My Potential Patients: Origins, Detection, and Transference in Pale Fire and Freud's Case of the Wolf-Man
by David G. Cohen
page two of four

One: Rhetoric, Webs, and Origins

Freud’s analysis in The Wolf-Man and Kinbote’s commentary in Pale Fire are, at least in part, efforts to convince.3 Freud wants to demonstrate the far-reaching significance of infantile experience, Kinbote to prove to the reader (and perhaps to himself) that “Pale Fire” is about him. Freud and Kinbote are not merely informed by preconceptions, then: they write largely to justify and validate them. And lest we make the naïve mistake of dismissing Kinbote as wholly divorced from his creator, we ought to note both his consummate artistry (Rorty 164) and the short anagrammatic distance from C. Kinbote to V. Botkin to V. Nabokov (Lee 83). The rhetoric of The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire is thus closely associated with Freud’s and Nabokov’s projects in these works, and is, I will argue, essential to the workings of their narratives.

In the fifth chapter of the Wolf-Man, prefaced with the deceptively modest title “A Few Discussions,” Freud offers the rhetorical claims that foreground his analysis of the neurosis. Freud’s main concern here is to demonstrate the irreconcilability of his infancy-centered theory of neurosis with the theories of Jung, Adler, and their adherents, those who “look for the causes of neuroses almost exclusively in the grave conflicts of later life” (192). According to these dissenters, memories from infancy related by neurotic patients are fantasies concocted in the present and located retroactively in the past due “to a regressive tendency, to a turning-away from the tasks of the present” (193). Freud’s first move is to insulate psychoanalytic technique from the possibility that he might lose this critical point of debate. Even if the analyst regards infantile experiences recalled by the patient as retroactive fantasies, he argues, to treat them as anything but authentic would be to lose the patient’s cooperation in tracking down the real repression from which they originate. Regardless of the analyst’s theoretical allegiances, then, the essential procedure of analysis should remain unchanged (193-194). With this fail-safe measure in place, Freud addresses the counter-argument that, since repressed infantile memories cannot be directly recollected by the patient and must instead be constructed by the analyst from distorted and displaced fragments, they constitute “phantasies not of the patient but of the analyst himself” (196). An analyst who maintains the validity of recovered infantile experience, Freud retorts,

will comfort himself by recalling how gradually the construction of this phantasy which he is supposed to have originated came about, and, when all is said and done, how independently of the physician’s incentive many points in its development proceeded; how, after a certain phase of the treatment, everything seemed to converge upon it, and how later in the synthesis, the most various and remarkable results radiated out from it; how not only the large problems but the smallest peculiarities in the history of the case were cleared up by this single assumption. (196, emphasis mine)

Claiming that Jung, Adler, and other opponents in the analytic community tend to simplify the binary opposites of his theory by selecting out one component as the most decisive, Freud declares that this case is intended to reassert the importance of infantile experience, to prove it “beyond any doubt” (198). Since the patient first suffered from neurosis when he was only four- or five-years-old, the time and material available to him that could have contributed to the imagining of regressive fantasies are limited, and infantile factors must thus be held accountable. That is, if such a “primal scene” has been properly constructed, if “it is indispensable to a comprehensive solution of all the conundrums that are set us by the symptoms of the infantile disorder” and “all the consequences radiate out from it, just as all the threads of the analysis have led up to it,” then “it is impossible that it can be anything else than the reproduction of a reality experienced by the child” (198-99, emphasis mine).

Having worked to make his position and that of his opponents wholly incompatible on the level of theory, Freud lays down his gauntlet, declaring that “it must therefore be left at this (I can see no other possibility): either the analysis based on the neurosis in his childhood is all a piece of nonsense from start to finish, or everything took place just as I have described it above” (199). The conditions of the debate established, Freud goes on to weave for the reader the etiological web he claims to have discovered during the analysis, always returning to and moving out from the primal scene forming the core of the structure. This demonstration is most overtly architectural in the seventh chapter, “Anal Erotism and the Castration Complex,” where Freud abandons narrative entirely in favor of the depiction of a structural network or map (Brooks 281), a kit of “fragmentary portions, which the reader can then put together into a living whole” (Freud 214). Yet while this analysis is “crucial for the case history,” as David Carroll notes, “it does not put into question the center (origin) which has just been determined, but on the contrary is organized around it and affirms its place” (522).

