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

Three: Constructions, Transference, and Otherworlds

In the previous two sections, we have attempted to close the distance between two seemingly antithetical writers. We first looked at how origins function in The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire, noting their importance as the vertices around which Freud and Nabokov weave webs of significance. We then explored the implications of their shared affinity for detective fiction, noticing how both texts invite readers to complete and repeat the investigations they describe—to spin, as it were, explanatory webs of their own. In this concluding section, we will shift our focus from looking at Pale Fire in conjunction with The Wolf-Man to looking at Nabokov’s novel in opposition to the psychoanalytic theory that informed and was informed by Freud’s greatest case. Specifically, we will read three of Freud’s papers on the inner workings of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), “The Dynamics of Transference” (1912), and “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (1914), a triptych of related essays that together form a complete account of orthodox psychoanalysis.

Readers familiar with psychoanalytic theory may well have anticipated this discussion. Repetition is a key concept in Freud’s psychological theory and metapsychological philosophy, as well as, we might add, in the works of the literary critics who study him.14 According to Freud, neurotics unknowingly act out their repressions, a state of unhealthy repetition that is intensified and overcome in the “transference,” the patient’s artificial relationship to the analyst. Contemporary psychoanalytic literary critics, who since Felman’s “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” have tended to forgo diagnosing and explaining literature in favor of reading Freud in parallel with texts as a literary theorist (Jackson 162-63), have often likened the transference to a text or the act of reading: to Richard King, “normality implied [to Freud] a metaphorical repetition; neurosis a literal one,” and “thus normality was a matter of interpretation not imitation” (1203); to Peter Brooks, “we as readers ‘intervene’ by the very act of reading, interpreting the text, handling it, shaping it to our ends, making it accessible to our therapies” (234); and to David Carroll, the text “is a compromise . . . with the world, a (re) translation of it, a construction from its traces” (527).

Carroll is alluding to “Constructions in Analysis” (1937), one of the last and most self-conscious of Freud’s papers. Freud begins in a briskly confident tone, seeming to promise a definitive rebuttal to the common criticism that because the analyst’s constructions are equally affirmed by the patient’s acceptance or rejection of them (“heads I win, tails you lose” [23: 257]), the analyst can never be wrong. Complaining that the distinction between analyst and analysand has become blurred in analytic theory, he reminds the reader that while it is the patient’s task to remember, it is the analyst’s to construct memories, “to make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind” (258-59). Constructions, then, constitute the bridge between the unique work of both parties. Freud acknowledges that while there is indeed no conclusive way of determining whether a construction is correct, a mistaken one is usually met with the patient’s indifference. Additionally, affirmation of a construction is only meaningful if the patient responds with additional, related material that serves to “complete and extend” (262) it. A negation is usually an expression of resistance, often a sign of the construction being not wrong but incomplete. Affirmations and negations from a patient are thus always ambiguous and never conclusive, with the subsequent events of the analysis alone providing reliable indications of a construction’s accuracy (259-265).

By relocating final authority over constructions within the person of the (Freudian) analyst, Freud effectively removes the issue from the sphere of public debate. But in a self-referential concluding section, Freud turns on himself to question the dissemblance of the analytic roles. The relating “of an obviously apt construction,” he says, sometimes results not in the return of the repressed itself, but in the recollection of related details. In these cases, resistance causes the displacement of “the ‘upward drive’ of the repressed” from the main body of the memory onto related, less threatening memory traces (266). These details resemble hallucinations, and the “mechanism” of their formation that of dreaming. Referring to the infantile repression at the core of such distorted and displaced recollections, Freud declares that “the essence of it is that there is not only method in madness, as the poet has already perceived, but also a fragment of historical truth” (267). If this assessment is correct, it would no longer be necessary to convince a patient that he is delusional, and the analysis should instead pursue the “kernel of truth” within a delusion and relocate it within the patient’s past. Given this new sense, delusional processes are as common to neurotics (whose rising repressions cause anxiety) as to psychotics, and indeed, “The delusions of patients appear to me to be the equivalents of the constructions which we build up in the course of an analytic treatment—attempts at explanation and cure” (268).

