While working on Fassbinder’s movie related to Nabokov’s novel “Despair,” I couldn’t fail to notice the visual games and montages, puns and quips inserted by the screenwriter, Tom Stoppard and by Fassbinder himself. These specific puns and innuendoes cannot be found in the novel for, in the movie, the words merely “match the tone of the original” (Vincent Canby,1979). The most interesting one offers a fore glimpse of the story’s ending in one of the painted alpine scenes in a mural that can be seen at the start of the film in a German tavern. The landscape evades the regular movie-goer’s notice and so does the inclusion of its painter (Ardalion), lightly sketched in by means of a stickman at his easel. In the mural Ardalion is standing at the exact position from where he will be watching Hermann’s future arrest and be seen by Hermann in turn.* The compound image follows the spirit of V.Nabokov’s productions, but not the letter.

 

In the internet I located one of these comedic moments when the main character, Herman Herman, confuses an insurance salesman with a “Viennese quack,” with an ironical “doubling” when he asks the “ ‘doctor’ about split personality: “I’m thinking of doing a book about it. Maybe, he adds, ‘two books. [The Filmmuseum audience mock-groaned at that one.]” - http://www.dcfilmsociety.org/storyboard1209.htm.  Then, there’s his silly wife Lydia when she interprets the stock market crash in Wall Street as an accident involving the collapse of a wall, or  enjoys the slip that relates “merger” and “murder” innocently preannouncing her husband’s crime. “Merger” and “murder” may also serve as allusions to Herman’s plans to take over the identity of his double by murdering him.

Another review (from the late seventies by V. Canby) refers to Stoppard’s creative alterations clearly shoving aside V.Nabokov’s actual novel and the author’s very pointed parodies and references to Russian symbolists and to Dostoevsky**
. The reviewer writes:

 

"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, 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.[  ] "How dare you come into the room partly clothed," he yells at Lydia when she enters their bedroom dressed only in a black slip. "Off with it!" (“Have you no sense of indecency?”) [  ] 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. http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9801E0DB1139E732A25755C1A9649C946890D6CF

 

Stoppard’s and Fassbinder’s recreation of V.Nabokov’s “Despair” glosses over the author’s references to his lost country and to his original intent concerning a parody of Dostoevsky and of other Russian writers. Even the focus changes: the scenery is one of Nazi Berlin with allusions to the rise of Hitler, his armies or his massified victims parading on a conveyor belt at a chocolate factory in Prague, from where the defective figurines are selected to be discarded in a dump.  I used the expression “recreation of ” but I don’t know how the movie “Despair,with its additional words “A Journey Into Light” in the title, should be considered. Is it another “false double” of Nabokov’s novel, at least as it’s seen from a “literary” perspective (the ekphrastic representation of a novel that refers to the motion pictures, to paintings and to mirrors, in a movie that inserts glass partitions, reflections, visual exchanges and painting in the plot, or whatever…), is it an homage or an appropriation?***

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

*Fassbinder’s Germany: History, Identity, Subject by Thomas Elsaesser – “The Alpine scene in which it takes place can be recognized, not without a certain shocked surprise, as the landscape prefigured in the painting of Ardalion that we see, half-finished, on the wall of the restaurant [   ] So while in one respect Hermann ‘returns the look’ and addresses the camera head-on after having sought to appropriate it as a mirror, in another respect “Despair”, too, is a film in which the closure is achieved by leaving a substitute gaze in the frame. More ironic still, the last scene can be read in terms that make both Herman and Ardalion delegates of the author’s look, even though in the fiction, they functioned as each other’s adversaries [  ].”
Btw: what is described as “Herman and Ardalion” as “delegates of the author’s look” in the movie’s last scene (by author I suppose the critic is indicating Fassbinder, not VN) could be seen as an “authorial intrusion,” had it taken place in the novel and been conveyed by words.

 

** “The Caning of Modernist Profaners: Parody in “Despair” by Alexander Dolinin: “Numerous critics have noted that Despair is the first major work by Nabokov in which the author resorts to intertextual strategies and stratagems--to literary parody, disguised polemic, cunning play with several superimposed subtexts, and so on. "Behind Despair stands a nexus of allusions so dense, so rich, that progressing through their labyrinth would require another Holmes," wrote William C. Carroll1 in a pioneering article that tracks some very important routes inside this labyrinth leading to Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Conan Doyle.[  ]

