Stalking Nabokov (20 page)

David Sexton, reviewing
Nabokov’s Butterflies
, ended with the comment that whatever your starting point, you would think more of Nabokov after reading the book.
¹
The same could be said of Zimmer’s
Guide
. You will also think more of Zimmer, even if you already know how selflessly he has worked for Nabokov since 1959, translating volume after volume into German, compiling the first Nabokov bibliography, editing and annotating the twenty-plus volumes of the Rowohlt edition of the collected works, contributing to the Nabokov website Zembla, and putting the final touches to a book on Nabokov’s Berlin.

Anyone who teaches Nabokov, and especially anyone who supervises or hopes to supervise graduate students working on him, should ensure that they have their own copy of
A Guide to the Butterflies and Moths 2001
and that they order another copy for their university library. Those who missed out on Michael Juliar’s
Vladimir Nabokov: A Descriptive Bibliography
for themselves and their library and now find it quite unavailable should not make the same mistake again.

Nabokov the commentator on
Eugene Onegin
, as well as Nabokov the researcher of “Notes on Neotropical Plebejinae” and Nabokov the author of
The Gift
, “A Discovery,” and
Pale Fire
, would have welcomed and applauded Zimmer’s invaluable
Guide 2001
. And Nabokov the lifelong lover of Lepidoptera would have had to blink back or wipe away tears of gratitude.

NABOKOV AS PSYCHOLOGIST

10. The Psychological Work of Fictional Play

When my friends in the very active Nabokov Society of Japan, Tadashi Wakashima, Akiko Nakata, and Shoko Miura, organized an international Nabokov conference in Kyoto in 2010, partly as a result of my cajoling—and my offering to organize a return conference in Auckland in 2012—they asked me to present a plenary paper. I had been reading a great deal of psychology over the previous decade and thought that this, as much as my reading in evolution (which dominates
chapter 11
, shapes
chapter 23
, and inflects
chapters 8
,
14
and
24
), could offer me a fresh perspective on Nabokov. He is a formidable psychologist, but apart from studies of his relationship to Freud, far too little research has been done in this area. And, as I argue, psychology has grown to the point where it can now focus on much about human minds and behavior of central concern to literature. Nabokov’s psychology, like his ethics and metaphysics, is another of those dimensions of his work that I think we cannot separate from his work as literature.

Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed as “preposterous” Alain Robbe-Grillet’s claims that his novels eliminated psychology: “The shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology—psychology at its best” (
SO
80). Later asked, “Are you a psychological novelist?” he replied: “All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists” (
SO
174). Since he evidently did not consider himself a novelist of no worth, we can infer he saw himself as a psychological novelist.

Psychology fills vastly wider channels now than when Nabokov, in the mid-twentieth century, refused to sail between the Scylla of behaviorism and the Charybdis of Freud. It deals with what matters to writers, readers, and others: with memory and imagination, emotion and thought, art and our attunement to one another, and it does so in wider time frames and with tighter spatial focus than even Nabokov could imagine. It therefore seems high time to revise or refresh our sense of Nabokov by considering him as a serious (and, of course, playful) psychologist and to see what literature and psychology can now offer each other.

I offer no definitive chart of the terrain, just prompts to exploration. We could move in many directions, a fact itself a tribute to Nabokov’s range and strengths as a psychologist: the writer as a reader of others and himself; as an observer and introspector; in relation to the psychology he knew from fiction (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce), nonfiction, and professional psychology (William James, Freud, Havelock Ellis); as a psychological theorist, in his fiction and nonfiction; and as a psychological “experimenter” in his fiction, running thought experiments on the characters he creates and on the effects he produces in readers. We could consider him in relation to the different branches of psychology, in his own time and now: abnormal, clinical, comparative, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary, individual, personality, positive, social; in relation to different functions of mind, whose limits he happily tests (attention, perception, emotion, memory, imagination, and pure cognition: knowing, understanding, inferring, discovering, solving, inventing); in relation to different states of consciousness (waking, sleeping, dreaming, delirium, reverie, inspiration, near-death experience, death experience). And we could consider what recent psychology explains in ways that Nabokov foresaw or all but ruled impossible to explain.

He used to tell his students: “The whole history of literary fiction as an evolutionary process may be said to be a gradual probing of deeper and deeper layers of life….the artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye” (
LRL
164–65). As a young boy he desperately wanted to discover new species of butterflies, and he became no less avid as a writer for new finds in literature: not only in words, details, and images, in structures and tactics, but also in psychology.