Freud tempers the revolutionary implications of this statement by noting that, unlike an analytic construction, a psychotic delusion merely substitutes a past reality for a present, rejected one. While accurate constructions and psychotic delusions seem equally true to the recipient in that both present repressed memories to his consciousness, only a construction related by the analyst can be truly therapeutic (268). A construction is like a delusion, then, only insofar as the patient is concerned; the analyst is certainly not delusional. Yet this is not the first time Freud compares the madness of a patient with the purported sanity of the analyst: in his 1911 Notes on a Case of Paranoia, he remarks on the similarity between the psychotic Dr. Schreber’s “‘rays of God’” and his own concept of outwardly projecting “libidinal cathexes” (12: 78), playfully quipping that “it remains for the future to decide whether there is more delusion in my theory than I should like to admit, or whether there is more truth in Schreber’s delusion than other people are as yet prepared to believe” (79).

Freud clearly intends this sense of shared psychosis in “Constructions in Analysis,” as well, with the implication being that patient and analyst alike draw from their own repressions, the one in recovering and articulating the raw material to be analyzed, and the other in formulating constructions. In this reading of Freud, analysis begins to look less stratified and more collaborative, with the patient relating fragments, the analyst constructing a story using this material in conjunction with the contents of his own unconscious, and the patient in turn remembering (or creating) additional memories in response. The cycle that results could be called a dialectic of delusions,15 a collaborative, “dialogic” (Brooks 321) effort at building a satisfactory narrative.

What possible bearing on Pale Fire could “Constructions in Analysis” have? After all, Kinbote is hardly interested in any kind of dialogue with Shade’s person or poem. As a parody of the Freudian analyst, he draws exclusively from his own repressions, obsessions, and desires in interpreting the latent content behind the manifest material of “Pale Fire,” constructing a self-validating narrative aimed at his own glorification and immortalization. If anything, he provides a living example of the latter day Freud taken to his logical extreme, where an analyst who once ignored, denied, or downplayed his own repressions now justifies and defends them. Indeed, Kinbote subverts the analytic roles to his advantage, first becoming patient in the hope that Shade “would recreate in a poem the dazzling Zembla burning in my brain” (80), and then, when the poem turns out to be “Pale Fire” and not “Solus Rex” (296), swapping the patient’s couch for the analyst’s chair in offering a construction where he is the poem’s protagonist and hero. Though Kinbote partly faults Shade for failing to tell his story (296), he mostly blames Sybil, his competitor for Shade’s attention and a rank “anti-Karlist” (74) who certainly must have encouraged her husband to strike out any references to Charles Xavier and his Zembla (91). Claiming that this “domestic censor” (81) of resistance has suppressed Shade’s intended utterance simultaneously empowers Kinbote as the poem’s analyst/interpreter and protects even the most outlandish of his claims from criticism.

But Pale Fire criticizes and engages with the Freud of “Constructions in Analysis” on a level deeper than that of damning parody. Responding to a variant from the section of Canto Three in which Shade recounts his brief and disastrous tenure at “I.P.H., a lay / Institute (I) of Preparation (P) / For the Hereafter (H)” (52, ll. 502-4), Kinbote notes:

The ultimate destiny of madmen’s souls has been probed by many Zemblan Theologians who generally hold the view that even the most demented mind still contains within its diseased mass a sane basic particle that survives death and suddenly expands, bursts out as it were, in peals of healthy and triumphant laughter when the world of timorous fools and trim blockheads had fallen away far behind. (237)

