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A Study of the Work of Vladimir Nabokov in the Context of Contemporary American Fiction and Film

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A Study of the Work of Vladimir Nabokov in the Context of Contemporary American Fiction and Film A Study of the Work of Vladimir Nabokov in the Context of Contemporary American Fiction and Film Barbara Elisabeth Wyllie School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London For the degree of PhD 2 0 0 0 ProQuest Number: 10015007 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10015007 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 ABSTRACT Twentieth-century American culture has been dominated by a preoccupation with image. The supremacy of image has been promoted and refined by cinema which has sustained its place as America’s foremost cultural and artistic medium. Vision as a perceptual mode is also a compelling and dynamic aspect central to Nabokov’s creative imagination. Film was a fascination from childhood, but Nabokov’s interest in the medium extended beyond his experiences as an extra and his attempts to write for screen in Berlin in the 1920s and ’30s, or the declared cinematic novel of 1938, Laughter in the Dark and his screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film version of Lolita. Nabokov assimilated the styles and techniques of cinema into his fiction, not as a passing experiment, but as a permanent aspect of his art. From his earliest work he demonstrates an affinity with the cinematic perspective not only of German and Soviet film-makers, but equally with that of contemporary American writers John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and William Faulkner. Like the work of Americans in the 1930s, Nabokov’s early Russian fiction precursed the fundamental visual and narrative innovations of 1940s film noir which, along with elements of ‘Screwball’ comedy, Nabokov adapted and utilized in Lolita. At the same time, the cinematic mode is fundamental to Nabokov’s exposition of pivotal themes of memory, mortality and the imagination in both his fictional and autobiographical work. In the late novels his deployment of cinematics extended from film and photography to television which both reflected the changing dynamics in the visual culture of contemporary America and presented an explicit revision of narrative and perceptual conventions paralleled by the New Hollywood film-makers of the early 1970s. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 1. Nabokov and Film: Positive versus Negative 7 Critical responses 7 Nabokov, “film-buff ’ 10 Nabokov ’ s camera eye 14 2. The Impact of German and Soviet Film on Nabokov’s Early Russian Fiction 16 German Expressionist film: key aspects 16 The Expressionist nightmare in Mumau’s Der Letzte Mann and Nabokov’s ‘Details of a Sunset’ 21 Mechanisms of cinematic visualization in The Eye 25 Dziga Vertov and Smurov’s kino-eye 30 Manipulation of cinematic narrative in ‘The Leonardo’ 39 Despair and the tyranny of cinematic perception 49 3. A Medium Invaded: Cinema and Cinematics in The Great Gatsby, King, Queen, Knave and Laughter in the Dark 55 Dos Passos and the camera eye 55 Fitzgerald’s dream cinema 60 Nabokov’s Russian fiction and the American film perspective 70 Cinematic motif in ‘Spring in Fialta’ 88 4. A Common Vision? Traces of Noir in Nabokov’s Russian Fiction and American Writing of the 1930s 91 American/i/m noir: definitions and interpretations 91 The Maltese Falcon and Sanctuary: seminal noir texts 99 Fate, the “double bind” and\h& femme fatale: formative noir by Nabokov and Cain 111 Definitive noir motifs in the work of Hammett, Faulkner and Cain 126 Dark illumination: the origins of noir lighting in The Big Sleep and the work of Cain, Faulkner and Nabokov 133 5. Images of Terror and Desire: Lolita and the American Cinematic Experience, 1939-1952 144 Memory as film: ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’ 145 Lolita'. Nabokov’s Hollywood novel 147 Humbert Humbert goes to the movies 149 Cinema and Humbert Humbert’s sexual consciousness 150 Film, photography and the mechanisms of memory 152 The corruption of objectivity: Humbert Humbert’s camera eye 155 Film as refuge and inspiration 163 Lolita, archetypal Hollywood heroine 166 Fate and the noir double bind 178 Movie violence and movie heroes 182 Light and dark, colours and shadows: the filmic image as revelation 188 Humbert Humbert and the American cinematic tradition 192 6. Dream Distortions: Film and Visual Deceit in *The Assistant Producer’, Bend Sinister and Ada 195 Realms of cinematic experience in ‘The Assistant Producer’ and Bend Sinister 195 Film and the dilemma of mortality in Ada 207 7. Altered Perspectives and Visual Disruption in Transparent Things and American Film of the Early 1970s 237 Transparent Things and the mechanisms of perspective 