Aeternus

Enviada por jansy em Thursday, November 03 @ 18:32:23 BRST

LOLITA: FREUDIANS, KEEP OUT, PLEASE

Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello

I- Introduction

Nabokov was no music lover, but in his novels - and Lolita is no exception - he interwove several themes that intersected each other from back to front or from bottom to top, as if the melody and the structure of the story were employing a technique similar to that of musical counterpoint, instead of conforming to the synchronizing of plot and action. A love-story dissolves into another, Annabel Leigh... Lee...Loleeta, with a few variations, while a murder is announced in the midst of chases and flights that lead us back to the original theme.

To Nabokov, nature and art are "an intricate game of enchantment and deception" (SM/ch6), as they conform to what Jacques Lacan described as the imaginary dimension, with its peculiar truth. However, the magic that Nabokov makes happen with his art comes through his writing (which, in Lacan expresses the symbolic dimension), by virtue of the vertex from which he, the author, speaks to us, and which develops independently from his authorial ideals.

In Lolita, Nabokov had no intention of providing details of the relationships among the characters. His aim was rather to introduce the reader into his "world-plays" to interact in the present situation and lead him away from the traditional relation between an author and his work. And yet, yearning to keep control over his texts, filling them with short messages addressed to a specific audience, heaping them with instructions, Nabokov also ruled over the reading as a tyrant, albeit a playful one. The challenge and the spell are such that dominator and dominated often keep in touch with each other.[1] Nabokov insistently returns to the fact that his writings have no reality other than the fictional, and through which he intends to create worlds that are entirely new, like a God. The fact that he keeps intruding into the text in a diatribe serves as a warning that "All reality is a mask".
A mask that hides no face but that has eyes that mercilessly stare at us.

According to Alfred Appel Jr., the literary works of Nabokov, as a whole, afford us an instance of the "strategies of involution", which makes the books bend over themselves, self-referential and aware of their own fictional status. Involution, in Appel's opinion, is achieved in seven interrelated ways: parody, coincidence, patterning, allusion, the work-within-the-work, staging and authorial voice. According to him, "the strategy of involution has determined the structure and the meaning of Nabokov's novels".

I chose to write about Lolita because for years I have been wanting to find an excuse that would force me to carefully pore over Nabokov's novels, since I was always amazed at seeing myself blissful and titillated, even when led into the dark recesses of a cruel and perverted universe. As in a trick of magic, that arrogant and extravagant Russian American author had become one of my favorite writers. Books such as Bend Sinister, Laughter in the Dark and Lolita were challenges that forced me into investigating the reason why his insane characters spoke to me so closely.

Vladimir Nabokov, who then signed as Vladimir Sirin, felt "the first little throb of Lolita" in the late thirties, paradoxically drawing inspiration from a newspaper article about a research on a chimpanzee in the Jardin des Plantes, who reportedly was the first animal ever to be capable of producing a drawing: the bars of his own cage. While writing Lolita, the narrator, Humbert Humbert, is also behind bars.

The text that antedated Lolita was titled Volshebnik, in Russian. According to Dmitri Nabokov other possible translations for this Russian word would be "magician" or "conjuror", besides the one that was finally chosen: The Enchanter. To Nabokov, in the field of literature "the enchanter interests me more than the yarn-spinner or the teacher" since he sees the greatness of literary works such as Dickens' or Gogol's as stemming from the fact that they exist as phenomena of language, not of ideas. This is not the same as saying that Nabokov, like Hegel and Nietzche, thought that there are no facts, only interpretations, as argued by some Nabokov scholars. To him, the literary being alone is a fact of the utterance. As to the rest, we shall see what he thinks about it.

II - The Proto-Lolita

In The Enchanter we encounter an anonymous nymphet of French nationality and her seducer, provisionally called Arthur. Those "first throbbings" that had not ceased after Nabokov emigrated to the United States, in 1940, made themselves forcefully felt ten years later, in Ithaca. At that time, Nabokov decided to resume the theme, now writing in English, "the language of my first governess in Saint Petersburg". According to the author, the new nymphet, with a few drops of Irish blood now added to her, was very much like her French ancestor, and the basic idea of the tale, in which the enchanter marries the mother so as to get close to the daughter, has also remained the same, although all the rest was new, having "grown in secret the claws and wings of a novel".

The novel starts with a monologue in which Arthur asks himself about the nature of the feelings and impulses experienced by him ("Sickness, criminality?") and proceeds to the conclusion that he is not a seducer, since "The limitations I have established for my yearning, the masks I invent for it when, in real life, I conjure up an absolutely invisible method of sating my passion, have a providential sophistry. I am a pickpocket, not a burglar". He mentally investigates whether his yearning would be assuaged by the reality of a touch that would create in him "an intolerable sensation of sanguine, dermal, multivascular communion with her, as if the monstrous bisector pumping all the juices from the depths of his being extendend into her a pulsating dotted line, as if this girl were growing out of him, as if, with every carefree movement, she tugged and shook her vital roots implanted in the bowels of his being, so that, when she abruptly changed position or rushed off, he felt a yank, a barbarous pluck, a momentary loss of equilibrium: suddenly you are traveling through the dust on your back, banging the back of you head, on your way to being strung up by your insides". Because, up to that moment, his passionate search for beauty took place in the world of dreams [2]. The difficulties began when the dream started to materialize into a girl who glided by on roller-skaters, in a park.

Chance put a coin on his path, a conversation was started on a park bench and his fantasies became corporeal and real. He now perceived "the entire instability and spectrality of his calculations, this whole quiet madness, the evident error of the obsession, which was free and genuine only when flowering within the confines of fantasy but which had now deviated from that sole legitimate form, to embark (with the pathetic diligence of a lunatic, a cripple, an obtuse child - yes, at any moment it would be rebuffed and thrashed!) on designs and actions that lay within the sole competence of adult, material life". There was a flesh-and-blood young woman, who had become an "absolutely unique and irreplaceable being" [3], but who, at the same time, remained as a " priceless original: sleeping girl, oil."

