SB's EDNote: In some forthcoming
work, probably soonest in a chapter to appear in Will Norman and Duncan White's
Transitional Nabokov volume, I argue that a version of Intelligent Design was a
certain kind of metaphor for Nabokov, but that one can't actually determine his
belief in it as a metaphysical doctrine. As for "democracy of ghosts"
[... Pnin] this formulation echoes precisely a passage in Kant's Dreams of
a Spirit-Seer (again can't be precise, but it's toward the end; apologies if
someone else has made this discovery). Deliberately? Who knows?
Kant's text is marvelously ambivalent and even playful.
LH: Intelligent Design implies one
and unique god, one and unique source of consciousness; moreover, it also
implies that everything has been planned in advance and that, as a consequence,
the Future already exists. Now, VN didn't believe in a pre-determined future, he
believed in surprises! He wrote or said I don't remember where that he prefered
a democracy of spirits to an autocratic god (something like that... does someone
have the exact quotation?) [...] Could you please tell me where
you found that information; I would like to read more about the subject
[JM:VN's explicit opinions about psychoanalysis were apparently informed only by
his contact with Freud's very early writings and, probably, by the
"utilitarian Freudians".] However that may be, I think it's important not to
dismiss or deny VN's lifelong opposition to Freud, even if one "believes" in
psychoanalysis; otherwise, all discussion is impossible.
["How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your
being aware of reality's dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in
hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without
a vanishing point.]"A very mysterious and dificult sentence. If I
understand correctly, VN means that our awareness of being aware of reality's
dreamlike nature is NOT a dream or a built-in hallucination since even a mirage
refers to a vanishing point; therefore, this point exists, however elusive and
vanishing; we can try the theorem with different X's. For example, if Hugh
Person is a mirage, he nevertheless refers to a vanishing point, the extra
textual character! Or , if our life, our reality is a mirage, it nevertheless
refers to a vanishing point, the unfathomable
beyond.
.................................................................................................................................................................
JM: Pnin,
ch.5 (penultimate paragraph): "Pnin slowly walked under the
solemn pines. The sky was dying.' He did not believe in an autocratic God. He
did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps,
formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies
of the quick."
Steve, by purely associative tricks I cannot now
retrieve, I concluded that for VN the world
of scientific "reality" follows rules that exclude "intelligent
design" from their propositions. Nevertheless, very prudently, when he
introduced "the otherworld" - no autocratic God - in his
novels and stories ( an article of private faith and as a special kind of
artistic sensititiy, as in his words about "hearing a truth sing in passin"
about Pushkin), he seemed to place or consider
them as "fantasy" ( perhaps what Coleridge mean by "fancy" as opposed
to "imagination"? This is way out of my depth, as usual). Kant! Please, tell us
more about this discovery of yours...
L.H, unfortunately I have no information about
VN's father's library, or his own.This is why is added "probably" and
"apparently" for whenever VN wrote against "Oedipal theory" or "a police
state of sexual myth" (etc) he seemed to be mainly criticizing certain
early works by Freud.
Thanks for the beautiful explanation about the vanishing
point and unfathomable beyond. I was tentatively using VN's words to
illustrate how the "ego" could be considered one of these mirages, rotating
together with other equally imagined characters and yet, also adding
that this ego still retained the role of a "structuring vanishing
point", but your interpretation of the extra textual character as the
"vanishing point" is very apposite.