Nabokov or the Cruelty of Desire: A Psychoanalytic Reading
Introduction
by Maurice Couturier
page two of two

The French word "désir," from which the English word is derived, has an interesting etymology. It comes from the privative de and from the noun sidus, meaning "star." The Latin verb desiderare literally means "to gaze at the star," hence morally "to record the absence of," with a strong notion of regret. Its original meaning as given in Le Petit Robert is: "Tendance vers un objet connu ou imaginé; prise de conscience de cette tendance." Desire, in this sense, is viewed as a human activity which falls under the province of both imagination and reason; it teases the intellect rather than clouds it. Very early, however, the verb "désirer" came to signify "aspirer aux faveurs d'une femme," the deverbal "DESIR" (circa 1160) signifying "aspiration, wish"; it later came to designate sexual appetite (see Dictionnaire historique de la langue française). The English word has followed more or less the same evolution; the first definition given in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is the following: "The fact or condition of desiring; the feeling that one would derive pleasure or satisfaction from possessing or attaining something; a longing." And the second: "Sexual appetite, lust."

Before the twentieth century, desire was celebrated and analyzed by memoirists such as Saint-Augustine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and André Gide, by poets like Ronsard, Shelley and Poe, and by novelists who, after the seventeenth century, endeavored to dissect its at once sentimental, sexual and unconscious components. Sex is prominent in pornographic novels like Vénus dans le cloître (1672) or Memoirs of a Women of Pleasure (Fanny Hill 1748) but it is only slightly veiled in sentimental novels like Pamela or Tom Jones and again openly staged in modernist novels like Ulysses. In a sentimental novel like Sainte-Beuve's Volupté (1834), the protagonist and narrator exalts the subtleties of desire without ever depicting, even metaphorically, its sexual fulfillment. The "volupté" foregrounded in the title is of a sentimental and aesthetic nature; the protagonist, who has become a priest, provides the following definition of desire in a conversation with a woman he loves: "Desire is but a first blind and daring experience, disguised and hurled forward haphazardly, like a lost sentry near the enemy encampment; but it senses, behind it, the company of the other expectations to sustain itself."10 The novel describes the itinerary of a desiring subject who eventually transmutes his erotic desire, always apprehended as guilty, into a metaphysical one. For guilt is the religious, the Christian, side of desire which, in its sexual component, becomes non-representable or taboo. But as the interdict always kindles desire in its various forms, some of its most ardent and eloquent apologists are either mystics like Saint-John-of-the-Cross or Saint-Theresa, or else libertines steeped in Calvinist Puritanism like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and André Gide.

Desire is the bottomless well from which, for the last two or three thousand years, the western writer draws his energy to fuel his pen. And the expectations or fantasies that it fosters constitute the chief prop which support the reader's attention, interest and complicity. In other words, desire as shared by both author and reader durably binds their relation and guarantees the permanence of the literary field throughout the ages.

Psychoanalysis has contributed more than any science or intellectual construct to change the way we apprehend desire. Freud rarely used the word Wunsch in his early works, even when writing about hysteria, sexual drives being presented before Die Traümdeutung as a specific activity apart. It was while analyzing dreams that he began to speak about Wunsch, but specifically as wish-fulfillment, without undertaking in his subsequent works a systematic anatomy of human desire. It is his French disciple Lacan, more than any other Freudian, who set out to fulfill this task, distinguishing need and demand from desire. For Lacan, desire is of an ontological essence. In his Séminaire II, he said: "Desire is a bond between being and want. This want is properly a want of being. It is not a want of this or that but a want of being whereby the human being exists… The human being comes to life as a result of this want. It is as a result of this want, in the experience of desire, that the being reaches a sense of himself in relation to being."11 Parodying Descartes, one could say: "I desire, therefore I am." But this doesn't give me the key of what I am; further on, Lacan explains that the being conscious of himself knows that he is but doesn't know in the least "what he is. That is what is wanting in any being."12 It is around this desire as want that "the structuring of the human world, desire as unconscious, fulfills itself."13 Desire, devoid of any singular object, supports itself on a multitude of needs, the need for food, for clothing, for reproduction, for pleasure, etc...., and it materializes symbolically as a demand addressed to the other, a demand for recognition, friendship or love, above all. Need and want are therefore the open and identifiable manifestations of desire, as a want of being, of the subject.

To be sure, it may seem presumptuous to borrow a theory developed by an orthodox Freudian using a somewhat esoteric vocabulary to study Nabokov's works. Yet, it appears to me that such a theory can help refine considerably one's analyses in the context of such a study; it is probably the best instrument to-date to deconstruct desire in works like Nabokov's novels. I personally experienced the necessity to undertake this study while translating Lolita into French: as I was rewriting the novel with my own words, doing my utmost to emulate Nabokov's marvelous language (a daunting task), even consulting his Russian translation whenever I had some doubt about what he meant in the original text, I felt more and more entangled in a web of tragic desire of which Humbert as a narrator never fully manages to give a proper formulation. The desire at work in this incandescent novel is not only Humbert's desire for his nymphet in its ontological dimension, of course; it is also the aesthetic cum erotic desire shared, beyond him, by myself as reader, analyst and translator, and by the elusive author, resolute as he manifestly was to keep his reader at bay and to screen his own unconscious (to which I do not claim to have access).

