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Fw: [NABOKV-L] Death of the author
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Maurice Couturier : "Like Maxim Shrayer, I apologize for entering the debate about the death of the author with a reference to my own works, specifically my essays "Nabokov ou la tyrannie de l'auteur" (Paris: le Seuil, 1993) and "La Figure de l'auteur" (Paris: le Seuil, 1995). Some of you may remember Brian McHale's bitter criticism of my essay of the subject in "Nabokov Studies" (Volume 2, 1995) entitled "The Great (Textual) Communicator, or, Blindness and Insight". to
which I responded only recently in "NOL". excerpts:" ...Barthes’s theoretical views changed considerably throughout his life, as did Genette’s, which shifted from narratology to aesthetics...I grant McHale that even the most unsophisticated critic is unconsciously tapping some interpretative grid, but this does not imply that all sophisticated critics should be content with applying known hermeneutics. If literary criticism and literary theory are to serve not only pedagogical but epistemological and aesthetic functions, their practitioners must be capable of breaking new ground and of contributing in their own fashion to the hermeneutic venture....Nabokov’s opinions on literature are so strong that many of his exegetes have felt the need to stick to a kind of criticism he himself practiced or would have sanctioned; and they have refrained from venturing into more daring interpretive realms, psychoanalysis for instance." What, then, would be McHale's reaction to my psychoanalytic study of Nabokov's novels, "Nabokov ou la cruauté du désir" (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2004) which is not author-centered?"
JM: Scholars whose articles and books aren't directly mentioned when the same, or similar themes as those they explore, are being discussed are wise to call the attention of the Nab-L. We may forget sometimes that the Nab-list is a "Forum," where misunderstandings, pertinent information and ideas can be clarified and enlarged.
My first acquaintance with Couturier's psychoanalytic reading of Nabokov came from Nabokov Studies, vol.9,2005 ("Narcisism and Demand in Lolita") but I made no progress because I discovered early on that we'd departed from different psychoanalytic perspectives or propositions.* Any argumentation on my part (favourable or conflictive), concerning "narcisism and demand" would therefore be rendered pointless by the lack of any common ground - but I'm sure other scholars familiar with Freud and Lacan weren't hampered to proceed, as I'd been by my professional limitations (there are wide theoretical schisms and chasms in psychoanalysis...)
I wish I could find a way to contribute to maintain open Couturier's particular inroads into Nabokov, since his initiative is truly ground-breaking and daringly innovative, judging from the articles I'm able to read. Although I haven't had access to the original article on "la cruauté du désir", there is a review of it, by Jacqueline Hamrit, that's been published in 2007/2008 Nabokov Studies,vol.11. The same perspective on "lack", as the one found in his 2005 article, seems to be present ( JH writes: "The first chapter, titled "Loss," starts with the assumption that loss is ar the origin of desire because it creates a feeling of lack... Although loss is at the core of Nabokov's oeuvre as it is connected to the loss of childhood and/or native country..." Later on she adds, in relation to "Aphanisis," that Lacan's revision of Jones's term, indicative of "the disappearance of desire," would admit that aphanisis is "a necessary condition of the existence of the desiring subject..." However I think that Lacan had already changed any such theories about "lack", "loss" and "desire" as early as 1958, in his seminar on "Hamlet." In addition, he kept constantly refining them away from any pragmatic concept of "loss" as representative of a definite object or emotional state that can be identified or located in time and space (such as the explicit loss of "homeland and childhood") ** Contrary to psychoanalytic theories, novels, as they appear in print, are exempt of change and in them an author retains his "authorship" and gets his last laugh at the readers. As I see it, a reader's (or a critic's) interpretations must be transient because they suffer a destiny that is similar to scientific and non-scientific theorizations, always on the move, marked by shifting paradigms...
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*For example, on page 20 Couturier concludes that "Need and demand are therefore the open and identifiable manifestations of desire, as a lack of being."(p.20) He lists the needs he relates to desire as the "need for food, for clothing, for reproduction, for pleasure..." Freud's words "Wunsch" and "Begierde" were apparently considered to be synonimous, as it also happens with Lacan's "desire" and "demand" (like Barthes's, Lacan's views changed throughout his life and his posterior distinction between "desire" and "need/demand" is the one I apply as a tool to understand psychoanalytic theories related to "lack").
** - Couturier apparently agrees with this shift, judging from what JH wrote in her review: " In the following chapter, 'Need,' Couturier opposes desire, which is the desire of the other, to need, which tends to narcissistic satisfaction." and from Ch.5, when his revised version of his Lolita article is brought up, since we are informed that this chapter "also studies the notion of drive as opposed to desire..."
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