And it was this very work of art who woke up with a start just as he, her step-father now, passed "his magic wand above her body", and started to scream. Taken by surprise in his nudity, the seducer fled from the room and ended crushed by a yellow-eyed motor vehicle, in the "instantaneous cinema of dismemberment", "and the film of life had burst". The novel ends there, but we are still in the beginning of that which will become Lolita, in the small hours of the morning, in the Enchanted Hunters hotel.

Both in The Enchanter and in Lolita we follow the passage from fantasy to act, although we remain, as we always will, within the field of literature. In both of them adults appear as victims of the seduction wielded by a child[4]. Slaves of nymphets[5], both Arthur and Humbert apparently have no intention of touching them, save in imagination: they approach the shadows of their bodies, of the motley play of light on their clothes as they move, to caress them in thought. However, from the beginning they see themselves as monsters, because they sense that somehow they corrupt the object of their day-dreaming. There is a force that rises from their fantasies to cast its tentacles upon the world. In the original novel, this psychic force is powerful enough to make an indignant lady move from the train cabin she shares with them. Nothing palpable is there to justify the discomfort and the shame felt by this lady, and yet we sense that those who come close to him feel his electricity and are contaminated by it. As Richard Rorty has ascertained in his preface to Pale Fire, "Nabokov arranges things so that, just when we thought that we had stepped back and found the proper standpoint from which to see his book in perspective, we get an uncanny sense that the book is looking at us from a considerable distance, and chuckling" [6].

III. Enchanted Hunters

In William Dow's vision, Nabokov took advantage of the conventions of detective and crime novels in order to "destroy" his text, involving the reader in a hide-and-seek game. According to Dow, Nabokov produced a "reinvention of the crime genre", inducing the reader to play the role of the detective, although he knows, from the very start, who committed the crime. [7] The meanders of the story that unfolds between Humbert and Quilty take place in an atmosphere of parody that glides over ethical issues and questions that the characters never asked.
In Humbert's words: "I insist upon proving that I am not, and never was, and never could have been a brutal scoundrel. The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patronimics of poets - not crime's prowling ground".

In his own rating, Humbert is not a psychopathic criminal, a pervert who abuses children. He is a "therapist".[8] "What I had madly possessed was not she, but my own creation, another fanciful Lolita - perhaps more real than Lolita; overlapping and encasing her; floating between me and her, and having no will, no consciousness - indeed no life of her own".

In this detective story, the clues available to the reader are the quick scenes in which Lolita seems to be communicating with someone, or the games that hint that the reader is the real prey of the narrator's tricks. Quilty's concrete presence is discreet and the reader has access to clues which Humbert lacks when in his chase he has to pore over the registers of the many hotels in a "cryptogrammic paper chase" through which different parts of the map of the United States are cut out and sewn together as in a giant "patchwork Quilty". Roaming from town to town after the marks left by the kidnapper's handwriting his search follows a new pattern until it circles back to his point of departure.

IV. The Aesthetics of Bliss

Vladimir Nabokov professes what he named "aesthetics of bliss", but, first of all, we must discriminate what kind of bliss we are talking about. In his case, it is not a question of seeking an oceanic feeling (Romain Rolland), or mystical beatitude, although the English word he used, bliss, may encompass both religious ecstasy and cosmic rapture. The bliss Vladimir Nabokov experienced in art stemmed from an aesthetics that has both corporeal and mental dimensions. In his view, a true work of art can be recognized by a "tingle between the shoulder blades", or "the little shiver behind": "it seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine".

Mystical ecstasy, as well as oceanic rapture, border on the excess, which, in pathological terms, is the mark of psychosis. Aesthetic bliss, on the other hand, often runs the risk of being transformed into a punctual form of perverse ecstasy, as it does in Humbert Humbert. In experiences of this sort, the soul is not projected onto a universe beyond the stars, and neither does it suffer from "la terreur des espaces infinies". Rather, it is compressed into the selvedges of something that is glimpsed as a grain of sand in a split-second of incandescence. In my view, that which characterizes the "perversion" in this type of ecstasy is due to the obsessed staring at a mythical medusa-faced nucleus that is dead and devoid of representation. Nabokov somehow acknowledges that fact, when he writes, in Lolita: "It is a question of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight (...) so as to reach "an incomparably more poignant bliss".

In his post-script to The Annotated Lolita, aesthetic bliss is defined as "a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness) is the norm". However, an older definition of bliss creeps in: "What if the way to true bliss is indeed through a still delicate membrane, before it has had time to harden, become overgrown, lose the fragrance and the shimmer through which one penetrates to the throbbing star of that bliss?", as in The Enchanter.

Nabokov does not clarify which are the ways of accessing this bliss, since he “already writes in an ecstatic state.” [9] He believes that: "the good writer is, first of all, an enchanter. A charmer of people”.[10] In his short stories, several intimations of the feeling of strangeness (the Freudian Unheimlich) are to be found. That feeling, and the fleeting moment of happiness, intermingle upon a background of nostalgia to create the mental state which, to be experienced, requires one to be capable of glimpsing, through the distorted lights and shadows that emanate from it, a timeless dimension that reveals the intimate bond that exists among the simplest objects.

There is also a secondary enchantment that arises when a past moment is recreated in writing under the spell of Mnemosyne, or that is directly provoked by a work of art. Speaking of a forgotten poet, in one of his collections of short-stories, Nabokov says he finds in him "that heavenly draught which suddenly locates the sensorial effect of true poetry right between one's shoulder blades". For him, "His is the satisfaction of a passionate desire to feel with his own fingers, to stroke and inspect, and smile at, and inhale, and stroke again - with that same smile of nameless, moaning, melting pleasure - the never-before-touched matter of which the celestial object is made. Any true scientist (...) should be capable of experiencing the sensuous pleasure of direct and divine knowledge (...) without that tingle, there is no science". [11]

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud carefully comments the observations addressed to him by Romain Rolland, about "a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of 'eternity', a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded - as it were, 'oceanic'. This feeling, he adds, is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them" (SE, XXI, p. 64).

