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Re: [ NABOKOV-LIST]... the dead center of the year in Pale Fire
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Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 14:01:25 -0300From: jansy@AETERN.USSubject: Re: [NABOKV-L] [ NABOKOV-LIST]... the dead center of the year in Pale FireTo: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Jansy: VN's explicit opinions about psychoanalysis were apparently informed only by his contact with Freud's very early writings and, probably, by the "utilitarian Freudians". Therefore, as I see it, he actually was a true Freudian inspite of himself.
LH: Could you please tell me where you found that information; I would like to read more about the subject.However that may be, I think it's important not to dismiss or deny VN's lifelong opposition to Freud, even if one "believes" in psychoanalysis; otherwise, all discussion is impossible.
Jansy: "[...]How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality's dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point."
LH: A very mysterious and dificult sentence. If I understand correctly, VN means that our awareness of being aware of reality's dreamlike nature is NOT a dream or a built-in hallucination since even a mirage refers to a vanishing point; therefore, this point exists, however elusive and vanishing; we can try the theorem with different X's. For example, if Hugh Person is a mirage, he nevertheless refers to a vanishing point, the extra textual character! Or , if our life, our reality is a mirage, it nevertheless refers to a vanishing point, the unfathomable beyond.
Laurence Hochard
J. Aisenberg: I have no idea about whether or not N."spinning universe derived from T.S. Elliot, but if it did, that would certainly be inconsistent since he never tired of explaining how second rate he was and building parodies of his work into his own.
JM (to JA): Perhaps both Eliot and Nabokov reached the same idea about the spinning universe circling a "dead"center, therefore VN might not really be referring to Eliot.
And yet, why not? VN rejected many of Henry James' writings, as he did with James Joyce's - but he also praised highly one or two of James' sentences and Joyce's works ( mainly Ulysses), without embracing their entire oeuvre. VN lovingly read Cervantes before he wrote an outstanding book of "Lectures on Don Quixote" but he also expressed devastating opinions about both Quixote and Cervantes in his interviews.
We cannot quote one sentence from a VN novel against another sentence of his from a different novel, there are inconsistencies because context is fundamental.
(to LH): Nabokov was as close to certain "truths" as, in my opinion, was Freud. So, it is important to separate what he and Freud had in common concerning the "unconscious processes and language" and his (dated) denunciation of Freud's psychoanalysis although these were "grounded and deeply consistent with the rest of his work and is even instrumental in the very structure of many of his stories."
Nabokov wrote:
RLSK: "I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows"TT: "Human life can be compared to a person dancing in a variety of forms around his own self [...]
Pale Fire: "How to keep sane in spiral types of space" ( line 559)
& more items from Transparent Things: [...] thus the vegetables encircled a boy in his dream[...] gradually forming a transparent ring of banded colors around a dead person or planet. [...]How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality's dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point...
From the examples quoted above, although this is rather risky ( it demands many more hours of work instead of a short email to the VN-List...), I concluded that VN was, like Rimbaud [in his letter à Georges Izambard (871):" Il s'agit d'arriver à l'inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens. Les souffrances sont énormes, mais il faut être fort, être né poète, et je me suis reconnu poète. Ce n'est pas du tout ma faute. C'est faux de dire: Je pense: on devrait dire: On me pense. - Pardon du jeu de mots. -Je est un autre. Tant pis pour le bois qui se trouve violon, et nargue aux inconscients, qui ergotent sur ce qu'ils ignorent tout à fait!»] dealing with a very modern apprehension of the Freudian "ego" (das Ich ) considered as a "dead center" or a structuring "a vanishing point", in contrast with what any individual artist expresses through his work as a painter, musician or writer, his "symptomatic consistency" ( Lacan's "le Sujet", with a bar over the "S")
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