Subject: [ http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~deladur/Nabokov_and_%20Freud.pdf] ...Those who engage in the study of Nabokov-Freud may jump from
one level of discourse onto another, without realizing
any discrepancy. For example, in psychoanalysis,
"resistance" is an expression of "transference," and it
is, always, an unconscious process. This signification is
at variance from Leland Durantaye's use of this word in his
concluding sentence of his article (meaning "opposition"), although it
remains vaguely acceptable in the first one line: "It is neither possible nor necessary to judge - as so many
of Nabokov's critic and defenders have endeavored to do - whether Nabokov's
resistance to Freud was determined or overdetermined by factors or feelings of
which he was not aware. What Nabokov very consciously sought to counteract
were approaches to art that, in their aspiration to uncover the general,
neglected the particular. And this he found in Freud. For Nabokov, the essence
of art dwells in the details of a work, and any system that encouraged the study
of such details as a means to any other end than art itself was, understandably,
anathema. This, more than anything else, motivated his resistance to
psychoanalysis and its founder." ...overlooked by those
who focus on Freud's "discovery" of psychoanalysis.... Freud tried to
establish the importance of discoveries which resulted from
one particular case (one case history, for example), because its
revelatory uniqueness excludes standard research procedures
that apply control groups and statistics.
JM: In need of further explicitation: (a) Durantaye's
employ of the word "resistance," to indicate a clear-cut standard
"opposition" (in his concluding line of my quote), was contaminated by the
meanings that are present in the opening sentence of the same
quote. If he had not set down "Nabokov's resistance to Freud was
overdetermined by ...feelings...unaware of...(etc)" then "resistance"
would not implicate psychoanalysis and unconscious motivations.
(b) There are many points that, at first sight at least, reveal a similar
scientific ideal motivating both Nabokov and Freud! (nb: I have no
authority on what I'm outlining here but I'm daring to expose these thoughts in
the hope that my arguments serve as a starting point for
a discussion, in our Nab-L, among the "experts")
I read that Nabokov was "a splitter" (the word "analysis" also suggests
splits) and, if I understood this information, instead of unifying diverse
butterflies under the same generic label, Nabokov championed their
appurtenance to varied assortments of distinct species (I hope I got it
right!). I suspect that this indicates that Nabokov was fascinated, not only by
diversity and individual details but by how these
details demonstrate how life is constantly renewing itself in the process
of interaction with the environment. Life would be amplifying
diversity and developping more and more details from a common (common)
matrix, ad infinitum (who knows?). And this positioning is like Freud's, in a
way.
Freud had to find a unifying, generic, reference (the
universality of the Oedipus conflict, the "phallus", how patterns of
language interact with the unconscious processes) from which he
could depart to study individual variations as they fan-out
according to social and natural pressures. These variations should
not be reduced to their general point of origin, although their
diverging paths could only be discerned by having them refer to
it. If Freud considered Art as an expression of "what is
humanity," to establish what are the elements in it which it
shares with dreams, jokes, racionalization, abstraction and even
fabulations and lies, his conclusions are to be understood as valid only for
their "scientific" importance, not as diluting the powers of an artistic
individual achievement. Freud was mainly intent on pain and its relief, as
a doctor. His research being limited, because he wouldn't use people
as if they'd been guineapigs, he chose to depart from jokes,
slips, dreams and passionate love (transference love as it takes place in a
psychoanalytic session) for they were, in his eyes, "normal states of
madness" shared by mankind, in order to investigate the
parallels between such "abnormally normal sates" (which served
as his reference points) and those he found in mentally afflicted
subjects.
Alexey Sklyarenko "...Soviet writer (People, Years,
Life, 1966; Book Three, chapter 2) Ilya Ehrenburg: "The son of the
Constitutional Democrate Nabokov, who was killed by an ultra-monarchist, is now
one of America's most widely-read writers; he wrote at first in Russian, then in
French, now he writes in English."
In an interview Nabokov called
Ehrenburg (1891-1967) 'a talented journalist and a big sinner'."
JM: I rushed to learn more about Ehrenburg to find out
what might prompted Nabokov to say he was "a big sinner" ( I reached
no conclusion!). I read that although he spent several years in France
(where he made friends with Picasso and French writers) he never gave up, as a
writer, Russia and the Russian language. In his varied allegiances
and moves, there was one certainty: he always opposed all kinds of
tyranny and anti-semitic policies. Ehrenburg's succint description of Vladimir
Nabokov as "the son of the Constitutional Democrate Nabokov" (he didn't name
either Dmitri or Vladimir but certainly indicated who was "his"
Nabokov?), a successful author in America and who wrote in Russian, French
and English... is not a neutral observation but a rather
critical one. Or so it seems to me. Perhaps this is where he
sinned?