In Freud's opinion, this feeling of "an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole" (SE, p. 65) is not a primary feeling, and it originates in the baby's first experiences. According to Freud, "originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive - indeed, an all-embracing feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it" (SE.pg. 68).

In Nabokov, this separation of an external world from its nest in the ego happens in a very peculiar manner, since he dares to question what he has learned from the reality tests and gain his own private access to a reality of a different order. He deems that one must be able to see "the invisible link" among things and to risk losing oneself in madness. Insanity constantly lurks in the background of his novels, as his characters may endanger their notion of identity and their ego construction, to experience the abysmal depths of that other realities. Although using a personification to keep this observation at a safe distance, Nabokov has no qualms about admitting his knowledge about states in which, as in his novel: "the more keenly I examined my face (...) the harder I found it to make the face in the mirror to merge with that "I" whose identity I failed to grasp (...) I am terrified by there being another person in the room with me; I am terrified by the very notion of another person (...) My line of communication with the world snapped, I was on my own and the world was on its own, and that world was devoid of sense. I saw the actual essence of all things. It was then that my terror reached its highest point. I gave up struggling. I was no longer a man, but a naked eye, an aimless glance moving in an absurd world".

Nabokov's works, however, have a historicity built from the long catalogue of autobiographical episodes and from many interviews that aided his prodigious memory and granted him access to the information needed to transform his day-to-day into fiction. While drawing past and present closer together with transparent and luminous bridges (or were they crevices?) he tried to link fatherland and childhood, both irretrievably lost , to his present life, or rather, to his writing about it.

It seems to me that Nabokov grieved more for the loss of that nest where he lay cuddled in his infantile ego than for his fate as an émigré. How can we know?

Could it be that, to Nabokov, the external world of reality did not count because what was important to him was the image he had created of it, which was a replica of that other world he carried within himself that, in its turn, was a reproduction of still another one? As no one else, he was capable of making the data collected by the eyes, the ears, the nose and the skin converge into another dimension that has nothing in common with our own "reality sense", bestowing colors to the sounds and intermingling space and time, prior to adding them to his own experience of existing [12].

Grabbing time through space, controlling death through his writing, Humbert, in Lolita, rendered the lost fatherland (place) equivalent to his lost childhood (time), conferring on both a reality in which time and space would be equally irredeemable - just as he met again his first love, Annabel Lee, as she was being reborn from the waters in a Ramsdale garden. In Lance, for instance, Nabokov describes the distance between a far-away planet and the Earth as measuring "as many miles as there are years between last Friday and the rise of the Himalayas". Yes, madness is some sort of "infinity-sickness". [13]

And Nabokov, for sure, knew still another way to infinity. The same Viennese author who captivated Kubrick in his most recent film, Arthur Schnitzler, was also known to him, as he was to Freud (Nabokov, in his youth, played the part of Lobheimer in a production of Schnitzler's Liebelei). In one of his stories of love and death, Schnitzler makes use of the mathematical concept of infinite return to reassure himself of our immortality, since, in the never-ending parade of the images of our past, as in a movie-picture taking place at the instant of a drowning, there should be room for the same drowning scene, with all its images, which, in their turn, would contain the drowning scene, with its film of images, and so on, infinitely. The infinite return, however, may also take the shape of obsessive control of past registers, most of all in love relationships.

As Nabokov tells us, in the short-story That in Aleppo Once: "I was under the strange delusion that first I must find out every detail, reconstruct every minute, and only then decide whether I could bear it. But the limit of desired knowledge was unattainable, nor could I ever foretell the approximate point after which I might imagine myself satiated, because of course the denominator of every fraction of knowledge was potentially as infinite as the number of intervals between the fractions themselves" .

This theme also appears in Transparent Things and in a short-story written in 1925, The Return of Chorb, where the character believes that he should gather all the little things he and his dead lover had perceived together, so as to reconstruct a near past common to both of them. In that manner, her image would become immortal, because going backwards step by step, in search of the most minute details of the experience they had shared, he would capture a total image that would then replace her.[14]

In this rapture, infinity and eternity are brought together, so as to recreate, as did Italo Calvino, a "memory of the world", or to find, as Jorge Luis Borges, the point from where the Aleph can be seen - when that which is being built is no longer the ego, but a world that meekly and subtly insists in affirming its discrepancy from it.

V. Messages Forged in Memory [15]

In order to penetrate in the realm of prisms and duplicates born from the infinite games of mirror-images, the reader is invited to practice the "language of tyrannies", if he is to decipher the multiple directions pointed at by the virulence of the paronomasias, and to crack the small nuts hidden in the anagrams that allow him to hear "the collateral murmur of this or that hidden theme" until they reached the gap "through which his world leads to another, made of tenderness, luminosity, and beauty". Nabokov's literary refractions produce games where fantasy and reality alternate and texts that are hidden behind texts deliberately follow the rules of the mechanism of dreams. Thus Nabokov is more akin to Freud's ideas than he would care to acknowledge because also for him psychic reality must occupy a peculiar place that warrants it not merely a status of its own, but a unique "factuality".

In Richard Rorty's view, the obsessive and strident animosity that Nabokov felt towards Freud was "the resentment of a precursor who may already have written all one's best lines", which, of course is an exaggeration. Nabokov saw psychoanalysts as the accomplices of the "police state of sexual myth", an image that served to heighten his hostility. He regarded the Freudian interpretation of dream symbolism as a product of a coarse and "medieval mind". The most devoted Nabokovians follow the lead of their master and keep away from Freud, since they understand that the novels and stories written by Nabokov constitute works of art that stand on their own, devoid of any social message and free of applications extraneous to the field of art and literature.

