EDNote: For the record, the question Carolyn is addressing was posed by
Jansy to me; I'm very sorry to say that I do not have an answer either!
~SB
On
Mar 10, 2009, at 6:21 PM, SB wrote: I read somewhere that VN was
acquainted with Charcot's experiments with hysterics. He also seems to
have made reference to the famous umbrella experiment by Bernheim, but
I cannot remember where and in what context. Do you know?
Dear SB,
I
can't answer your question, but in the context of Charcot and Bernheim,
both of whom used hypnosis extensively in their work, I would like to
remind the list of a few of the references to hypnosis in PF. In the
archives I found this speculation of my own:
"The subject of madness in PF has not yet
been addressed [this was written in 2002]. If John Shade is mad then the
commentary to the poem
takes on another possible interpretation. As has been noticed from the
beginning, Kinbote's notes do not annotate the poem but do bear some
relationship to it. The form of those notes reminds me of a technique
in psychological analysis called free association. If John Shade has
gone mad and has been institutionalized, could the "commentary" not be
a record of his therapy? His therapist, in other words, uses snippits
of the poem to induce Shade/Kinbote to free-associate, and the result
is the "Commentary". There are several references to mesmerism/hypnosis
in the novel, including a trilby worn by Gradus. Is Shade under
hypnosis? autoneurypnological?"
To
this I would add that Kinbote's annotation to l. 949 is actually
addressed to a doctor. Also note Nabokov's neologism
"autoneurypnological" shows that he was aware of a very early work on
hypnosis, Neurypnology or the Rationale of
Nervous Sleep (London, 1843) by James Braid, who later
coined the simpler word "hypnosis."
Carolyn