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Re: Nabokov and Freud
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Concerning Nabokov and Freud, I’ve enjoyed the lively and instructive
contributions by Jerry Friedman, Anthony Stadlen, and Jansy Mello. Reading them,
I was reminded of an appraisal of Freud almost directly the opposite of
VN's--i.e., the ideas expressed in Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” the
best-known lines of which are these:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion
The entire poem is available here:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543
According to Jenefer Shute, in an essay titled "Nabokov and Freud," it was not
merely Freud but this "whole climate of opinion" that VN was railing against.
Shute’s essay, which is available to anyone willing to dig it out from the
sample pages of The Garland Companion to Nabokov at Amazon, makes a good
companion to the essay by Durantaye mentioned recently by Jansy. As I read her,
Shute’s main contention is that Freud is Nabokov's tar baby. The harder he tries
to free himself, the more tightly the two are stuck together. Referring to the
narrator of "Tyrants Destroyed," Shute writes:
At length, it dawns on him that his mission has already been accomplished:
"Rereading my chronicle, I see that, in my efforts to make him terrifying, I
have only made him ridiculous, thereby destroying him--an old, proven method."
(36) Nabokov evidently believes that he has engaged such a strategy against
Freud--but has his endless scorn served to dominate and displace psychoanalytic
discourse, or has it, on the contrary, only confirmed Freud's omnipresence? (p.
414)
VN’s attempt to laugh Freud out of existence fails, according to Shute, and she
ends by saying:
Thus 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, as Durentaye suggests,
ill-informed and overly general in a way that VN himself otherwise deplores.
What's worse, 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. On this particular topic, he is seldom if ever funny, though he tries
so hard to be. But when he tries to be serious (e.g., in characterizing Freud as
promoting totalitarianism), things are even worse--he is so obviously
wrongheaded that nobody with any sense could believe him. On psychobabble in
general (most of which is only loosely connected to Freud), he fares better, but
seldom achieves anything to match the level of satire routinely found on (say)
the Cheers and Frasier TV shows.
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. And
yet he rages on, and on, and on. This leads me to think that his fear and hatred
of Freud was very narrowly based and that Jansy, in her message of February 6,
may have hit on the crucial detail in her message of February 6: “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. Only something like this, it seems to me--a threat of
this magnitude--would account for the depth and irrationality of VN's rage
against Freud. 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 always possible, of course, that VN’s whole thing about Freud was just
another bit of extravagant leg-pulling. In which case I suggest we all take a
deep breath, relax, and sing together this little ditty by Dorothy Parker:
So come dwell a while on that distant isle
In the brilliant tropic weather
Where a Freud in need is a Freud indeed,
We'll always be Jung together.
Anyone wishing to read Parker’s “poem” in its entirety can access it at the site
(above) where Auden’s famous poem appears. It’s worth noting, though, that under
the pressure of neuroscience, the medical model of mental illness, and new, ever
more sophisticated studies of infant life and development, the teachings of
Freud, Jung, Lacan, et al. have themselves been steadily crumbling away, at
least in this country. The climate of opinion in psychology, if not yet in
literary criticism, is changing fast. 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. Or, as
VN himself somewhere says, in the future people will have a whole new set of
things to be wrong about. Words to that effect.
Jim Twiggs
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contributions by Jerry Friedman, Anthony Stadlen, and Jansy Mello. Reading them,
I was reminded of an appraisal of Freud almost directly the opposite of
VN's--i.e., the ideas expressed in Auden's “In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” the
best-known lines of which are these:
if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,
to us he is no more a person
now but a whole climate of opinion
The entire poem is available here:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15543
According to Jenefer Shute, in an essay titled "Nabokov and Freud," it was not
merely Freud but this "whole climate of opinion" that VN was railing against.
Shute’s essay, which is available to anyone willing to dig it out from the
sample pages of The Garland Companion to Nabokov at Amazon, makes a good
companion to the essay by Durantaye mentioned recently by Jansy. As I read her,
Shute’s main contention is that Freud is Nabokov's tar baby. The harder he tries
to free himself, the more tightly the two are stuck together. Referring to the
narrator of "Tyrants Destroyed," Shute writes:
At length, it dawns on him that his mission has already been accomplished:
"Rereading my chronicle, I see that, in my efforts to make him terrifying, I
have only made him ridiculous, thereby destroying him--an old, proven method."
(36) Nabokov evidently believes that he has engaged such a strategy against
Freud--but has his endless scorn served to dominate and displace psychoanalytic
discourse, or has it, on the contrary, only confirmed Freud's omnipresence? (p.
414)
VN’s attempt to laugh Freud out of existence fails, according to Shute, and she
ends by saying:
Thus 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, as Durentaye suggests,
ill-informed and overly general in a way that VN himself otherwise deplores.
What's worse, 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. On this particular topic, he is seldom if ever funny, though he tries
so hard to be. But when he tries to be serious (e.g., in characterizing Freud as
promoting totalitarianism), things are even worse--he is so obviously
wrongheaded that nobody with any sense could believe him. On psychobabble in
general (most of which is only loosely connected to Freud), he fares better, but
seldom achieves anything to match the level of satire routinely found on (say)
the Cheers and Frasier TV shows.
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. And
yet he rages on, and on, and on. This leads me to think that his fear and hatred
of Freud was very narrowly based and that Jansy, in her message of February 6,
may have hit on the crucial detail in her message of February 6: “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. Only something like this, it seems to me--a threat of
this magnitude--would account for the depth and irrationality of VN's rage
against Freud. 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 always possible, of course, that VN’s whole thing about Freud was just
another bit of extravagant leg-pulling. In which case I suggest we all take a
deep breath, relax, and sing together this little ditty by Dorothy Parker:
So come dwell a while on that distant isle
In the brilliant tropic weather
Where a Freud in need is a Freud indeed,
We'll always be Jung together.
Anyone wishing to read Parker’s “poem” in its entirety can access it at the site
(above) where Auden’s famous poem appears. It’s worth noting, though, that under
the pressure of neuroscience, the medical model of mental illness, and new, ever
more sophisticated studies of infant life and development, the teachings of
Freud, Jung, Lacan, et al. have themselves been steadily crumbling away, at
least in this country. The climate of opinion in psychology, if not yet in
literary criticism, is changing fast. 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. Or, as
VN himself somewhere says, in the future people will have a whole new set of
things to be wrong about. Words to that effect.
Jim Twiggs
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/