Jerry Friedman: "On the subject of
reputable philosophers, I'm not going to add to my "onslaught" about what
Nabokov believed, but I will say that I don't see why Shade should be closer to
them than to Mme. Blavatsky [...] Freud stated that "dreams of flying, so
familiar and often so delightful, have to be interpreted as dreams of general
sexual excitement, as erection-dreams". I think what Nabokov is talking
about with those umbrellas and balloons is this simplistic "have to be", with
its implication that everyone's mind is so similar that Freud knows every
individual's (that is, Nabokov's) psyche better than the individual."
JM: When we are offered a thread we may follow it
either with a positive or a negative disposition. The choice itself is
revelatory about the chooser.
For example, in the recent Nab-L about Wittels, we
find a quote: "Wittels was showing the
Vienna Society how easily the key psychoanalytic ideas about sexuality and the
unconscious could be used as revenge ... For
Wittels...psychoanalysis was virtually a science of
revenge... (his) audience was unsettled by what Wittels seemed to be
using psychoanalysis for...." Here we learn more about Wittels than
about Psychoanalysis, even though Wittels may attract a host of
followers, similarly shy of femininity and intent on
a revenge.
Now I must make a "mea culpa" to Jim Twiggs. I was
certain that Nabokov couldn't have been acquainted with the story
concerning Wittels's Irma, and still
have written "Lolita" since, in the background, there's a very sick mind
intent on using and tormenting a real child. Now I'm not so sure because, when one changes one's focus,
everything can be examined under a different light.
My first reaction arose because I had set the
focus on "Irma-Lolita". However Nabokov might have creatively "solipsized"
her, almost like Wittels did, but to look at a different feature which he
could use as a source. Namely, Wittel's explicit,
detailed and clear-cut misogyny.
If Wittels informed Nabokov about Humbert
Humbert, if that was the "focus" of a possible connection bt. Wittels and
Nabokov, Nabokov wouldn't be involved with "Irma" in any way, and
Lolita would become an exemplary presentation about the dire consequences
of a man's hatred against women ( even if unintenionally so).
Both Humbert Humbert and Shade (perhaps Pnin and
VN's other characters?) show various developments and inroads related
to misogyny and the denial of the "other sex". And there are various ways
to behave like a misanthrope, or as a "poet".
I just came accross an example from
G.K Chesterton's "The Club of Queer Trades" when a lack of interest in
people is not a product of revenge nor specific hates*: "Very few people
knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least unsociable... Few people
knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human
face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more
felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the
sunset clouds."
Actually, when one considers Humbert Humbert, among
other things, as being a portrait of a misogynist, many puzzling
questions related to Lolita's destiny call for a revision. So now I'm
finally able to see the point Jim Twiggs has raised here concerning "The
Child-Woman" memoirs.
..........................
*- While I was searching after Chesterton's lines, I
found a curious batch of others, related to "poets". A small sample from
"Orthodoxy":
"It is true that some speak lightly
and loosely of insanity as in itself attractive. But a moment's thought will
show that if disease is beautiful, it is generally some one else's disease...And
similarly even the wildest poetry of insanity can only be enjoyed by the sane.
To the insane man his insanity is quite prosaic, because it is quite
true....Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is
reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and
cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any
sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in
imagination ." (nb: I don't think I agree completely with Chesterton, but
these lines related to poets, insanity and imagination, are mistifying
enough..).