Like Freud, Kinbote is harried by an opposition bent on debunking his reading as a self-motivated fantasy. His Foreword reads like a parody of Freud’s fifth chapter, offering a set of rhetorical formulations designed to render unassailable even the most ludicrously tangential connections he will make in the Commentary between his narrative and Shade’s poem. Once he has accomplished justifying the publication of a critical edition by asserting against the Shadeans that the poem is essentially complete, Kinbote mentions the existence of the so-called “variants” purportedly edited out by a jealous “Mrs. S.” (Sybil Shade), most of which, we later learn, are comically poor forgeries explicitly alluding to Zembla and Charles II. “In a sense, many of them are more valuable artistically and historically”—valuable to Kinbote, that is—“than some of the best passages in the final text” (16).

“I must now,” he thinks aloud, “explain how Pale Fire came to be edited by me” (16). Here and elsewhere in the Foreword, Kinbote’s account makes amusing use of circular argument and unprovable assertion: his friendship with Shade “was the more precious for its tenderness being concealed” (25), existing “on that higher, exclusively intellectual level where one can rest from emotional troubles, not share them” (27); Shade “intended to ask my advice after reading his poem to me as a I know he planned to do” (16); and “naturally,” Sybil Shade’s request that Kinbote “accept Prof. H. (!) and Prof. C. (!!) as co-editors” “precluded collaboration with my friend’s misguided widow” (18). (Prof. C. receives the extra exclamation point, we later gather, for teaching Freud in his English classes [271].) Regarding his questionable acquisition of the manuscript, Kinbote moreover “def[ies] any serious critic to find this contract unfair,” and claims the unrevised final fifty lines of the poem “to be beautifully accurate when you once make the plunge and compel yourself to open your eyes in the limpid depths under its confused surface” (14). In the fifth chapter of the Wolf-Man, Freud offers a similar argument, impatiently dismissing the impossibility of the primal scene being apprehended and remembered by the patient at age one-and-a-half, then recalled and comprehended at age four:

Anyone who will take the trouble of pursuing an analysis into these depths by means of the prescribed technique will convince himself that it is decidedly possible. Anyone who neglects this, and breaks off the analysis in some higher stratum, has waived his right of forming a judgement [sic] on the matter. (192)

The Freud of The Wolf-Man feels harassed, defensive, and desperate; Kinbote amplifies these emotions to a degree simultaneously comic and pathetic. “Such hearts, such brains,” he trembles, referring to the Shadeans and their representatives, “would be unable to comprehend that one’s attachment to a masterpiece may be utterly overwhelming, especially when it is the underside of the weave that entrances the beholder and only begetter” (17). “Attachment” suggests emotional commitment, parasitism, and, given the hypnotic combination of “entrances” and “utterly overwhelming,” the magical entrapment of “the beholder,” who both possesses and is possessed. As the “only begetter,” Kinbote simultaneously sires and acquires the poem, feminizing Shade as the womb that gives birth to his narrative. In the sense that he is the poet’s inseminator or muse, Zembla and his friendship with Shade constitute the invisible “underside of the weave,” the “catalytic agent upon the very process of the sustained creative effervescence that enabled Shade to produce a 1000-line poem in three weeks” (81). In its more outrageous suggestion that he is reborn or doubled through the poem, the lesser structural “underside” is Shade’s poem and the displayed pattern is Kinbote’s story. All these meanings coexist in Kinbote’s relationship to “Pale Fire,” a complexity he encapsulates and structures with the assertion that his “own past intercoils there with the fate of the innocent author” (17).

Shade himself is occupied with similar tropes. “A thread of subtle pain, / Tugged at by playful death, released again, / But always present, ran through me” (38, ll. 139-41), he says, introducing a reminiscence of his first death-like experience. The cat and spider imagery here is repeated and rendered more explicitly arachnid in Shade’s account of his second death experience, when a “blood-black nothingness began to spin / A system of cells interlinked within / Cells interlinked within cells interlinked / Within one stem” (59, ll. 703-6). Thrilled by the prospect that the “tall white fountain” (61, l. 758) he perceives during his fit and later encounters in a magazine article about the near-death of “a Mrs. Z.” (60, l.748) represents some cosmic truth, Shade enthusiastically travels to meet her: “Was met by an impassioned purr. / Saw that blue hair, those freckled hands, that rapt / Orchideous air—and knew that I was trapped” (61, 770-772). Shade is punished here, as during his lectureship at “I.P.H., a lay / Institute (I) of Preparation (P) / For the Hereafter (H)” (52, ll.502-4), for vulgarizing and literalizing his interest in death. After learning to his bemused embarrassment that Mrs. Z.’s “fountain” is misprinted from “mountain,” Shade resolves to aestheticize his exploration of death, seeking in the world around him “a web of sense” (63, l. 810): “Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find / Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind / Of correlated pattern in the game, / Plexed artistry, and something of the same / Pleasure in it as they who played it found” (63, ll. 811-15).

