lying on a table, showing "a 
white-faced man with his lifeless features and big American glasses, hanging by his 
hands from the ledge of a skyscraper--just about to fall off into the 
abyss"--the most famous scene in Harold Lloyd's Safety Last (1923).   I trust you 
have enjoyed this note, to paraphrase, a comment made by Kinbote under very 
different circumstances.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030713/3b12267f/attachment.html>