Nabokov's beef with the psychoanalysts So I finally got…
0 reactions
Nabokov's beef with the psychoanalysts
So I finally got around to reading Pale Fire after reading some of Nabokov's other works. It's a masterpiece, as expected; the whole presentation is immaculate as are the mind games being played, and the volatile dynamic between Shade and Kinbote is superb. The language is beautiful and I'm re-reading the Cantos after following Kinbote's (demented) commentary the first go-around. One section that stood out to me came in Kinbote's commentary on Canto One, where he details a set of lines that Shade crossed out that satirize psychoanalysts:
> Line 57: The phantom of my little daughter's swing
> After this Shade crossed out lightly the following lines in the draft:
> The light is good; the reading lamps,
> long-necked;
> All doors have keys. Your modern
> architect
> Is in collusion with psychanalysts:
> When planning parents' bedrooms, he
> insists
> On lockless doors so that, when looking
> back,
> The future patient of the future quack
> May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene.
Aside from being a hilarious takedown, it takes a very suspicious tone of analysis, as though there's some societal-wide conspiracy theory to recreate the Oedipal images that psychoanalysts write about in order to con patients out of their money. It feels like Nabokov is venting his frustrations over the psychoanalytic tradition that permeates the literati at the time of his writing. In one interpretation, Shade crossed it out merely because it didn't fit the tone of the poem, but it's just as true to me that he crossed it out because Wordsmith College wouldn't have accepted a sudden and severe repudiation of Freud in the text, especially as counterposed to the imagery of his daughter's swing. It would've been a tonal whiplash from their point of view.
I remember from Lolita there being anti-psychoanalysis subtext, such as in the sequence where Humbert meets with Dolores' head teacher, and her teacher deems her "sexually repressed" after recalling Dolores' odd behaviors at school, failing to notice the obvious signs of her being sexually abused. It's of a wider content than Pale Fire in that Nabokov's beef isn't so much the prison it puts literary tradition in, but that the psychoanalysts themselves are peddling pseudoscience to society at large. And that they've not only infected every facet of society, but they're handicapping literary expression, too, and that pisses him off. To him, it's probably no different than if Dianetics were being used as a framework of critique in literature. It's as much a critique of the bureaucracy of psychiatry as it is the underlying theory too, and I find it fascinating that Nabokov explores both sides in two different books. I'm sure this appears in his other works too (and general commentary).
#entertainment
source
So I finally got around to reading Pale Fire after reading some of Nabokov's other works. It's a masterpiece, as expected; the whole presentation is immaculate as are the mind games being played, and the volatile dynamic between Shade and Kinbote is superb. The language is beautiful and I'm re-reading the Cantos after following Kinbote's (demented) commentary the first go-around. One section that stood out to me came in Kinbote's commentary on Canto One, where he details a set of lines that Shade crossed out that satirize psychoanalysts:
> Line 57: The phantom of my little daughter's swing
> After this Shade crossed out lightly the following lines in the draft:
> The light is good; the reading lamps,
> long-necked;
> All doors have keys. Your modern
> architect
> Is in collusion with psychanalysts:
> When planning parents' bedrooms, he
> insists
> On lockless doors so that, when looking
> back,
> The future patient of the future quack
> May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene.
Aside from being a hilarious takedown, it takes a very suspicious tone of analysis, as though there's some societal-wide conspiracy theory to recreate the Oedipal images that psychoanalysts write about in order to con patients out of their money. It feels like Nabokov is venting his frustrations over the psychoanalytic tradition that permeates the literati at the time of his writing. In one interpretation, Shade crossed it out merely because it didn't fit the tone of the poem, but it's just as true to me that he crossed it out because Wordsmith College wouldn't have accepted a sudden and severe repudiation of Freud in the text, especially as counterposed to the imagery of his daughter's swing. It would've been a tonal whiplash from their point of view.
I remember from Lolita there being anti-psychoanalysis subtext, such as in the sequence where Humbert meets with Dolores' head teacher, and her teacher deems her "sexually repressed" after recalling Dolores' odd behaviors at school, failing to notice the obvious signs of her being sexually abused. It's of a wider content than Pale Fire in that Nabokov's beef isn't so much the prison it puts literary tradition in, but that the psychoanalysts themselves are peddling pseudoscience to society at large. And that they've not only infected every facet of society, but they're handicapping literary expression, too, and that pisses him off. To him, it's probably no different than if Dianetics were being used as a framework of critique in literature. It's as much a critique of the bureaucracy of psychiatry as it is the underlying theory too, and I find it fascinating that Nabokov explores both sides in two different books. I'm sure this appears in his other works too (and general commentary).
#entertainment
source
| 4,000 mlx | |
| 7 | |
| 0 |