Shade decides, in other words, that he can understand death only indirectly, by mimicking in the creation of poetry the networks of playful correspondence wrought by an “aloof and mute,” otherworldly “they” (l. 818). He connects this artistic ethos with his deepest personal suffering in Canto Four, where he declares: “I feel I understand / Existence, or at least a minute part / Of my existence, only through my art, / In terms of combinational delight” (68-69, ll. 970-73), adding that “I’m reasonably sure that we survive / And that my darling somewhere is alive” (69, l. 977-78). The irony, of course, is that minutes after Shade cozily writes he is “reasonably sure that I / Shall wake at six tomorrow, on July / The twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine, / And that the day will probably be fine” (69, ll. 979-82), he is shot by an escaped mental patient who mistakes him for his judge and jailer. Shade’s conviction that he can wrest meaning from the world and his daughter’s death by spinning webs of poetry seems to be completely overturned.

But the murder allows Kinbote to acquire the manuscript from a distraught Sybil Shade, and, when it becomes immediately clear that the poem is not an epic tribute to King Charles the Beloved, to use it as a vehicle for the transmission of his narrative. Still, Kinbote’s grandiose paranoia, ever incorporating new details and individuals into his self-referential delusions, refuses to allow that the killer is anything less than a regicidal assassin. It becomes difficult for Kinbote “to make people calmly see—without having them immediately scream and hustle me—the truth of the tragedy—a tragedy in which I had been not a ‘chance witness’ but the protagonist, and the main, if only potential, victim” (299). Kinbote solves this problem by reinventing Grey as Gradus, claiming to have conducted “an interview, perhaps even two interviews” (299) before the prisoner’s suicide, and winding the mechanism of this “clockwork man” (152) so as to synchronize his forward movement with that of “Pale Fire”: “We shall accompany Gradus in constant thought,” he announces early in the Commentary, “as he makes way from distant dim Zembla to green Appalachia, through the entire length of the poem” (78), propelled by Shade’s “powerful iambic motor” (136).

Gradus and Shade thus form two strands of plot that grow ever closer, and the point of their intersection is simultaneously the moment of Shade’s death and the origin of the novel. With this “primal scene” securely in place, Kinbote establishes a web of connections between poem and commentary through his cross-references, and we are invited to make connections of our own between Shade and Kinbote, Zembla and New Wye. Poem and commentary cooperate in impelling us forward to this climax, a moment of revelation Kinbote and Nabokov have promised and prepared us for since the first mention of Shade’s death in the novel’s opening sentence.4 It is a violent and spectacular collision of worlds, an interpenetration of the delusional fictions of Kinbote, the paranoid revenge fantasy of Jack Grey (a world whose composition we can only infer), and the deceptive “reality” of New Wye.

Behind and above these fictional worlds is the character Nabokov, the creator and master of all of them: “I may turn up yet,” Kinbote says before completing his commentary and ostensibly committing suicide, “on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art” (300-1). The persona Kinbote imagines is of course that of Nabokov himself (Lee 85), at least as he constructed it through his autobiography and interviews.5 For while the death of Shade is the point of origin of Kinbote’s Commentary, the novel itself arises from the interplay of two texts, a structure which insistently points back and up to a more or less “aloof and mute” author. The death of Shade is thus a nexus between both the worlds within the novel and the worlds just outside, those of writer and reader. To use Freud’s words, “everything seemed to converge upon it, and . . . the most various and remarkable results radiated out from it” (196).

Like the death of Shade in Pale Fire, the primal scene in The Wolf-Man functions as both an origin and an end. For the patient, the primal scene is the root cause of the neurosis, and in its uncovering and retelling, the cure; for Freud, the primal scene is that which he expects to find in the analysis, and, after putting the patient “under the inexorable pressure” (157) of an arbitrary six-month deadline, that which he indeed manages to uncover. And while the four-year long analysis culminates with the construction of the primal scene, the text itself begins with it, introducing it in a self-conscious moment of revelation only twenty-eight pages into the one hundred nine-page account.