In his biography of Gogol, the novelist remarked that "The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself". Nevertheless, he insistently affirmed that his life was not to be mistaken for his work. He saw his characters as gargoyles and caryatids expelled to the outside of the cathedrals: "they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade - demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out". Their creation would spell as a bubble of time suspended in the air, as the island of nymphets.

In Lolita, however, his signature can be found beyond the voices of the author and the narrator (that so often intermingle). Thus, in the novel there appears, by Quilty's side, a woman playwright called Vivian Darkbloom, Quilty's collaborator in the play The Enchanted Hunters, in which Lolita plays the role of a girl-nymph[16] . This anagram (pointed out by Appel Jr. and Richard Corliss): Vladimir Nabokov & Vivian Darkbloom could function as some kind of signature?

VI. Where is Waldo?

It may well be that most of Nabokov's self-references and quotations have escaped me. I am not a very competent detective-reader. I lack, mainly, the necessary leisure, as well as Appel Jr.'s zeal that led him to affirm that "everything is there, in sight (no symbols lurking in the murky depth), as in a trompe-l'oeil" - a conclusion I do not reach for the reason that it merely endorses Nabokov's own disavowal.[17]

Besides Vivien Darkbloom, for instance, we come across variants that create other feminine Viviens in Mrs. Vivien Badlook, but there are also Mrs. Calmbrood, Dorian Vivalcombe , Blavdak Vinomiri or Adam von Librikov from other novels.

In the brief dialogue between Humbert and Quilty the latter reveals that he is aware of the irregular situation between Humbert and Lolita, even if Humbert has not yet acted on his wishful fantasies. Therefore he finds it difficult to believe what he has just heard from Quilty who then repeats his comment by replacing words to create a neutral but similar-sounding sentence. Quilty says: "Where the devil did you get her?", and then corrects himself: "I said the weather is getting better", before asking who the girl is. When Humbert answers she is his daughter, Quilty strikes back: "You lie, she is not", and then amends it to "I said July is hot".

These changes start to shape the atmosphere of unreality that surrounds Quilty's apparitions, making him equally unreal. He follows Humbert using different cars, and even the number of the plate jotted down by Lolita, to Humbert's despair, seems to have been tampered with. The confusion between what is real and what is fake appear as comedy, as when Charlotte takes Humbert, whom she sees as an artist and a scholar, to her bedroom, to show him some reproductions of famous paintings. Lolita, in the midst of all this, becomes more and more real, until, in the end, she is totally removed from the plot (according to Alfred Appel Jr., "Lolita made Lolita famous, rather than Nabokov").

We find Nabokov's own testimony about the quality of the voice that can be heard in his novels in his preface to Bend Sinister, where he refers to a "first intimation that 'someone is in the know' - a mysterious intruder who takes advantage of Krug´s dream to convey his own peculiar code message. The intruder is not the Viennese Quack (all my books should be stamped Freudians, Keep Out)[18] but an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me". This voice tries to control the reading beyond the text, and to take hold of the image beyond the words, speaking from different spots, but nevertheless unrecognizable, as the images in a labyrinth of mirrors. In its message, a partial and implicit tale of Vanitas is conveyed, and, in this same preface, the author states it in the most straightforward way possible: "Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution" [19]. He now affirms: "My characters are not 'types', not carriers of this or that 'idea' (...) all of them are only absurd mirages, illusions oppressive to Krug during his brief spell of being, but harmlessly fading away when I dismiss the cast". This same manipulation of the reader/spectator, that gives rise to contradictory and unpleasant identifications in them, builds and demolishes sympathies and confounds critical judgement, is also part of the author's voice, who believes he is capable of rebuilding the world in his own fashion, as does any delirious madman. As R. Corliss points out, Humbert's prose is always in a state of perpetual ecstasy: for Lolita, first and foremost, but also for everything he sees and touches. He is stimulated by all things, physical, tactile, ethereal, ephemeral. They alight on his erect palpus, and Humbert gets so titillated that his heart nearly bursts.

The detailed description of the landscape, of the advertisement on the roadside, the gas stations, the motel rooms and of the kitsch world of the small towns in the American hinterlands, typical of "road books" has ensured to this Russian turned American a special place in the literature of his adopted country.[20]

VII - Lolita and the Escape from Solipsism

Lolita is a typical American teen-ager. A fatherless orphan, she readily agrees to replace her lost father with the handsome Humbert, whom she looks upon as a father, an oedipal father and the Oedipal fantasy, in girls, is like an organizing thread that runs along the conscious scene. Lolita tries to seduce Humbert Humbert as a daughter tries to seduce her father, not as the nymphet of the protagonist's dreams. Since he does not see her as a daughter he then misinterprets her affectionate gestures. Thus he invades the girl's fantasy with the authority of an adult.

Children's oedipal desires are real, but their reality belongs to the mental structure of human beings, and they do not seek fulfillment beyond the realm of fantasy, except in pathologies, when a complicity arises between parents and children. Lolita had the bad luck of corresponding to Humbert's fantasies, without realizing she was slowing alienating herself in them. From the very first, she happily calls him "Dad". To Humbert's excuses for sharing one bedroom, she replies that her mother will be furious when she hears about it, and bluntly identifies the situation: "The word is incest".

To a certain extent, Humbert realizes the shift from fantasy to act, when he, at last, gets Lolita locked up in a hotel room. From that moment on Humbert starts to address the "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury", as he wanders through the halls of the hotel: "God's eyes are everywhere. God sees all".