238 Signs and symbols and the problems of perception 245 Film and television dreams in Transparent Things, Americana and Being There 253 A parallel realm of existence: photography in Transparent Things 258 Imaginary boundaries, invisible barriers and the filmic perspective 260 Transparent Things and the New Hollywood 265 CONCLUSION 280 BIBLIOGRAPHY 285 ILLUSTRATIONS (All stills courtesy of British Film Institute Stills and Posters) Fig. 1 Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946) 12 Fig. 2 The Killers 13 Fig. 3 Mumau’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1919) 18 Fig. 4 Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari 19 Fig. 5 Dziga Vertov’s The Man With the Movie Camera (1929) 32 Fig. 6 The Man With the Movie Camera 36 Fig. 7 The Man With the Movie Camera 36 Fig. 8 The Man With the Movie Camera 38 Fig. 9 Cecil B. DeMille on the set of The Plainsman (1936) 64 Fig. 10: Flesh and the Devil (1927) 86 Fig. 11: Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948) 97 Fig. 12: Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari 98 Fig. 13: Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not (1944) 101 Fig. 14: Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) 102 Fig. 15: The Lady from Shanghai 113 Fig. 16: Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) 119 Fig. 17: George Marshall’s The Blue Dahlia (1946) 119 Fig. 18: Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) 120 Fig. 19: Sunset Boulevard 127 Fig. 20: Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950) 134 Fig. 21: The Lady from Shanghai 138 Fig. 22: Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953) 139 Fig. 23: Marlene Dietrich (1935) 165 Fig. 24: Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 171 Fig. 25 Bonnie and Clyde 172 Fig. 26 Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1936) 176 Fig. 27 Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941) 177 Fig. 28 Garson Kanin’s My Favourite Wife (1940) 181 Fig. 29 Sunset Boulevard 206 Fig. 30 Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) 250 Fig. 31 Vertigo 251 Fig. 32 Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) 267 Fig. 33 Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) 270 Fig. 34 Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974) 274 Fig. 35 Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) 277 Chapter One Nabokov and Film: Positive versus Negative [The movies are] a pastime for helots, a diversion for the uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries [...] a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence [...] which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a “star” in Los Angeles/ Nabokov’s treatment of cinema and cinematics in his fiction is characterized by ambivalence. In certain respects it reflects the tradition of anti-film polemic epitomized by Georges Duhamel, but in many others, it communicates a genuine fascination for the medium and a profound consideration of its significance as a legitimate art form. Nabokov’s deployment of the styles, themes and techniques of film encompasses every dimension of the cinematic experience, from the mechanical processes of exposure and projection to its potential as an alternative fictive narrative mode. Any analysis of Nabokov’s cinematic manipulations is, however, complicated by contradiction and ambiguity. Film exists in his fiction as an overt and explicit parodie dynamic — evident particularly in specific characterizations — but also, and more fundamentally, discreetly and implicitly as a pivotal aspect of Nabokov’s creative aesthetic. Critical Responses Alfred Appel Jr., in his seminal studyNabokov’s Dark Cinema, described the presence of film in Nabokov’s fiction as “the product of an anatomist’s tour of the contemporary world, rather than a cinéaste’^ total recall, a film buffs enthusiasm”.^ Concluding that Nabokov’s stance was essentially indifferent, arbitrary and negative, he proposed that Walter Benjamin quoting Georges Duhamel's Scènes de la vie future, Paris, 1930 in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) collected in H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books), 1968, p. 239. Alfred Appel Jr., Nabokov’s Dark Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press), 1974, p. 31. Hereafter Appel. 8 Nabokov was merely an “average movie-goer” who had “seen more films than he [was] able or care[d] to remember”.^ A close examination of Nabokov’s deployment of the medium in his work, however, demonstrates a far greater, more intimate and vitalinterest than Appel concedes, one which goes beyond the dimensions of mere reference or allusion, to establish it as critical in his exploration of themes of memory, mortality and the imagination. Nabokov’s response to Appel’s study was, nevertheless, essentially positive.
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