| Sorry if this repeats stuff, I've only been intermittently following this strand. I just wanted to point these things out. I think I would agree with Twiggs that Nabokov's understanding of Freud is about as deep as mine, which amounts to taking a quick dip in a few of the more famous texts--The Interpretation of Dreams, Civilization and its Discontents--girdled by a great deal of distortive secondary literary and cinematic criticism. I remember somewhere an interviewer asking him specifically what he had read and Nabokov smoothly blithing past it. Therefore the Freud he derides seems really to be a pop Freud, with its vague use of jargon used to confidently pour even the most complex or the rawest elements of experience into a one- size-fits-all mold. I've just been rereading Lolita, which contains perhaps N.'s best send up of this type of Freudianism, not only in terms of the way it plays with notions about childhood trauma and recurrent fetishized deviance but especially in Miss Pratt's--the Beardsly school's headmistress--parent-teacher conference with Humbert (pp.180-185, American Library Edition) in which she amusingly asserts with innocent hygienic bluster that Lolita is "still shuttling...between the anal and genital zones of development." (p.181). Even though she uses such sexualized terminology it seems totally divorced from the allure of either orifice. Almost inadvertently she has put her Freudian finger on the problem with the girl but instead comes to the conclusion that little Dolly Haze is a repressed prig! Therefore I would argue against Twiggs' thoughtful idea that N.'s prob with Freud was with its lack of an Otherworld. Nor do I think, as has also been suggested, that he was afraid or "resisting" in a psychological sense ugly truths he could not face (though he was clearly put off by the dirty interpretations of things he wanted to be "innocent"). I myself am no otherworlder; what I objected to in the Freud I was always hearing about (long before I read Nabokov) was the way in which it seemed to be being claimed that human behavior was either a mask for unacknowledged sexual impulses or a tenuous game of "Mother May I" used to socially to navigate the ID. Not to mention the idea that dreams could somehow be cataloged into a series of images whose meaning somehow existed objectively external to the dreamer divorced of any kind of individual mental context. Or that behaviors could be reduced to titled types culled from classical literature. All of which seemed a kind of crude bourgeois attempt to fit people into deterministic cookie-cut slots intended to justify an unjust society, and saying that anyone who didn't conform was just somehow neurotically at odds with the way people had very clearly been designed (sexuality and genderness became two of the biggest billy clubs to beat people with, see Edmund White or Betty Friedan; or left handedness; or Asthma, see Proust). It's the distortions of Darwinism all over again, which Nabokov so famously railed against, explaining why he always referred to Freud as a philistine. And actually that article Twiggs suggested, in its description of how Freud dealt with Da Vinci, rather confirmed Nabokov's take, even if he never made mention of it. --- On Wed, 2/9/11, Jansy <jansy@AETERN.US> wrote:
|
| Search the archive | Contact the Editors | Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" |
| Visit Zembla | View Nabokv-L Policies | Manage subscription options |