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Pale Fire: Shades of "Psycho"
----- Original Message -----
From: Rodney Welch
To: NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 11:24 PM
Subject: Pale Fire: Shades of "Psycho"
Permit if you will a strange comparison that occurred to me in a recent reading of Pale Fire.
I found a passage in Shade's poem that directly echoes a very famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, which appeared in 1960, just two years before the book's publication.
As viewers will remember, the resolution of the film is that the psychotic killer Norman (Anthony Perkins) had a split personality -- he had killed his mother, and then, out of guilt, tried to bring her back from the dead (if only in his mind) by giving her part of his personality. When he was attracted to a woman, the "mother" side of him turned homicidal. This personality finally overtakes him.
The end is one of the most chilling images in American cinema: Norman is seated in a chair in a cold, blank, empty room at the local courthouse, talking to himself, in his mother's voice, watching a fly crawl on his hand. Knowing he is being watched, he thinks: "Let them see what kind of person I am -- not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They will see and they will say `Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly.'"
Could Nabokov -- an unabashed Hitchcock fan -- have had this image in mind when he was composing lines199-202 of John Shade's poem, when he's recalling Aunt Maud in the sanitarium in Pinedale?
"There she'd sit/In the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit/Upon her dress and then upon her wrist./Her mind kept fading in the growing mist." Bit of a Norman Bates moment, isn't it?
Please keep in mind I'm only referring to the image -- not any of the other split personality stuff (although, heaven knows, there seems to be a lot of that going on in the book too.)
--Rodney Welch
Columbia, SC
----- Original Message -----
From: Rodney Welch
To: NABOKV-L@listserv.ucsb.edu
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 11:24 PM
Subject: Pale Fire: Shades of "Psycho"
Permit if you will a strange comparison that occurred to me in a recent reading of Pale Fire.
I found a passage in Shade's poem that directly echoes a very famous scene from Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho, which appeared in 1960, just two years before the book's publication.
As viewers will remember, the resolution of the film is that the psychotic killer Norman (Anthony Perkins) had a split personality -- he had killed his mother, and then, out of guilt, tried to bring her back from the dead (if only in his mind) by giving her part of his personality. When he was attracted to a woman, the "mother" side of him turned homicidal. This personality finally overtakes him.
The end is one of the most chilling images in American cinema: Norman is seated in a chair in a cold, blank, empty room at the local courthouse, talking to himself, in his mother's voice, watching a fly crawl on his hand. Knowing he is being watched, he thinks: "Let them see what kind of person I am -- not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching. They will see and they will say `Why, she wouldn't even harm a fly.'"
Could Nabokov -- an unabashed Hitchcock fan -- have had this image in mind when he was composing lines199-202 of John Shade's poem, when he's recalling Aunt Maud in the sanitarium in Pinedale?
"There she'd sit/In the glassed sun and watch the fly that lit/Upon her dress and then upon her wrist./Her mind kept fading in the growing mist." Bit of a Norman Bates moment, isn't it?
Please keep in mind I'm only referring to the image -- not any of the other split personality stuff (although, heaven knows, there seems to be a lot of that going on in the book too.)
--Rodney Welch
Columbia, SC