For the past fifteen years, Nabokov specialists have been tempted to apply a metaphysical grid to Nabokov's works, following the example set by two leading specialists, Vladimir E. Alexandrov and Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer. Alexandrov, using a remark made by Véra Nabokov who claimed that "potustoronnost'" (a Russian word meaning something close to "otherworld") was the main theme of her husband's work, tried to follow this idea and to propose a metaphysical reading of Nabokov's works. Here is, perhaps, one of the key programmatic passages of his preface: "By 'metaphysics' I mean Nabokov's faith in the apparent existence of a transcendent, non-material, timeless, and beneficent ordering and ordered realm of being that seems to provide for personal immortality, and that affects everything that exists in the mundane world. I say 'apparent' and 'seems to' because a cardinal tenet of Nabokov's faith is the irreducible alterity of this other realm from the vantage point of mortal experience: all one can have is intuitions of what it may be like; no certainty about it is possible."14 Nabokov's text is so complex, so protean, that specialists adopted a cautionary attitude toward this approach at first. Everyone knew that Nabokov had been very wary of metaphysics. Whenever he spoke of God, he used sometimes cryptic sometimes flippant language; for instance, responding to a critic who had asked him if he believed in God, he answered: "To be quite candid--and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill--I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more."15 In Despair, on the other hand, his protagonist is much more offhanded: "The idea of God was invented in the small hours of history by a scamp who had genius; it somehow reeks too much of humanity, that idea, to make its azure origin plausible."16 Nabokov never openly says that he does not believe in God or an afterlife but he repeatedly explains that whatever we can say about the supernatural is picayune, which marks him as an authentic agnostic. For him immortality has nothing to do with some nirvana or the Christians' paradise; the only immortality he is interested in is the immortality of art, as he repeatedly states.

Yet, Vladimir E. Alexandrov has put his finger on an important aspect of Nabokov while trying to dig out the elements of his unifying thematic. He detected in Nabokov's works an occult element of an ontological nature to which he chose to lend a transcendental dimension. Could not that otherworld be precisely the want of being that Lacan considers as the spring of desire? Metaphysics is an intellectual construct concerned precisely with the want of being that has always haunted men: being unable to know who they truly are, they tend to develop a faith in an absolute transcendental being, as a model, as a hope, as a guardian, whatever, in order to exorcise their anxiety, their fear of nothingness. God must exist for mortals to survive without experiencing too much existential discomfort. It seems to me, therefore, that Alexandrov has given a metaphysical version of this want of being which tragically haunts Nabokov's chief protagonists and obviously haunted their inventor as well.

The beyond which his works point towards is not, in my opinion, a metaphysical universe or a cheap paradise, platitudes which Nabokov would have no doubt relegated to the bric-a-brac of poshlost', but the real, the most essential, in ourselves and in the world, which both science and philosophy strive to dig out. The want of being of the desiring subject is the result of this want of understanding. The real at stake here is not that everyday reality which Nabokov, in a scathing statement, defines as "utterly static since it presupposes a situation that is permanently observable, essentially objective, and universally known,"17 but rather "an open totality of unidentifiable objects," to borrow French philosopher Clément Rosset's formulation, or again, as he puts it, "that which has no duplicate; or which, more exactly, is not an illusion."18 The real is by definition the impossible, that which cannot be put into words and represented, simply intimated, but is the source of the scientist's desire to pursue his quest for knowledge and the poet's desire to conceive artefacts so well-wrought and convincing that they give the illusion of a deeper reality. Nabokov entertained these twin desires throughout his career; in an interview, he spelled out their similarities: "The tactile delights of precise delineation, the silent paradise of the camera lucida, and the precision of poetry in taxonomic description represent the artistic side of the thrill which accumulation of new knowledge, absolutely useless to the layman, gives its first begetter (...). There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts."19 Not only do science and art require the same kind of approach, in Nabokov's opinion, and aim at creating temporary approximations of the real, they also afford the same pleasures to their practitioners. The passion with which scientist and artist practice their respective arts is a sign that they are trying to compensate for their want of being.

Joyce, who was not properly a scientist, at best a talented philologist, inserted short vignettes copied almost literally from his notebooks, calling them epiphanies; in Stephen Hero, he defined them as follows: "By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."20 One finds a good number of such epiphanies in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce obviously considered his epiphanies as raw material not yet invested by any reflecting conscience, as approximations of the real to the extent that their meaning remained pendent. In A Portrait and his subsequent works, however, he also used much more sophisticated strategies to achieve his poetic goals.

Nabokov was never a minimalist; he never attempted to lift fragments of reality and to pass them off as samples of the real. He resorted to a totally different poetic strategy to create the illusion of the real. He saturated and over-determined his texts, superimposing images, embedding a succession of discourses, thereby generating in his reader such confusion that the latter has to unravel the poetic web before he can raise the question of meaning. Nabokov does not claim to distillate meaning, as Proust did with great success in the "madeleine" episode for instance; he struggles to create artistic objects, paradoxical universes, raw, bleeding texts, which defy all attempt to normalize them, to recover a deposited meaning. His scorn for all ideology as well as for psychoanalysis is the offshoot of his poetic ambition.

Nabokov loathes cruelty, but, paradoxically, his novels teem with highly cruel scenes. The cruelty he is interested in is not so much that inflicted by the sadist or simply the desiring subject seeking to corner the object of his desire; it is, to use again Clément Rosset's theory, the real not yet buried under a blanket of meaning such as it emerges from the poetical friction of words.

10. Volupté (Paris, Gallimard, Coll. Folio, 1986), p. 213. My translation.

11. Séminaire II (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1978), pp. 261-2.

12. Ibid., p. 262.

13. Ibid.

14. Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov's Otherworld (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 5.

15. Strong Opinions (New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 45.

16. Despair (New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1966), p. 111.

17. Strong Opinions, p. 94.

18. Clément Rosset, L'objet singulier (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1979), pp. 22 and 25.

19. Strong Opinions, p. 79.

20. Stephen Hero (St. Albans: Panther Books, 1977), p. 188.