Another "part",  part II? 

 
TK: "Connections are important, but so are distinctions – and all connections should be understood in their context. Otherwise, yes, we run the risk of the allegorical frame of mind with which Freudianism is, in the popular imagination, associated. It is that black and white symbolic state of mind which Nabokov portrays in Luzhin. And ...Luzhin is not a good model for life or art. If by ‘curiosity’ one means this allegorical temperament, or the failure to recognise proportion, context...I must insist that though it is – to Nabokov, and for what it is worth, to me – an essential part of life, reading, and art – it is also a faculty which can dangerously disassemble the living texture of art and life – and thus become not invigorating but in a sense deadening and obsessive...I did not mean to suggest that the love of details is not essential to Nabokov’s aesthetic and view of what is important in life – to non-readers as well as reader – and that is why I listed ‘happiness’ alongside poetry and reading."

 

JM: When discussing "freudianism" I sometimes forget to restrict my comments to Nabokov's own views, and to the time in which we assume he gave up reading Freud directly  (i.e., when - from the standpoint of "popular imagination" - he rallies against a freudian's "allegorical frame of mind"). Therefore, I wouldn't amplify his views to encompass Luzhin and his "black and white symbolic state of mind."  

Indeed, we read about Luzhin's mad obsession with chess, that he transforms his entire surroundings into chess-boards and interprets his life as a series of clever or mistaken moves over black and white squares. Luzhin is alienated from external objects, people and himself ...but what has that to do with "symbols"?  Such "symbols" as those we encounter in his trajectory, in Nabokov's novel, must remain like beauty, "in the eye of the beholder," for Luzhin, himself, is completely insulated against them.

A modern view will find Luzhin as the kind of person who is deprived from subjectivity, exzctly because he's been engulfed the symbolic. He will use codes, rules, even words without cutting himself off from their operations. Luzhin functions like a very clever parrot, or perhaps, like an advanced computer ( with the disadvantage of having a body of emotions, mainly distress), while his cultural discourse flows, uncritically and unmodified, through his mouth, without effectively reaching him. He is a slave of the symbolic (in Lacan's acception of the word), as it may also happen, to a lesser degree, when a person (hopefully, not a freudian) cannot discern texture and text, and looks uncuriously at the world because is is carrying a "freudian dictionary of symbols" in his hands (why did Karshan focus on curiosity as being expressive of an "allegorical temperament" beats me).

Karshan concludes that "Connections are important, but so are distinctions – and all connections should be understood in their context."  and his caveat is wondrously well-put. It's a sentence  to remember, always ( but sometimes so difficult to follow).