The derogatory paronomasia semanticizing the very name of Dostoevsky as connected with "dust" and "dusk"[  ]not only injects more venom into Hermann's iconoclastic stingers but also becomes a part of the deeper semantic layers of the text controlled by the auctor rather than the narrator. Thus when Hermann in the English translation complains of being unable to free his "dusty, dusky soul" through a "refined self-torture" of writing (118), this addition to the original ex post facto becomes a defamatory authorial allusion to the soul-searching of Dostoevsky's heroes and, by implication, to the popular Western concept of the Russian (or Slavic) Soul associated with Dostoevsky's writings.[   ] For Nabokov in the 1960s, Dostoevsky was a clear and present peril, an immediate enemy, as well as a very strong irritant, and he used the English translation of Despair as a weapon in his fight; with the book he meant to lampoon the darling of the existentialist crowd and thereby to overbear the artistic authority of his inflated compatriot.[  ] Among numerous cognitive and interpretative blunders he (Hermann) makes there is one that betrays his misreading of Dostoevsky. "I do not accept your sympathy," Hermann warns his hypothetical readers, "for among you there are sure to be a few souls who will pity me--me, a poet misunderstood. "Mist, vapor ... in the mist a chord that quivers " [Dym, tuman, struna drozhit v tumane] No, that's not verse, that's from old Dusty's book Crime and Slime. Sorry: Schuld and Sühne (German edition)" (177). The gleeful narrator thinks that he is quoting (or, better, misquoting, as he changes "twangs" for "quivers") the expressions of pity and sympathy addressed by Porfiry Petrovich to Raskolnikov in Part Six of Crime and Punishment.What he does not suspect, though, is that the phrase quoted is, in its turn, an intentional paraphrase of Gogol's "Memoirs of a Madman"--a desperate cry for help reverberating in the deranged mind of a lunatic. Thus Hermann reads Dostoevsky only on the surface level, missing the artistic subtleties of the text, and the quotation backfires, undermining his inflated self-image and revealing who he really is: a pathetic madman on a par with Gogol's hero rather than a triumphant destroyer of Russian classics.” [   ] Generally speaking, in Nabokov's Ich-Erzählungs an incriminating quotation of this kind, unwittingly botched, misapplied or misunderstood by a narrator, often serves as an implanted clue that can lead the reader to the discovery of what the writer called "the inner scheme" of the story (see Selected Letters, 117). Alluding to some text, the narrator believes he is in control of all its meanings and implications but, in fact, does not realize that the quotation in itself exposes his lies, pretensions, and crimes. Other examples of this device (or, as it were, this intertextual trap) in Despair are Hermann's quotations of Pushkin's poetry [  ] In the context of the novel, Dostoevsky, together with Pushkin, represents Russian literary heritage abused and misapprehended by the arrogant impostor, and hence cannot be the target of Nabokov's parody. Like his paper on The Brothers Karamazov, the Russian version of Despair seems to attack not Dostoevsky but "dostoevshchina," that is the strong Dostoevskian trend in contemporary Russian literature [   ] If in the English version of Despair Hermann notices with horror that his writing has become "too literary ... smacking of thumb-screw conversations in those stage taverns where Dostoevsky is at home" (98), the Russian original defines the stock conversation scene in a slightly different way: "butaforskie kabaki imeni Dostoevskogo," that is "taverns named after Dostoevsky." This discrepancy is significant insofar as it reflects a very important change in parodic targeting of English Despair--a shift from the progeny to the progenitor, from the contemporary "dostoevshchina" to Dostoevsky.[  ] The entrapment of Hermann in Bely's stock images and situations, in their turn derivative of Dostoevsky, reflects and comments upon the depravities of his insane creative mind. Unable to free itself from secondhand clichés, stale fancies and solipsistic platitudes, Hermann's artistic imagination generates only an eclectic mixture of incongruous imitations, counterfeits, fake "doubles"--the pseudo-innovative hodgepodge in which Leonid Andreev's "dostoevshchina" commingles with Andrei Bely's self-conscious fictions, and Briusov's or Savinkov's trite narcissism merges with plots of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and tabloid journalism.”

 

*** Returning to Thomas Elsaesser’s book on Fassbinder:Despair is an art film, in so far as its self-reflexivity, its use of Ardalion’s ‘bad painting’ as a frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame, are a comment on ‘representation’ from within the perspectival-illusionist paradigm; yet it is an anti-art film in so far as the impasse of Hermann’s ‘coming out’ demands a more radical re-thinking of this specular paradigm itself. From one side of the divide, Hermann’s fate is one of ‘despair’, but from another, it is ‘eine Reise ins Licht’,a journey into light [  ] In “Despair”, the realization that Hermann may be leaving the space of the narrative is undercut by the knowledge that he is still inside the world of Ardalion, another space of representation: there is no ‘outside’ to this ‘inside’…” (Murder,Merger, Suicide, p.90)

 

Google Search
the archive
Contact
the Editors
NOJ Zembla Nabokv-L
Policies
Subscription options AdaOnline NSJ Ada Annotations L-Soft Search the archive VN Bibliography Blog

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.