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Re: Nabokov and Freud
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Jim Twiggs: "Concerning Nabokov and Freud, I’ve enjoyed the lively and instructive contributions by Jerry Friedman, Anthony Stadlen, and Jansy Mello...According to Jenefer Shute..."it was not merely Freud but this "whole climate of opinion" that VN was railing against."...Freud is Nabokov's tar baby...VN’s attempt to laugh Freud out of existence fails, according to Shute:" ...Nabokov's claims to a pure textuality, a discourse somehow impervious to vulgar constraints such as "history" or "ideas," can be taken no more seriously than his claim to have banished Freud. Indeed, the very methods employed to assert the text's independence are those that undermine it; parody and polemic point insistently to the hors-texte they are designed to deny. Far from articulating an absolute freedom, they inscribe instead the horizons of a particular historical moment and the limits of authorial power." (p. 419). My own view is that VN's attacks on Freud are... ill-informed and overly general ...most of the attacks, many of which amount to little more than adolescent name-calling, are not up to the standard of comedy that we expect from VN... when he tries to be serious (e.g., in characterizing Freud as promoting totalitarianism), things are even worse--he is so obviously wrongheaded...On psychobabble in general (most of which is only loosely connected to Freud), he fares better...The history of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy contains much to be laughed at and appalled by, but VN seems not to know or care about the particulars. ...his fear and hatred of Freud was very narrowly based and that Jansy...may have hit on the crucial detail: “There’s no ‘hereafter’, no transmigrating souls and no ‘metempsychosis’ to be read in Freud and his dire vision of ‘eternity.” What I'm suggesting is that if Freud's basic world view--a from-the-bottom-up naturalistic view--is correct, then VN's "metaphysics" is exposed as a quaint piece of wishful thinking...The fact that VN himself sometimes doubted what he so dearly, almost desperately hoped for--a life beyond this one--would only strengthen his resistance to Freud’s naturalism. It’s worth noting, though, that under the pressure of neuroscience, the medical model of mental illness...the teachings of Freud, Jung, Lacan, et al. have themselves been steadily crumbling away, at least in this country.In fifty years’ time, rightly or wrongly, a very different vocabulary of psychobabble will have taken over, at which point Freud himself will likely seem as quaint as VN’s hopes for an Otherworld."
JM: Just before Jim Twiggs' message reached me, mentioning the word "psychobabble" twice, Alexey Sklyarenko warned me that he "meant Isaak Babel (1894-1940), the author Konarmia ("Red Cavalry")..." in his posting about boredom and a "Freud list." I should have made it more explicit when I jumped from Isaak Babel onto a towering Babel of psychobabels.
Jim's thoughtful (and often funny and informed) posting almost tempted me a return to Freud but, in my view, he has already stressed the most important points in connection to Nabokov's Freud ("adolescent name-calling," "wrongheadedness"..) and its often contagious quality. Fyodor ("Father's butterflies") remembers that he'd overheard a snippet of his father's words: "Yes, of course it was in vain that I said 'by chance,' and by chance that I said 'in vain'. " It's a pity that we'll never learn what came next.
Jim's suggestion that Freud's vision of eternity exposes "VN's 'metaphysics' as a quaint piece of wishful thinking," and that Nabokov, himself, was uncertain about his hopes in a hereafter, is confirmed when we return to Nabokov's explanation ( in a recently quoted Jan.1966 interview) about "why he detests Freud": "the creative artist is an exile in his study...He's quite alone there...As soon as he's together with somebody else he shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody else." The problem lies in that language, even when it's used in the solitary confinement of a barred cell, also entails in communication. It engenders meaning or, as in art, the endlessly driving power of significations.
Nabokov probably didn't read Freud's later works ( as for example, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", where traumas, the death drive and the compulsion to repeat are introduced), but he intuited something of the same when, already in "Pale Fire,"he toyed with a lapidar inscription: "Et in Arcadia Ego" (Even in Paradise we find "death" or "dementia"...).
Plato, Freud, Shade, Derrida, Lacan - and all that crowd - shall probably seem extremely "quaint" in the near-future when other, even simpler, hopes are equally dashed, such as "authorial voice," "individuality," "freedom."
...................................
* No need to bother about any open forums...what for? Besides..."WHAT is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. "
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JM: Just before Jim Twiggs' message reached me, mentioning the word "psychobabble" twice, Alexey Sklyarenko warned me that he "meant Isaak Babel (1894-1940), the author Konarmia ("Red Cavalry")..." in his posting about boredom and a "Freud list." I should have made it more explicit when I jumped from Isaak Babel onto a towering Babel of psychobabels.
Jim's thoughtful (and often funny and informed) posting almost tempted me a return to Freud but, in my view, he has already stressed the most important points in connection to Nabokov's Freud ("adolescent name-calling," "wrongheadedness"..) and its often contagious quality. Fyodor ("Father's butterflies") remembers that he'd overheard a snippet of his father's words: "Yes, of course it was in vain that I said 'by chance,' and by chance that I said 'in vain'. " It's a pity that we'll never learn what came next.
Jim's suggestion that Freud's vision of eternity exposes "VN's 'metaphysics' as a quaint piece of wishful thinking," and that Nabokov, himself, was uncertain about his hopes in a hereafter, is confirmed when we return to Nabokov's explanation ( in a recently quoted Jan.1966 interview) about "why he detests Freud": "the creative artist is an exile in his study...He's quite alone there...As soon as he's together with somebody else he shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody else." The problem lies in that language, even when it's used in the solitary confinement of a barred cell, also entails in communication. It engenders meaning or, as in art, the endlessly driving power of significations.
Nabokov probably didn't read Freud's later works ( as for example, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", where traumas, the death drive and the compulsion to repeat are introduced), but he intuited something of the same when, already in "Pale Fire,"he toyed with a lapidar inscription: "Et in Arcadia Ego" (Even in Paradise we find "death" or "dementia"...).
Plato, Freud, Shade, Derrida, Lacan - and all that crowd - shall probably seem extremely "quaint" in the near-future when other, even simpler, hopes are equally dashed, such as "authorial voice," "individuality," "freedom."
...................................
* No need to bother about any open forums...what for? Besides..."WHAT is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. "
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/