Jean-Pierre Melville IS Vladimir Nabokov IN Jean-Luc Godard's 'Breathless'!!!

We all know that genius director and New Wave godfather Jean-Pierre Melville makes a hugely memorable appearance in Jean-Luc Godard's neither particularly good nor influential (...psych!) 1959 debut feature Breathless...but do we all know that Melville based his mandarin novelist character Parvulesco on none other than Vladimir Nabokov? It's true!

In his invaluable 1974 book Nabokov's Dark Cinema, Alfred Appel Jr. explains: "...Melville appears in the satirical role of a novelist named Parvulesco (from the French parvenir ['to attain, to reach, to succeed'] and parvis [poetical: 'hall, temple']) who is interviewed by Patricia (Jean Seberg). 'I had seen Nabokov in a televised interview,' says Melville, 'and being like him, subtle, pretentious, pedantic, a bit cynical, naive, etc., I based the character on him' (from Rui Nogueira's interview-book, Melville on Melville [New York, 1971], p. 76)." And boy, I wish the English-language edition of Nogueira's book were available for less than 80 smackers right about now, but I guess I could work on improving my French...

A few points: I'm on board for much of the real Melville's characterization of V.N....only not the "pretentious" part. No way was V.N. pretentious—everything he pronounced on he knew about, deeper than his interviewers dreamed of. But given his meticulous pre-interview preparation—V.N. considered the off-the-cuff format of most modern interviews anathema—one could see how Melville might have perceived V.N. as pretentious.

In point of fact, the interview Parvulesco submits to—press conference style, at Orly airport—is the sort of thing that Nabokov never would have even conceived of sitting still for. Nabokov's antipathy for nearly all things German might well have precluded the admiration for Rilke expressed by Parvulesco. Most of the questions directed at Melville's character are for the most part of the kind that Nabokov would have dismissed out of hand, although V.N. did, in —around the times of both Lolita and Ada—sit still for a number of variations on the "what's the difference between eroticism and love?" query put forward in Breathless. But Melville does achieve a great approximation of Nabokovian sang-froid overall, and his answer to Seberg's question "What is your greatest ambition?"—"To become immortal, and then die"—is indeed worthy of the master himself.

As you might have gleaned, I'm about halfway through the new Criterion double-disc set of Breathless. Like its new Days of Heaven, this is another Criterion hit-out-of-the-park. I'm swooning, practically.

Comments

[Tim Lucas]

I'm glad to find you as well schooled on the great VN as on things cinematic, Glenn. I've read all of Nabokov myself, and a good deal about him, but I didn't detect a hint of Volodya in Melville's performance, though I can see what he means in retrospect; however, after seeing Melville speak as himself elsewhere on the disc, I did see a good deal of the real Melville in that performance!

It is such a delicious set. You'll love the French television documentary on the second disc -- Godard's cameos are a riot.

[Ray]

One more nuance that may be lurking in the name "Parvulesco" is its hint of the word "parvenu"--an upstart, someone who's managed to rise above his social origins without acquiring the manners or polish or education of the higher class. The example that comes to mind is Jed Clampett--but without the loveableness. Could Melville have wanted to hint at these qualities in Nabokov? Maybe there's a hint of condescension at Nabokov's origin as a mere Russian rather than a fully cultured Frenchman?

Maybe the word to use is not "pretentious" so much as "pompous," and Nabokov could fairly be accused of that--not in his fiction, but in the sweeping and absolute pronouncements he was prone to make about other people's fiction and/or scholarship. Rereading his "Lectures on Literature" lately, I found myself feeling embarassed for having so admired them years ago, precisely because they're so full of such self-satisfied certainty. Again, I hasten to repeat, I'm not accusing Nabokov's fiction of any of this.

And to return to the name Parvulesco--is Ionesco hovering in the background there?

[G. Kenny]

I don't know if Melville was THAT much of a snob, Ray—there wasn't much that could be considered "nouveau"-anything about V.N.'s family background. I half-agree with you on the lectures—I guess you can either cringe or laugh at the self-satisfaction. But the attention to detail—the way he lays out the grounds for "Mansfield Park" and identifies Josef K. in Kafka's "Metamorphosis" as a dung beetle—make the lectures' eye-roll-inducing tone more tolerable...

[bill]

There's a line in "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" that I always loved, and which is the opposite of pretentious OR pompous. Unfortunately, I can't remember it verbatim, and the context is very vague (I read the book a long time ago)but essentially the narrator is criticizing a certain kind of reader, but then hastens to add that he is not referring to readers of mystery novels, after which he says, "God bless their pure hearts". Or something like that. Boy, that's vague. Anyone remember the line better than I do?

[Trip]

I have a copy of the Nogueira book. I might be able to get it copied so you'd at least have the text.