In an article written in 1988, The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty, Rorty takes pains to describe Nabokov as a liberal malgré lui-même, who provides a responsible perspective for looking out on society, and a doorway into "participative emotion", such as the one which moved liberal statesmen such as his own father". According to Rorty, the "sinister aestheticism" that leads Nabokov to value style and aesthetic rapture instead of ethics, is a cover-up for the author's conflict with his own humanist dimension. This same fact is also acknowledged by Peter Quenell (in his preface to one of the editions of Lolita), who sees Nabokov as a benevolent humanist, in the European tradition of Rabelais and Montaigne. A. Appel Jr., likewise, described him as "an author whose deeply humanistic art affirms man's ability to confront and order chaos". Terence Rattigan, who sees Lolita as genuinely shocking, as only works of an elevated moral purpose can be, agrees with Lionel Trilling, who states that "Lolita is not a book about sex, it is a book about love." [21]

Could it be that Nabokov, as suggested by Rorty, was aware of the link between art and torture? Was he describing his own dilemmas between the nurturing of esthetical pleasure and a certain practice of cruelty? Rorty's answer is based on the three features he sees as most characteristic of Nabokov: his perversely insistent aestheticism, the fear of being led to cruelty by this same aestheticism and his concern with immortality. According to Rorty, Nabokov was desperately trying to believe that "artistic gifts" were "sufficient for moral virtue", even though he knew that there is no possible synthesis between ecstasy and solidarity.

In Lolita, the quotation of an ancient poet (who was none other than Nabokov himself) "The moral sense in mortals is the duty we have to pay on mortal sense of beauty" points out to the acknowledgement of the debt we all incur on account of our being susceptible to beauty. Is it necessary to say more about the sense of morality in Nabokov?

In Richard Rorty's opinion, the aestheticism in Nabokov, "one of the most powerful imaginations of the 20^th century" nevertheless leads us along a journey of personal growth, since, in reading his books, we are forced to recognize in ourselves forbidden fantasies and emotions, contradictory facets that acquire dialectic expression as they are worked through. According to Rorty, Nabokov did not intend to imitate reality, but rather to modify it, and the reader as well. Rorty manages to find, among the statements of an already mature Nabokov, one that serves to justify his bet. In it, Nabokov defines art as the result of "beauty plus pity".

According to Appel Jr., "even in his most parodic novels, such as Lolita, he makes audible through all the playfulness a cry of pain", since in Nabokov's view, "on the very brink of parody... there must be... an abyss of seriousness, and I must make my way along this narrow ridge between my own truth and a caricature of it".

VIII. The Sources of Magic

In his biography of Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov writes that, when a very elevated level is reached, as in Gogol, literature searches that secret depths crossed by the shadows of other worlds. Since he systematically steers towards a region outside space and time, Nabokov makes us think that he believes in parallel worlds and in a reality beyond life. According to Stacey Schiff, who wrote the biography of Vera Nabokov, the author's wife, this mystical dimension would have been encouraged by Mrs. Nabokov herself, who shared with her husband the same passion for details and coincidences, seeking for the "substantial shadows behind the illusions of existence". Alfred Appel Jr. does not agree. Rather, he uses Nabokov's reference to "windows giving upon a contiguous world" to see these as representations of the tactics employed by the author in his novels, in order to achieve involution. In Appel Jr.'s view, "this contiguous world is the mind and the spirit of the author, whose identity, psychic survival, and 'manifold awareness' are ultimately both the subject and the product of the book. In whatever way they are opened, the 'windows' always reveal... the poet", sitting back in his American armchair, as the core of the whole story.

Appel Jr. notes that, in using the tactics of "involution", Nabokov not only creates a story within the story, or transports his characters from one short story or novel to another, but also transforms the characters into readers/spectators of the book where they appear. At this point, he quotes Jorge Luís Borges, about the play within the play, in Hamlet: ""if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers and spectators, can be fictitious." However, although traversing contiguous worlds, with their communicating windows, he never doubted that, in the very center of them all, there was a Poet, as the one who invented the play The Enchanted Hunter.

We try to look upon the world from a meta-window, as if we had forgotten that we are forever forbidden to escape from the simple referential that is inevitably produced in the vertex we come to adopt. As Appel Jr. has noted, Nabokov's characters "continually confront mirrors where they had hoped to find windows". The power to denounce, by means of art and writing, these narcissistic captures does not make them disappear, nor banishes them to the outer walls of the cathedrals. The Vladimir Sirin or Vladimir Nabokov despite the more insistent disavowals might be positioned at the innermost core of his work since it is impossible to discover whether he knew that this could reduce him to a fiction within a fiction. Vladimir Nabokov manipulated self-reference, the blanks and the syncopes in his text with the mastery of one who knows the consequences of such a strategy.

To Freud, the adult life is a via dolorosa that requires the adoption of palliative measures, "powerful deflections, which cause us to make light of our misery; substitutive satisfactions, which diminish it; and intoxicating substances, which make us insensitive to it". According to him, the suffering that menaces us from inside our own body, from the external world and from our relationships with other men force us to lessen our claims to happiness. Thus, in Freud's view, man seeks satisfaction through internal psychic processes, in order to gain independence from the external world: "It is asserted, however, that each one of us behaves in some one respect like a paranoiac, corrects some aspect of the world which is unbearable to him by the construction of a wish and introduces this delusion into reality".

Freud recognizes that, in him, art "does not convulse [his] physical being", and that "the mild narcosis induced in us by art can do no more than bring about a transient withdrawal from the pressure of vital needs and it is not strong enough to make us forget real misery". Perhaps the discomfort caused by Freud in Nabokov could be related to the conclusions arrived at by the psychoanalyst, quoted above. Nabokov believes that art does convulse his body and his mind, and furthermore, that his own bliss is a pointer to a transcendent reality.

In contrast to Freud's well-known pessimism, Nabokov believed that "the capacity to wonder at trifles - no matter the imminent peril - these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life, are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is this childish speculative state of mind, so different from common sense and its logic that we know the world to be good", since he maintained "an irrational belief in the goodness of man..." that "becomes something much more than the wobbly basis of idealistic philosophy. It becomes a solid and iridescent truth".