To Freud, the “fragment of historical truth” (23: 267) within madness should be separated from the delusional detritus surrounding it and firmly relocated within the patient’s infantile past; to Kinbote, the trappings of madness are shed by death, and it is in the otherworld that the preserved kernel of selfhood, presumably the soul, joyously explodes open like popcorn.16 The context of Kinbote’s theological point is significant, prefacing an account of his stumbling in on cocktail conversation between Mrs. H. and Shade: “‘That is the wrong word,’ he said. ‘One should not apply it to a person who deliberately peels off a drab and unhappy past and replaces it with a brilliant invention. That’s merely turning a new leaf with the left hand’” (238). While Mrs. H. claims that she and Shade were debating “the old man . . . at the Exton railway station, who thought he was God and began redirecting the trains” (238), the “glazed eyes” (238) Shade directs at Kinbote suggest that either the two were discussing him as well, or that he is the “person” Shade really had in mind. Either way, the implication is that Shade regards Kinbote as “a fellow poet” (238), a gesture of shared imagination and humanity we do not encounter directly in almost any of their other interactions.17

What is at stake here is the shared territory of art and madness, and it is one of many moments in Pale Fire in which we can sense Nabokov’s presence behind that of his characters. Brian Boyd notes that Nabokov often flags important passages in the novel with ironic dismissal, and here Kinbote concludes by shrugging that “I am not sure this trivial variant has been worth commenting; indeed, the whole passage about the activities of the IPH would be quite Hudibrastic had its pedestrian verse been one foot shorter” (238). To the Zemblan theologians, the agnostic John Shade, and Nabokov himself, then, delusions are not merely “attempts at explanation and cure,” as Freud says, but are “brilliant invention[s]” that shed the “drab and unhappy past” where the Viennese witch-doctor imprisons them. That is, while Freud seeks to firmly lodge the truth at the core of madness within an infantile beforetime, Nabokov envisions its redemption in an otherworldly aftertime.

It is significant in this respect that while Brian Boyd is able to fill a book with elaborate demonstrations of how Hazel influences Shade from beyond the grave, how both in turn inspire Kinbote, and even how Kinbote’s experiences in New Wye inform his delusions, he cannot definitively reconstruct Kinbote’s past as Botkin. The most he (and anyone) can determine is that he “seems likely to be a Russian émigré who has lived until recently in Scandinavia” (92), and that he may have been forced to flee the country and his university post after molesting a child (96). Nabokov seems to have made it impossible for the reader to construct the “drab and unhappy past” of Kinbote with any kind of conviction, though it remains a palpable presence behind the commentary. Though he certainly does not shy from revealing the depths of Kinbote’s despair (“Dear Jesus, do something” [93]), Nabokov is more interested in having us appreciate how Kinbote transmutes that pain into art by inventing the dazzling otherworld of Zembla.

Shade’s parodic treatment of the I.P.H. and Mrs. Z. makes it eminently clear, though, that we ought not to literalize the otherworld, a vulgarization we can extend to equating it solely with an afterlife, however eruditely aestheticized. And if we should not abstract Pale Fire to a metaphysical treatise on life and afterlife—a “spiritualistic case history” (226) in Kinbote’s contemptuous words—neither should we reduce it to an aesthetic one on life and art. Home and exile, original and double, self and other, “drab and unhappy past” and fantastic delusion are equally applicable renderings of the divide between world and otherworld. If Brian Boyd’s book on Pale Fire makes the first of these literalizing mistakes by providing a supernatural solution to the puzzles of the text, it does not necessarily make his argument “wrong.” As Boyd notes, many of Nabokov’s stories and novels show an interest in “not just the possibility of an afterlife but also the possibility of some communication between the dead and the living” (173). Nabokov stresses that we will be unable to find evidence of the otherworld’s existence or nonexistence, and “indeed, he suggests, our very expression of our inability to detect such signals could be their very sign, or in any case, proof of the inconceivable distance between the conditions of an existence beyond death and ours” (173-74).

