In the late seventies, after I first laid my
hands on Nabokov's original novels in English, I became an addict. At the
same time there was a nagging question: "why do I like Nabokov's writing so
much," for its answer would certainly reveal a little about who I
am.
Eric Naiman's book
"Nabokov, perversely" came as a healthy shock.
Naiman's first chapter made me feel
as an outsider because of its predominantly male reference to sensual
thrills and innuendoes. Then, in the closing paragraph of the
second, there seemed to be an opening:
"By the time of his next book, Nabokov will
have developed a more psychoanalytically 'mature,' erotic passion for his new
language[...]melancholic longing will have taken the place of disgutst, enabling
Nabokov to write an enticingly shocking, much more palatable work. As a
part of the process of his second linguistic maturation, Vladimir Nabokov would
finally reach a wide audience as a great American writer, but only when he had
rediscovered girls." (N,P.73);
Would there be a place for "Little Lulu,"
then, together with those chumming Clubhouse fellers?
However, Naiman's chapter, the one
preceding "Bend Sinister" had been about "A filthy look at Shakespeare's
Lolita." (perhaps Shakespeare is to blame?) Similarly, at the end of Chapter 4,
on "Hermophobia", I found out that the "good reader of Nabokov reads
queerly, warily, with a strange mixture of agression and submission, lashing out
at his colleagues while fearing and welcoming the attentions of an author who
thinks the best readers allow themselves to be taken from behind."
After jumping over several chapters, I
stopped again, this time on "The Meaning of 'Life'," when the author
describes how, between "the 1920s and the 1960s, Nabokov, perhaps through
Shakespeare, had discovered a new meaning of 'life'," with renewed captions
from "Lolita," and "Pale
Fire. "King Queen Knave" were examined in more detail, confronting the
Russian original with Nabokov's later translation "to
permit a still breathing body to enjoy certain innate capacities... the
'coarseness' and the 'lewdness' ...have of course been
preserved."(235) Many pages later, Naiman quotes Michael Wood: "What has happened here is that the
'idiotically sly novelist' of old has become the idiotically friendly punster;
but behind both of them lurks a more interesting figure, a writer who cannot
hear a word as saying only one thing if there is a chance that it can be got to
say more, by whatever contortions of tongue or syntax."(p.249) for, as
Naiman states, "KQKn" "sets impressive standards for lexical
nymphomania and satyriasis.
He asks: "At what point does the constant punning sexual banter become a form
of pathology? [...]when we do tire is that a sign of weakness or
of health? [...] throughout the novel, the characters find words exciting, and
this is obviously a thrill Nabokov hopes his reader shares. Moments where words
are defined, discussed, and fondled are offered as the good reader's equivalent
of voyeur scenes in pornography, where a character within the story or film
serving as the viewer's or reader's stand-in watches sexual activity and becomes
aroused."(p.251).
For Naiman, in ADA, "Van is arguing against
an iconic, Freudian code in favor of a verbal, Shakespearean
one..."..."Shakespeare's use of language was playful, literary, and focused on
the conscious deployment of language, while Freud's was pseudoscientific and
always had the unconscious in its sights. Van's comments indicate an awareness
that the two codes are, in a way, competitors."(252).
Fortunately I'm not "that" kind of a Freudian
and no good reader of Shakespeare - so there are no conflicting codes
looming over me and my love for words, English words, French,
Portuguese, German words... Actually, there are no such "codes"
and, although I was led to conclude that Nabokov's unceasing
punnings were consciously and deliberately contrived* in ways that risked
to turn plot and texture, for me, into a competitive
verbal shitty waste, fortunately ( again
because I'm not that kind of a Nabokov-Freudian), I was able to reformulate at
least one item, related to non
"phallo-centered"enjoyment. It's related
to Nabokov's synesthesia, his colored words, sensuous sounds and variegated
texture, tingling all over the skin as they reach one from his
hyper-mnemoniac's childhood recollections, artistically rendered.
What Nabokov reveals to me is not something from
a Freudian "repressed unconscious," although it has been long lost in
my case. Nabokov offers a perverse world - but its perversity derives
from a sensitive young boy's epiphanies, something
that occurs in any normal "polymorphous perverse" stage**, and is
shared by boys of both sexes: a world of explosive thrills, sexual
intimations and explorings, joyful profanities, with undifferentiated
stimuli acting over the entire body/soul.
As I see it
Nabokov has an uncanny power to recreate these emotions
and latent, but forgotten sensations. As for the more adult seminal enjoyments to be teased out
from literary Nabokoviana...well, I still have a lot of pages to
read about them in Naiman's book.
........................................................................................................................
*In his introduction to Bunny/Volodya's
correspondence, Karlinski mentioned the special place "punning" has in Russian
(his exact words were quoted in the Nab-List some time ago and perhaps we
can use them to distinguish Russian from any other language's insistence and joy
with puns).
**- Wiki summary (open to corrections until
now): "Polymorphous perversity is a psychoanalytic term for human ability to
gain sexual gratification outside socially normative sexual behaviors. Sigmund
Freud used this term to describe the normal sexual disposition of humans from
infancy to about age five[...] Freud theorized that humans are born with
unfocused sexual libidinal drives, deriving sexual pleasure from any part of the
body. The objects and modes of sexual satisfaction are multifarious, directed at
every object that might provide pleasure. Polymorphous perverse sexuality
continues from infancy through about age five, progressing through three
distinct developmental stages: the oral stage, anal stage, and phallic stage.
Only in subsequent developmental stages do children learn to constrain sexual
drives to socially accepted norms, culminating in adult heterosexual behavior
focused on the genitals and reproduction. Freud taught that during this stage of
undifferentiated impulse for sexual pleasure, incestuous and bisexual urges are
normal. Lacking knowledge that certain modes of gratification are forbidden, the
polymorphously perverse child seeks sexual gratification wherever it occurs. In
the earliest phase, the oral phase, the child forms a libidinal bond with the
mother via sexual pleasure gained from sucking the breast. For Freud,
"perversion" is a non-judgmental term. He used it to designate behavior outside
socially acceptable norms."