Vladimir Nabokov

Jung's Synchronicity (1952)

By William Dane, 26 April, 2025
Jung has come up a few times on the listserve of late--during the 150th anniversary year of his birth, no less. Synchronicity is an interesting text through a Nabokovian lens, notably in terms of Fate, where a number of VN protagonists have fictively created all or part of their text, so that the question Who is Fate is straightforward to answer in reality (VN) but less so fictively. Of course in any novel's content nothing happens by chance; which Jung argues is somehow also the case with apparently coincidental occurences in reality. Related are the "synchronizations" Nabokov points out in Joyce's Ulysses in his Lecture on same. It's one of Jung's shorter texts, readable in a day or two.