Freud addresses the issue of communication between the world of the repressed past and the world of the present through his concept of transference, discussing it in two papers contemporaneous with The Wolf-Man.18 In “The Dynamics of Transference,” Freud argues that one or more “stereotype plate[s]” for how one falls in love are forged in early childhood from a combination of infantile experience and disposition, and that the pattern they represent is repeated—“constantly reprinted afresh”—throughout life. Although this “transference” occurs in the relationships of all neurotics, it is easily established with the person of the analyst (12: 99-101). When the analysis reaches deep enough into the unconscious in trying to “track down” (102) the libido, a transferential association rises up into the patient’s consciousness, serving as resistance to the analytic detective work (103-4). As the duration of an analysis increases, the patient’s resistance increasingly employs this negative and unconscious positive transference as a way of distorting the repressed material (103-4), and the analyst fights back by enlisting the patient’s positive, conscious transference (106). While the transference presents the greatest obstacle to treatment, it also does “the inestimable service of making the patient’s hidden and forgotten erotic impulses immediate and manifest” (108). “This struggle between the doctor and the patient, between intellect and instinctual life, between understanding and seeking to act, is played out almost exclusively in the phenomena of transference,” and “it is on that field that victory must be won” (108).

While “The Dynamics of Transference” compares transference to a battlefield, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” depicts it as a playground. In certain cases, Freud says here, “we may say that the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (12: 150). Indeed, “as long as the patient is in the treatment he cannot escape from this compulsion to repeat; and in the end we are to understand that this is his way of remembering” (150). Since the patient repeats in the analysis both the repressed material and his neurotic symptoms, experiencing them as “real and contemporary,” they must be treated as such. Yet it is also the analyst’s task to relocate these manifestations firmly in the patient’s past (151-52), and in the transferential “playground,” the patient’s potentially harmful compulsion to repeat can be satisfied while at the same time exposing the repressed neurotic material to examination and interpretation. By substituting neurotic symptoms experienced in real life with a “transference-neurosis” exhibited only in the analysis, the patient’s repressed memories can be made conscious and his illness overcome: “The transference thus creates an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from the one to the other is made” (154).

As in his regard for the artistic potential of madness, Nabokov angrily opposes Freud’s use of infantile repressions as an ultimate explanatory paradigm. In a particularly Shadean passage in Speak, Memory, he declares that in exploring the “spherical” “prison of time” (20),

I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.19 (20)

The parenthetical aside is a sly wink to the reader familiar with Nabokov. In “The Vane Sisters,” the protagonist awakes from a dream, tries to look in it for signs of the recently deceased Cynthia Vane, and, as the story ends, despairs. Reading every first letter of the last paragraph, though, yields an otherworldly message from Cynthia and her sister Sybil, ironically affirming the possibility of a kind of communication with the dead (Boyd, Discovery 213-14). Clearly, planting and searching for acrostics was not beneath Nabokov, nor was, for that matter, comparing himself to Shakespeare on the pretense of their shared birthdays (Lee 85-86).

This is not to say that Nabokov is covertly approving of Freudian dream interpretation and the infantile traumas it often uncovers; he undoubtedly finds both reductive and distasteful. But even in this sharply acerbic dismissal of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic reading, Nabokov acknowledges, however begrudgingly, an affinity with Freud on the basis of their shared fondness for literary gamesmanship. Freud sees the transference as a kind of cooperative combat between analyst and patient, “the peculiar space of a deadly serious play” (234), as Brooks puts it, where the past can be acted out symbolically and reformulated (234-35); Nabokov sees games and puzzles as embodying the admirable qualities of ingenious deception on the part of the composer and eager curiosity on the part of the solver, dramatizing the “clash,” as he says, “between the author and the reader” and “the author and the world” (qtd. in Discovery 8). To Nabokov, then, the problem with Freud is not that he puts such stake in verbal games, but that his style of play is so uncreative.

