Jim Twiggs: "Concerning
Nabokov and Freud, I’ve enjoyed the lively and instructive contributions by
Jerry Friedman, Anthony Stadlen, and Jansy Mello...According to Jenefer
Shute..."it was not merely Freud but this "whole climate of opinion" that VN was
railing against."...Freud is Nabokov's tar baby...VN’s attempt to laugh Freud
out of existence fails, according to Shute:" ...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... ill-informed and overly general ...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... when he tries to be serious
(e.g., in characterizing Freud as promoting totalitarianism), things are even
worse--he is so obviously wrongheaded...On psychobabble in general (most of
which is only loosely connected to Freud), he fares better...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. ...his fear and
hatred of Freud was very narrowly based and that Jansy...may have hit on the
crucial detail: “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...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 worth noting, though, that under the pressure of
neuroscience, the medical model of mental illness...the teachings of Freud,
Jung, Lacan, et al. have themselves been steadily crumbling away, at least in
this country.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."
JM: Just before Jim
Twiggs' message reached me, mentioning the word "psychobabble"
twice, Alexey Sklyarenko warned me that he "meant Isaak Babel
(1894-1940), the author Konarmia ("Red Cavalry")..." in his
posting about boredom and a "Freud list." I should have made it more
explicit when I jumped from Isaak Babel onto a towering Babel
of psychobabels.
Jim's thoughtful (and often funny and
informed) posting almost tempted me a return to Freud but, in my view, he has
already stressed the most important points in connection to Nabokov's Freud
("adolescent name-calling," "wrongheadedness"..) and
its often contagious quality. Fyodor ("Father's butterflies") remembers that
he'd overheard a snippet of his father's words: "Yes, of course it was in
vain that I said 'by chance,' and by chance that I said 'in vain'. " It's a pity
that we'll never learn what came next.
Jim's suggestion that Freud's vision of
eternity exposes "VN's 'metaphysics' as a quaint piece of wishful
thinking," and that Nabokov, himself, was uncertain about his
hopes in a hereafter, is confirmed when we return to Nabokov's
explanation ( in a recently quoted Jan.1966 interview) about "why he
detests Freud": "the creative artist is an exile in his
study...He's quite alone there...As soon as he's together with somebody else he
shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody
else." The problem lies in that language, even when it's used in the
solitary confinement of a barred cell, also entails in communication.
It engenders meaning or, as in art, the endlessly driving power
of significations.
Nabokov probably didn't read Freud's later works
( as for example, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", where traumas, the death
drive and the compulsion to repeat are introduced), but he intuited something of
the same when, already in "Pale Fire,"he toyed with a lapidar inscription: "Et
in Arcadia Ego" (Even in Paradise we find "death" or "dementia"...).
Plato, Freud, Shade, Derrida, Lacan
- and all that crowd - shall probably seem extremely "quaint"
in the near-future when other, even simpler, hopes are
equally dashed, such as "authorial
voice," "individuality," "freedom."
...................................
* No need to bother about any open forums...what
for? Besides..."WHAT is Truth?
said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer. "