The redeeming idea that beauty and compassion come together to produce a work of art may have been portrayed by Lyne, when, after Humbert's final arrest, we see, in the distance, a small town where children's voices come from. At that moment, Humbert cries for Lolita's fate, for her no longer being a part of that children's chorus. Humbert is no longer engrossed in self-commiseration, and he is capable of lamenting the tragedy of his nymphet, now returned to the reality of being Lolita, Dolly, Dolores.[22]

In the book, the girl experienced a turn of fate that dissolved the references she had taken for granted ("You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go") and ends up in the town of "Gray Star, the capital town of the book". A gray and dull star, that, nevertheless, serves as an address. Is it by mere chance that Lolita is expecting a baby, due to be born on Christmas Day? Why did Nabokov decide that both she and the baby would die during labor? How are we to understand the sentence where Humbert recognizes having "crucified" Lolita, a term he also uses to refer to butterflies pierced by pins in collectors' boxes?

As Appel Jr. sees it, as Humbert's memoirs progress, he reaches a three-dimensional conception of life because "the pretty but two-dimensional landscape" described before, now "includes people. Aesthetic, moral and communal perspectives have cohered, as ideally they should". Revealing his love for Lolita, even though she was no longer a nymphet, or crying for the absence of her voice in the children's chorus, Humbert would have "transcended his solipsism".

IX. Confessions of a White, Widowed Adult

Pedophile is the name given to a seducer of children. Nabokov makes us experience, in our bodies and our souls, just how heart-wrenching and terrifying this illness is. According to Richard Corliss, the refined artist portrayed in Humbert knows how to recognize the ideal matter out of which to create a work of art, in the appeal (sexual or esthetical) of the potential, of that which is still budding, of that which is almost completed. It is the attraction felt by a body and a mind fighting cellular decadence for a mind and a body that can only become more brilliant, more total, more. He is speaking of the illusion of completeness, shared by so many of us. When Humbert confesses: "I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita", we can see that he admits his own incompleteness, and is painfully foreshadowing her loss, when a real girl would replace the girl that he had "invented".[23] Prior to that moment, when the spectator could still hear the lament of a helpless girl who cried ceaselessly, night after night, or pity Charlotte, the betrayed and insulted woman, it was not Humbert who reminded us of, or made us forget that human dimension, but Nabokov himself, indistinctly glimpsed behind the manifest scene. Not perceiving the other and feeling no curiosity about life are, to Nabokov, the greatest of all crimes.[24]

Following a logic of his own Nabokov, inverts the question of the proof of God's existence, when Humbert reaffirms his guilt feelings for having corrupted Lolita's life. He writes: ""Unless it can be proven to me - to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction - that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North-American girl named Dolores Haze has been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art". This is an important avowal, in which Nabokov seems to speak through Humbert (since, as he pointed out elsewhere, "my creature Humbert is a foreigner and an anarchist, and there are many things, besides nymphets, in which I disagree with him"). There are certain disasters and catastrophes that cannot be made up for, explained away or excused - not even by the promise of immortality through art.

As a writer, Nabokov was, no doubt, amazingly prone to soliloquy, as he despised texts containing long dialogues, philosophic novels and books with a social message. "I don't give a hoot for the welfare of mankind ... There is nothing about me of the civil hero who dies for his people. I die only for myself, for the sake of my own world of good and truth ... and if they are as precious to someone else as they are to me, all the better", he states in Tyrants Destroyed.

Nabokov had no patience for those who searched for a Lolita behind Lolita, concerned with the "sexual morbidity" that served no end other than concealing the context from which such oddities ought to be considered. In an interview, he confessed: "I am a normal man, you see" and in order to write his novel, he had to read case histories and to study pedophilia from both specialized literature and journalistic accounts on notorious pedophiles.

Dmitri Nabokov described The Enchanter, as well as other works by his father, as "the study of madness seen through the madman's mind", because Nabokov's artistic fantasy fed on "aberrations in general, both physical and psychological". In his view, "the criminal pedophilia of the protagonist - like that of the later Humbert in a new work and a different setting; like the murderous delusion of Hermann in Despair, like the sexual anomalies that are but an element of Pale Fire and other works; like the madness of the chess-master Luzhin (...) was one among many themes Nabokov selected for the creative process of fictional recombination."

What could possibly motivate Nabokov's antagonism towards Freud, who is constantly mentioned? Here is an example: "As usual, I wish to observe that, as usual (and as usual several sensitive people I like will look huffy), the Viennese delegation has not been invited. If, however, a resolute Freudian manages to slip in, he or she should be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there in the novel" ( foreword of King, Queen, Knave) and also "I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues - and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols ... and its bitter little embryo spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents." (Speak Memory).

Nabokov was capable of attaining a rare understanding of the Freudian theory, without, however, letting himself be touched by it. Commenting Gogol's obsession with his own nose, he writes about a face that was smooth because it lacked the phallic Freudian protuberance of a nose, who Nabokov, the "normal man" did not have to ignore (and, indeed, did not ignore, as can be seen in his comments about Gogol, in Strong Opinions, and also in the disavowals committed by him when trying to distinguish himself from Lolita). At a certain point, Humbert says that if he had consulted a competent hypnotyzer, perhaps the man would have extracted from him some fortuitous memories, making them appear much sharper than the images that presented themselves in his own mind, now that he knew what to search for in the past. In this sentence, we see that, in spite of the irony, the novelist acknowledges he is aware of all that psychoanalysis can offer, namely, the access to the repressed unconscious by means of free association, or through the distortions introduced by secondary elaboration or by the paramnesias.