Like his maker, Shade loves puzzles and games. “My illustrious friend,” Kinbote tells us,

showed a childish predilection for all sorts of word games and especially for so-called word golf. He would interrupt the flow of a prismatic conversation to indulge in this particular pastime, and naturally it would have been boorish of me to refuse playing with him. Some of my records are: hate-love in three, lass-male in four, and live-dead in five (with “lend” in the middle). (262)

Shade’s “childish predilection” annoys Kinbote in the same way that Kinbote’s incessant recounting of the Zembla narrative (this is what he means by “prismatic conversation”) eventually bores Shade. Now that Kinbote has an uninterrupted forum in which to talk, though, he shows a retrospective fondness for Shade’s habit, reenacting the four stroke “lass-male” hole in the Index by taking the reader from “Word golf” (315) to “Lass” (310) to “Mass, Mars, Mare” (311) to “Male” (310)—its opposite—and back. Kinbote does not appreciate, however, that these seemingly trivial games express Shade’s worldview as much as Zembla does his. Shade hopes that he “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). The existence of this greater organizing power can never be validated, only suspected and postulated:

It did not matter who they were. No sound,
No furtive light came from their involute
Abode, but there they were, aloof and mute,
Playing a game of worlds, promoting pawns
To ivory unicorns and ebon fauns;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . coordinating these
Events and objects with remote events
And vanished objects. Making ornaments
Of accidents and possibilities. (63, ll.816-20 and 826-29)

The conspiratorial eeriness of this “they” is more than the casual paranoia of an eccentric fictional character: Nabokov writes in an unpublished postscript to Speak, Memory that the autobiography is structured “according to the way his life had been planned by unknown players of games” (qtd. in Discovery 30), a statement Boyd draws on in arguing that Nabokov moves the characters of Pale Fire around like chess pieces “precisely because he in turn suspects that something beyond him shapes his world and ours” (242).20 Seen in this light, Nabokov’s aesthetics seem nearly identical to Freud’s psychology: “The patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out,” Freud says. “He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (“Remembering” 150). To Freud, we unconsciously act out an infantile beforetime in the playground of the transference; to Nabokov, we unknowingly perform the dictates of an otherworldly aftertime on the gameboard of our own world. The difference is one of direction, while their essential uncanniness is the same.

The remaining distinctions between Freudian and Nabokovian forms of transference start becoming blurred if we consider them in their greater structural contexts. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane,” Shade imagines at the beginning of his poem, “I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I / Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky” (33, ll.1-4). At Shade’s death, all the strands of Pale Fire intersect and open out, in inverted form, in the “reflected sky” of the otherworld. From there, if we believe Brian Boyd, he and Hazel benevolently manipulate Kinbote as he writes his commentary. Yet in his near-death glimpse of the cosmos, Shade sees not a pair of worlds but “a system of cells interlinked within / Cells interlinked within cells interlinked / Within one stem” (59, ll. 704-706). The image implies limitless expansion and attenuation, with the “stem” presumably belonging to a plant that is itself a single organism in a world among and within limitless others. Pale Fire, it is possible to argue, is a “lemniscate” (37, l. 137), a two-world, metonymic expression of a cosmic order that is, as the figure of the lemniscate implies, incomprehensibly infinite.

In Freud, the primal scene exists in an otherworldly beforetime unknowable to the patient—despite a lifetime spent on analysts’ couches, the Wolf-Man never could remember it (Obholzer 36)—but detectable by the analyst in the transference. Extending its invisible tendrils across the barrier between narratable history and infantile prehistory, the primal scene orchestrates a life; by tracing these strands back to their source, what seems on the surface to be a confused muddle of unrelated events is granted satisfying order and coherence. In proposing that the primal scene may be a fantasy, however, Freud threatens to replace the surety of a historical event with what Peter Brooks calls an “infinite regress” (276) in human history, “suggest[ing] another kind of referentiality, in that all tales may lead back not so much to events as to other tales, to man as a structure of the fictions he tells about himself” (277). While the manuscript of The Wolf-Man depicts on “the two-dimensional descriptive plane” (Freud 214) a causal web bounded within the sphere of a single person, Freud’s textual additions threaten to endlessly defer the moment of origin and the limits of explanatory possibility.