To put it differently, the construction of the primal scene in the analysis caused innumerable loose pieces of information accumulated over the course of years to instantly crystallize into a network of meaning; in the case history, Freud introduces the primal scene and then suspends and subverts time, jumping from component to component in depicting the structure that forms around it. As he explains, “I am unable to give either a purely historical or a purely thematic account of my patient’s story; I can write a history neither of the treatment nor of the illness, but I shall find myself obliged to combine the two methods of presentation” (158). According to Peter Brooks, Freud’s text actually has four levels of narrative: “the history of the neurosis,” “the etiology of the neurosis,” “the history of the treatment,” and “the order of report in the case history” (272). While the order of report organizes the other three levels (273), what prevents the text from devolving into explanatory anarchy, I would argue, is the primal scene itself, a single point that is simultaneously the text’s origin, end, and source of order.

Freud evokes this puzzling circularity late in his analysis with one final salvo of rhetoric, a reinterpretation of the patient’s reverse-Oedipal “womb-phantasy” according to the ventriloquized objections of Jung and Adler. The patient imagined and projected into his past the primal scene to avoid contending with the real sources of his neurosis, Freud imagines his opponents arguing, and “his symptoms were then strung together as though they had been derived from a primal scene of that kind” (244). Freud’s response to this imagined objection is startling:

All this would be very nice, if only the unlucky wretch had not had a dream when he was no more than four years old, which signalized the beginning of his neurosis . . . and the interpretation of which necessitates the assumption of this primal scene. All the alleviations which the theories of Jung and Adler seek to afford us come to grief, alas, upon such paltry but unimpeachable facts as these. (244)

In a clever if overreaching paper written partly in response to Peter Brooks’ sympathetic reading of the case, Stanley Fish portrays The Wolf-Man as a rhetorical performance in which the content of the analysis is a function of Freud’s pernicious desire to dominate and persuade. Fish pounces on Freud’s use of “assumption” in this passage, noting that the very analysis Freud has just given is being used as proof of the primal scene on which it rests. “The necessity Freud invokes here is a narrative necessity,” Fish adds. “The primal scene is important because it allows the story of its own discovery to unfold” (938). Since “it has been installed at the centre of a structure of conviction[,] it acquires the status of that which goes without saying and that against which nothing can be said. It then becomes possible to argue both for and from it at the same time”; it is, in short, “something beyond rhetoric” (938). Fish’s vehemently anti-Freudian stance does not markedly differ here from Brooks’ more generous reading, which argues that the new, reformulated narrative a patient acquires in analysis gains its therapeutic benefit not from its truth claim, but from its potential “as a shaping and connective force,” an energy arising from the narrative’s explanatory power or “conviction” (283-84).

In both readings of Freud, the primal scene allows for narration to occur. Whether we see Freud’s account in The Wolf-Man as a therapeutic dialogue, an aggressive rhetorical power-play, or some combination is a matter of emphasis and preference. It is similarly up to the reader to decide whether Kinbote’s narrative in Pale Fire (and Nabokov’s just behind him) tells the story of imaginative art triumphing over bitter reality or the tale of his own selfishness and solipsism. In either case, the significance of the primal scene and the death of Shade lies less in their status as events than in the act of telling they make possible. As we have seen, both moments are the source of stories and that to which they return: the primal scene is the cause of the neurosis and its cure, the termination of the analysis and the beginning of the case history, and the purpose for which the case is written and the force that holds it together; the death of Shade is the origin of Kinbote’s commentary and its destination, the moment legitimizing and shattering a delusional world, and the generating point of the novel and its end. Freud’s and Kinbote’s rhetoric is circular, then, because narrative is circular, an end in itself and its own reason for being. In the next section, we will see how the elliptical nature of these texts impacts the way they are read.

3. I will use "commentary" to refer to the entirety of Kinbote's Foreword, Commentary, and Index.

4. The narrative structure is similar in Despair, in which, Helen Oakley writes, "the identity of the murderer is revealed quite early on. The book is given its driving force then not by an investigation into the identity of the murderer, but through interest in how the victim and murderer, like two parallel lines, will converge at a point in the end" (487).

5. In Strong Opinions, Nabokov claims he gives interviews "to construct in the presence of my audience the semblance of what I hope is a plausible and not altogether displeasing personality" (158). When I discuss the "Nabokov" within Pale Fire, Speak, Memory, and Strong Opinions, I am referring to this quasi-character, a constructed figure similar to, but not synonymous with, his creator.