The insistent reappearance of a mysterious sort of truth kept surprising Nabokov, as he, when re-reading his early works, kept coming across certain episodes of his life that he had transformed into fiction, because these events, as narrated in that form, seemed to him more faithful to his actual experience than what he wrote on a much later date, with all sincerity, when composing his autobiography. In his preface to Maschenka, he confessed that he never failed being fascinated by the fact that, in spite of some superimposed inventions, the fictional account contains a more concentrated resolution of the personal reality than the scrupulously faithful description attained by the autobiographer.

What means other than his own experience could Nabokov use, in order to describe those fantasies saturated with narcissistic pleasure, characteristic of the phallic phase, and peculiar to someone who has intensely experienced, and vividly remembers, the ecstasy of a child who has not yet recognized itself as boy or girl, and who offers itself to the world, and takes possession of it, with its entire body. Although Nabokov had to resort to psychiatric manuals in order to describe Humbert Humbert's pedophilia [25], Humbert voyeuristic ecstasy, on the other hand, in his complicity with Lolita's voluptuousness, must have arisen from memories Nabokov, as an artist, had retained of his own experience as a child.[26]

X. Disavowal or Sublimation?

Disavowal, in Nabokov's novels, points to a paranoid construction that he, as an author, rarely relinquishes.[27] He not only endeavors to demonstrate the existence of a psychic reality created and sustained by words, but also strives to affirm that he is the one who makes it exist. Implicit in this assertion is the notion that there is no unknown unconscious, pushing to gain form and expression: all that exists in his mental world is a fiction conjured into existence by himself. To Nabokov, a famous insomniac, mental productions make no sense unless they have been organized by reason and language, as in day-dreams. Coincidences, chance and mysterious connections between events and objects, however, have a status all of their own, in Nabokov's works. [28]

Nabokov rejects the Freudian idea of an unconscious primary process, underlying or concomitant to conscious verbal language, articulated by mechanisms such as those perceived in dream-work. It seems to me that he acknowledges the value of nothing other than the transforming mechanisms of art, that transmute the shadows encapsulated in words, and, in creating a rational language, humanize men: : "we think not in words, but in shadows of words", is his conclusion. [29]

A great admirer of James Joyce's Ulysses, Nabokov was acutely disturbed by the Irish writer's "association between sex and latrine", regarding them as sub-human outputs of Joyce's own mind (and not of the characters' madness, as, according to him, was the case in his own work [30]), and also by the prestigious Finnegan's Wake, described by him as "a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding of a book, a persistent snoar in the next room... Finnegan's Wake's façade disguises a very conventional and drab tenement house, and only the infrequent snatches of heavenly intonations redeem it from utter insipidity". Nabokov maintained that the defect "in those otherwise marvelous soliloquies of his consists in that he gives too much verbal body to thoughts".

Perhaps Nabokov's playful ruses represented a manner of elaborating the traumatic effects of the intrusions of reality (or, to be more precise, of the Real, in Lacan's conceptualizing), when these appear in the guise of coincidences that foreshadow a form of association that escapes his control. Such coincidences stand as proof that something in the world disobeys even that which he must keep inventing and, for that reason, he adopts them, throwing his own spool of thread, so as to pretend that these coincidences, too, are a product of his pen. Even though his works were a permanent parody of those who seek access to some ultimate truth, Nabokov, apparently, had no doubts about his own feeling of existing, about rationality, chance and human goodness, and about the sudden roses of his art.

In describing the process of mourning, Freud stated that, when there is the loss of an object (internal or external), the "shadow of the object falls upon the ego" and, therefore, the loved object, in a certain way, goes on existing within the mental world. That is the route I intend to take, to arrive at some of the facets that characterize Nabokov's works. He accepts losing the object, but he claims he has the power to recreate it, so that, as an Author, he will not disappear together with the object, but rather, become even stronger than before, outside space and time, keeping the unconscious under control. Full maturity is reached only when we accept not only the loss of the object, but also our own contingency as subjects: in Freud, Vanitas is radical. We are dust, and to dust we shall return.

We know that, in Freud's view, the lost object (the maternal phallus) does not exist in disavowal. In perversions, this defense mechanism leads to a paradox, in which both the existence and the non-existence of such object are simultaneously affirmed. In fetishism, the glance is not allowed to reach what lies beyond the feet, the knees, the stockings or the panties in a woman, for fear of confronting the mother's castration. Nevertheless, there are registers of cases, among which Nabokov can be included, where there is a fascination for the fissures, the gaps and the crevices found in the feminine body. Nabokov himself made fun of the "little Freudians" who found unconscious homosexual fantasies in Humbert, identifying them in his preference for pubescent girls with boyish bodies. Still, I now ask: could it be that "the end of the nymphic phase" is that in which a nymphet metamorphoses into a woman, thus dissolving the eternity of nymphic time, with its dance of the veils of phallophnies? [31]

Nabokov needs to be seen as "a great humanist", so that his admirers can feel more comfortable in going along with the outbursts of his aesthetics, giving body to the transmission of the power of the artist. Nabokov's art never intended to be democratically doled out throughout the community, as a form of sublimation. He was a writing-addict who, due to his immense talent and genius, touched his readers' sensitivity, showing them a very peculiar path to compassion, bliss and humor.

In the post-script Nabokov wrote to Lolita, and that, since 1956, has been published along with the novel, he deplores having to write in English, and confesses that his own private tragedy was having to "abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of these apparatuses - the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations, the traditions - which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." In referring to frac-tails, he retrieves his original inspiration for writing Lolita: in spite of the sophisticated garments, the animal tail flies in the air.

In this closing sentence, Nabokov mixed French and English words to designate a cutaway coat: "frac-tails". It pleases me to imagine that the folds of his works have recreated an infinite regress, that reproduces itself in layers that multiply outside the mirrors and the mirages, as it happens, according to what I was told, in the world of "fractals".