It is tempting to keep going in this way, to construct visual models of The Wolf-Man and Pale Fire, described in geometric terms and accompanied by meticulously drawn figures. For example, one could argue that since Nabokov’s artistic web is oriented temporally and Freud’s psychological web is oriented thematically, their essential armature is shown to be the same if rotated, say, ninety degrees. Armed with enough contemporary literary criticism on Freud, one could torture the sweeping, aggressive rhetoric of The Wolf-Man into one of Nabokov’s aestheticized, subjective worlds. Or mobilizing enough of Freud’s rhetorical reversals and Pale Fire’s mirrors, crystals, doubles, and palindromes, one could undermine the very real differences between Freud’s unconscious-dwelling repressions and Nabokov’s deistic, ambivalent chessmasters. In short, one could continue abstracting from Freud and Nabokov until each looks like the mirror image of the other and their uniqueness has been completely effaced.

This impulse to draw, model, and encapsulate is profoundly paranoid, but not inappropriate. It is Freud who urges us to combine the puzzle pieces of The Wolf-Man and the Wolf-Man’s neurosis “together into a living whole” (214), Kinbote who hopes his detailed map of the Onhava palace will be reproduced “in later editions” (107) of Pale Fire, and Nabokov who forces his students away from an allegorical reading of Ulysses (Boyd, American 179) by demanding they draw the “intertwining itineraries” (Strong Opinions 157) of Leopold Bloom’s and Stephan Dedalus’s travels through Dublin. As we have noted, Freud and Nabokov seduce us into being paranoid readers even while acknowledging the seductive dangers of paranoia. It can be said that the entirety of this essay testifies to such a seduction, that it is a delusional system generated from the paranoid conviction that Nabokov is constantly, covertly, and knowingly allying himself with Freud, and that Freud is always on the verge of revealing himself as a Nabokovian artist. There is certainly a kernel of truth in such a critique. But to Freud and Nabokov, paranoia deludes at the same that it precipitates creativity: to Freud, it is psychotic illness, but encourages one to explain and explore; to Nabokov, it leads to selfishness and solipsism, but feeds the curiosity necessary for the creation of art. Since the line between healthy and delusional paranoia ends up being quite thin, we will, as Kinbote says, “stop, folks, right here” (Pale Fire 300). David Carroll says that “the literary work is always to be interpreted. . . . The moment when a text is fully grasped, the moment when it is fully present and its sense fully understood, is the moment of the origin, the end of its history” (527). It is also the moment when paranoia has fully taken hold.

14. Most notably, Peter Brooks finds useful and compelling analogues for "the repetition compulsion" in the chapter of Reading for the Plot entitled "Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative" (originally published in Yale French Studies, 55/56 [1977] with Felman's "Turning the Screw of Interpretation"), applying the cryptic and discursive metapsychology of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) to literary texts. For our purposes, though, we will be most concerned with repetition as a symptom of neurotic illness.

15. Thank you to John Limon for this apt and useful articulation.

16. We can also recall Niagarin and Andronnikov about to pillage Eystein's portrait of Count Kernel, whose strongbox, Nabokov tells us, contains only "the broken bits of a nutshell" (Pale Fire 131).

17. One exception is found in Kinbote's gloss on "Freud" in his note to line 929. Kinbote describes here his and Shade's violently scornful laughter at Kinbote's reciting "certain tidbits from a book I had filched from a classroom"--Prof. C's classroom, in fact--"a learned work on psychoanalysis, used in American colleges, repeat, used in American colleges" (271). Two passages from actual books, the first from Oskar Pfister's Psychoanalytical Method and the second from Erich Fromm's The Forgotten Language, are reprinted in the note, with bibliographic information and page numbers included (271).

18. Transference plays a crucial, if subtle, role in The Wolf-Man. In his introduction to the case, Freud notes that he was able to secure the patient's cooperation only by cultivating the growth of his positive, conscious transference, then setting a deadline for the end of the analysis: "Under the inexorable pressure of this fixed limit his resistance and his fixation to the illness gave way, and now in a disproportionately short time the analysis produced all the material which made it possible to clear up his inhibitions and remove his symptoms" (157). And in the case history itself, I would argue, Freud attempts to set up a transference between his text and the reader, claiming that "I am no less critically inclined than he towards an acceptance of this observation of the child's," meaning the primal scene, "and I will only ask him to join me in adopting a provisional belief in the reality of the scene" (183). As the deadline of the end of the case history approaches, Freud hopes that this make-believe situation will allow the reader to overcome his "resistance" to the supreme importance of infantile experience.