He declared that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (
LRL
ii), and he liked to criticize, utterly undaunted by reputation. He especially liked to correct competitors. He was fascinated by psychological extremes, as his fiction testifies, but he deplored Dostoevsky’s “monotonous dealings with persons suffering from pre-Freudian complexes” (
LRL
104). He admired Tolstoy’s psychological insight and his gift of rendering experience through his characters, but while he availed himself of Tolstoy’s techniques for scenic immersion, he sought to stress also, almost always, the capacity of our minds to transcend the scenes in which we find ourselves. Nabokov admired Proust’s capacity to move outside the moment, especially in untrammeled recollection, but he allotted more space to the constraints of the ongoing scene than Proust. In
The Gift
he gives Fyodor some of Proust’s frustration with the present, but he also locates the amplitude and fulfillment even here, for those who care to look. And where Proust emphasizes spontaneous, involuntary memory in restoring our links with our past, Nabokov stresses memory as directed by conscious search. He revered Joyce’s verbal accuracy, his precisions and nuances, but he also considered that his stream-of-consciousness technique gave “too much verbal body to thoughts” (
SO
30). The medium of thought for Nabokov was not primarily linguistic: “We think not in words but in shadows of words” (
SO
30). Thought was for him also multisensory and, at its best, multilevel. As cognitive psychologists would now say, using a computing analogy foreign to Nabokov, consciousness is parallel (indeed, “massively parallel”), rather than serial, so cannot translate readily into the emphatically serial mode that a single channel of purely verbal stream-of-consciousness can provide.

Famously, Nabokov could not resist deriding Freud. And for good reason: Freud’s ideas were enormously influential, especially in Nabokov’s American years, but his claims hollow. The Nobel laureate Peter Medawar, perhaps the greatest of science essayists, declared, in terms akin to Nabokov’s, that Freudianism was “the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century.”
¹
Nabokov saw the intellectual vacuity of Freudian theory and its pervasiveness in the popular and the professional imagination. He thought it corrupted intellectual standards (
SO
47), infringed on personal freedom (Guérin interview), undermined the ethics of personal responsibility (
SO
116), destroyed literary sensitivity (Guérin interview), and distorted the real nature of childhood attachment to parents—as has been amply confirmed by modern developmental psychology.

Nabokov treasured critical independence, but he did not merely resist others: he happily imbibed as much psychology as he could from the art of Tolstoy and the science of William James. He also looked for himself. He was a brilliant observer not only of the visual and natural worlds but also of the world of human nature. We can see his acute eye for individuals throughout his letters and memoirs, in others’ recollections of
his
sense of
them
, even many years later, and, of course, in his fiction.

Let’s turn there now: to the fiction, to one short passage, a mere sixty-seven words. I want to interweave the psychology Nabokov observes and experiments with in his fiction and the modern psychology about whose possibilities he was so skeptical. I also want to show just how much psychological
work
fiction can involve, or how much Nabokov’s swift shifts
make
it involve.

In
Ada’
s fourth chapter, we see Van Veen at his first school, the elite River-lane, and at his first sex, with the young helper at the corner shop, a “fat little wench” whom another boy at the school has found can be had for “a Russian green dollar.” The first time, Van spills “on the welcome mat what she would gladly have helped him take indoors.” But “at the next mating party” he “really beg[a]n to enjoy her … soft sweet grip and hearty joggle,” and by the end of term he has enjoyed “forty convulsions” with her. The chapter ends with Van leaving to spend the summer at Ardis, with his “aunt” Marina:

In an elegant first-class compartment, with one’s gloved hand in the velvet side-loop, one feels very much a man of the world as one surveys the capable landscape capably skimming by. And every now and then the passenger’s roving eyes paused for a moment as he listened inwardly to a nether itch, which he supposed to be (correctly, thank Log) only a minor irritation of the epithelium.

(
Ada
I.4:33)

Nabokov writes fiction, not psychology, but this typically exceptional passage depends on, depicts, and appeals to psychology. These lines and psychology have much to offer each other.

The “elegant first-class apartment” and the “gloved hand” make the most of a cognitive bias, the contrast effect: our minds respond to things much more emphatically in the presence of a contrast. Through the suddenness of the switch, Van and VN contrast the tawdriness of the “fat wench” possessed “among crates and sacks at the back of the shop” with the opulence of the train and Van’s fine dress.

“One feels very much a man of the world”: we can all recall and imagine sudden moments of self-satisfaction, especially at points where life steps up a level in childhood and adolescence. We can unpack this several ways. Life-history theory in recent evolutionary biology focuses on species-typical patterns of development and their consequences across species—although before life-history theory showed our human life patterns in a comparative light, we knew the importance of, and the unique delay in, the onset of human sexual activity. Psychology long neglected emotion. Now it explores even the social emotions, like those associated with status. Taking a step up on the staircase of life marks a rise in status, and recognizing that boosts levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the brain. This rise in turn, past puberty, raises the inclination to sexual activity—as in Van, on his way to Ardis, who wakes up there early the next morning to a “savage sense of opportune license” (
Ada
46) when, in his skimpy bathrobe, he encounters the nineteen-year-old servant Blanche.

In “
one’s
gloved hand …
one
feels very much a man of the world,” Van invites us to a common human emotion through the generalizing pronoun “one.” We take this appeal to shared experience for granted. Recognizing shared experience, and wanting to, are at the basis of fiction and the social life fiction feeds on. But psychology should do more than just take these facts for granted: it should help us explain them.

Mirror neurons, discovered in the 1990s, fire in the same part of my motor area that would be activated if, say, I grasp something, when I merely
see
someone else grasping. This unforeseen component of neural architecture, especially elaborate in humans, helps us to understand and to learn from others, and perhaps to cooperate or compete with them.
²
We also have from infancy a far stronger motivation to share experience than have other animals, even chimpanzees: think of an infant’s compulsion to point to draw others’ attention to something just possibly of interest. This heightened motivation to share experience seems to lay the foundation for human ultrasociality.
³