XI. Transmission and Projective Identification. [32]

Yona Dureau confers special value to Nabokov's openness to meaning and to various possible significations, which makes possible contrasting readings and contradictions. According to her, "in the critique of Nabokov's works, oppositions concerning the DIEGESE (???), the narrative structures, or a symbolic or structuralist reading, sometimes spring from the same elements of the text. Nabokov has written moral novels, one of the schools asserts. Nabokov is immoral, even perverse, others answer. Nabokov presents an esoteric and mystical writing, that evokes another world, some critics say. Nabokov establishes meaning and values, and proceeds to destroy them the next moment, state some others. The tone used by all these critics must surprise the reader, for it is never serene and seldom neutral. Ellen Pfifer condemns some of the critics because they defend the immorality point of view. Maurice Couturier condemns the author's tyranny and perversion. D.-J. Hughes chastises the advocates of realism. Nabokov seems to be the play of the underlying ideologies, either conscious or unconscious, since he exacerbates the passions and the grief (The italics are mine).

Yona Dureau's suggestion of the use by Nabokov of techniques of not-saying and of blanks seems to open the way to the development of an issue related to a form of artistic transmission that, as I initially thought, is realized by means of projective identification through something that acquires substance, form or expression in his art, shaping the reader/spectator according to a specific design, which, in its turn, is determined by the unconscious dynamics of the artist.This mode of transmission, in certain cases, may be associated to the use of perverse resources, in special the Freudian mechanism of disavowal - that creates two opposing universes, associated to the belief that both are equally real. A Spanish popular saying succeeds in describing this duplicity remarkably well: "I don't believe in witches, but nevertheless, they exist" (No creo en brujas, pero que las hay, las hay).

After a long study of the work of the painter/engraver Hans Bellmer, I barely succeeded in hinting at this question, associating it with his verbal talent, that makes use of anagrams and paronomasias, and takes delight in the construction of palindromes in order to demolish, with his art, part of the field of meaning in language, as when he creates broken or distorted dolls, or paradoxical images, where figure and background are interchangeable. My argument concerning Bellmer was that his art served as an unconscious vehicle for the expression of a disavowal, that would subsequently make an impression on those who came into contact with his works, introducing in them emotional certainties or doubts that did not belong in their own symptomatic organization. The Kleinian concept of projective identification, as applied to such cases, did not thoroughly satisfy me, since it suggested that there was something being transmitted (by the author's projection) through mysterious or telepathic ways.

In Dureau's view, Nabokov's writing gives rise to contradictory and intensely emotional critiques because it forces the individuals who investigate his works to speak about themselves, since they project their own contents upon the undefined or blank areas of the text. According to her, the passionate and antithetical or irreconcilable readings result from the fact that the author does not explicitly state the connections among certain ideas or events. Yona Dureau writes: "Our study is based on the fact that all critical reading is established upon an explicit part of the work, as much as upon an imaginary construction of its meaning. This imaginary construction is made possible by the blanks present in the text, that are interpreted by the critics as if they were implicit components. The more a text makes use of blanks, the greatest the number of implicit components that will appear in the critique".

Dureau ascertains that "the blanks are used not only in different contexts, but also according to a multiplicity of structural levels and perspectives, that confer specific values to this variable: stylistic, semiotic, semiological, psychological, metaphysical epistemological". Since it is a space left open in the text, the blank allows the reader/spectator to reflect or project himself onto that space, that operates as a mirror.

According to Dureau, the blank is a significant that serves as a motive for the research on the expression of the inexpressible, as well as an element of articulation in the construction of meaning within the text. In her opinion, in Nabokov's writing the blank represents an ideal, a form of style that reflects his metaphysics, and that is located in the very center of that which Umberto Ecco called "the openness of a work of art". Thus, in Yona Dureau's view, the blank in a novel may hide that which gets transfigured in another novel, making it possible to speak of the use of two different expressions of "negation" (déni), or else, it may be used a means of speaking the unspeakable. In Lolita we find a text that associates two taboos related to two forbidden expressions. The incest taboo is unspeakable, although it is associated to an expression of desire, which, in its turn, cannot be separated from death, which is also a taboo. In this case, the blank serves both as a hiding-place for the forbidden and as the mark of desire ("Le blanc sert alors autant de cache pour ce qui est interdit que de marque du désir").

Differently from Yona Dureau, who saw the contradictory critiques merely as the result of the tactical use of blanks, I think that Nabokov used them in order that the contraries and conflicts expressed by each one of the critical voices could coexist with equal pertinence. Yona Dureau's hypothesis on the role of the "blank" in Nabokov's work, since she sees it as element that propitiates the projections of the reader/spectator, opens up a more precise way to the understanding of Nabokov's effect on his readers. The element of "contagion" (transmission), stronger than the effectiveness of identification and empathy, would result from the manipulation, by the artist, of the directions of the projections made by the reader/spectator upon his work (upon the blanks within his work). Yona Dureau's hypothesis of the "blanks" in Nabokov's style helped me realize that, rather than the real projection of the idiosyncrasies of an author upon the mental world of the reader/spectator, there were crevices in their articulation (the "blanks") that would invite the reader's projection, while, simultaneously, these projections and "choices" would be limited, according to the author's conscious or unconscious designs, in order to transmit what belongs to the field of his symptom. It is not my intention to state that art is not one of the ways to express the inexpressible, or an access to a renewed view of life. Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that some works of art contain not only what they want to express, but also the private universe of the author's unconscious, that captures the reader in a manner that is unexpected because it is reductive.

Vladimir Nabokov, in spite of the openness he affords to interpretations, still rules the scene and even if he tried to express the ineffable he at the same time recreated in the reader his own conflicts and his own sorrows, ecstasies and fantasies. [33] It seems to me, also, that he deliberately barred the way to pathological identifications with cruelty or pedophilia, as if closing the door on this sort of contagion and transmission by means of art.