19. Shade offers a similar, pithier barb in recalling the downfall of the I.P.H.: "And to fulfill the fish wish of the womb, / A school of Freudians headed for the tomb" (Pale Fire 57).

20. There are a number of moments when Nabokov makes his presence felt through the layers of the text of Pale Fire. We have previously noted Kinbote's musing at the end of his Commentary that he "may turn up yet, 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" (301). Other oddities include Shade's apparently innocent recollection of the year in which "Hurricane Lolita swept from Florida to Maine" (58, ll.679-680) and Shade's describing in a beautiful non sequitur "the exile, the old man / Dying in a motel, with the loud fan / Revolving in the torrid prairie night. . . . He suffocates and conjures in two tongues / The nebulae dilating in his lungs" (55-56, ll. 609-611 and 615-16). In addition to eerily foretelling Kinbote's despair and suicide in Cedarn, Utana, the passage seems to describe Nabokov's own motel-to-motel butterfly hunting expeditions in the western United States.

Andrews, David. “Varieties of Determinism: Nabokov among Rorty, Freud, and Sartre.” Nabokov Studies 6 (2000/2001): 1-33.

Berman, Jeffrey. The Talking Cure: Literary Representations of Psychoanalysis. New York: New York UP, 1985.

Blackwell, Stephen H. “Nabokov’s Wiener-schnitzel Dreams: Despair and Anti- Freudian Poetics.” Nabokov Studies 7 (2002/2003): 129-150.

Boyd, Brian. Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999.

---. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Carroll, David. “Freud and the Myth of the Origin.” New Literary History 6 (1975): 513-528.

Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Adventure of the Empty House.” The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 2. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1927. 1-25.

---. “The Final Problem.” The Adventures and the Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. London: Penguin, 2001. 488-506.

Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 94-207.

Fish, Stanley. “Withholding the Missing Portion: Power, Meaning, and Persuasion in Freud’s ‘The Wolf-Man.’” Times Literary Supplement 29 Aug. 1986: 935-38.

Freud, Anna. Foreword. The Wolf-Man by the Wolf-Man. Ed. Muriel Gardiner. New York: Basic Books, 1971. ix-xii.

Freud, Sigmund. From the History of an Infantile Neurosis. Ibid. 153-262.

---. “Constructions in Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. 24 vols. London: Hogarth, 1964. 255-269.

---. “The Dynamics of Transference.” Ibid. 97-108.

---. “Lecture II: Parapraxes.” Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Ibid. 25-39.

---. Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia. Ibid. 1-82.

---. “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through.” Ibid. 145-156.

Green, Geoffrey. Freud and Nabokov. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988.

Jackson, Leonard. Literature, Psychoanalysis and the New Sciences of Mind. Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2000.

King, Richard. “Memory and Phantasy.” MLN 98 (1983): 1197-1213.

Lee, L.L. “Vladimir Nabokov’s Great Spiral of Being.” Critical Essays on Vladimir Nabokov. Ed. Phyllis A. Roth. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1984. 74-85.

McCarthy, Mary. “A Bolt from the Blue.” A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays. Ed. A.O. Scott. New York: New York Review of Books, 2002. 83-102.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Random House, 1962.

---. Speak, Memory. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966.

---. Strong Opinions. New York: Vintage International, 1973.

Nabokov, Vladimir and Edmund Wilson. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters. Ed. Simon Karlinsky. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Oakley, Helen. “Disturbing Design: Nabokov’s Manipulation of the Detective Fiction Genre in Pale Fire and Despair.” Journal of Popular Culture 36 (2003): 480-96.

Obholzer, Karin. The Wolf-Man: Conversations with Freud’s Patient Sixty Years Later. New York: Continuum, 1982.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Shute, J.P. “Nabokov and Freud: The Play of Power.” Modern Fiction Studies 30 (1984): 637-650.