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[NABOKOV-L] nabokov, polymorphously perverse...
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In the late seventies, after I first laid my hands on Nabokov's original novels in English, I became an addict. At the same time there was a nagging question: "why do I like Nabokov's writing so much," for its answer would certainly reveal a little about who I am.
Eric Naiman's book "Nabokov, perversely" came as a healthy shock.
Naiman's first chapter made me feel as an outsider because of its predominantly male reference to sensual thrills and innuendoes. Then, in the closing paragraph of the second, there seemed to be an opening:
"By the time of his next book, Nabokov will have developed a more psychoanalytically 'mature,' erotic passion for his new language[...]melancholic longing will have taken the place of disgutst, enabling Nabokov to write an enticingly shocking, much more palatable work. As a part of the process of his second linguistic maturation, Vladimir Nabokov would finally reach a wide audience as a great American writer, but only when he had rediscovered girls." (N,P.73);
Would there be a place for "Little Lulu," then, together with those chumming Clubhouse fellers? However, Naiman's chapter, the one preceding "Bend Sinister" had been about "A filthy look at Shakespeare's Lolita." (perhaps Shakespeare is to blame?) Similarly, at the end of Chapter 4, on "Hermophobia", I found out that the "good reader of Nabokov reads queerly, warily, with a strange mixture of agression and submission, lashing out at his colleagues while fearing and welcoming the attentions of an author who thinks the best readers allow themselves to be taken from behind." After jumping over several chapters, I stopped again, this time on "The Meaning of 'Life'," when the author describes how, between "the 1920s and the 1960s, Nabokov, perhaps through Shakespeare, had discovered a new meaning of 'life'," with renewed captions from "Lolita," and "Pale Fire. "King Queen Knave" were examined in more detail, confronting the Russian original with Nabokov's later translation "to permit a still breathing body to enjoy certain innate capacities... the 'coarseness' and the 'lewdness' ...have of course been preserved."(235) Many pages later, Naiman quotes Michael Wood: "What has happened here is that the 'idiotically sly novelist' of old has become the idiotically friendly punster; but behind both of them lurks a more interesting figure, a writer who cannot hear a word as saying only one thing if there is a chance that it can be got to say more, by whatever contortions of tongue or syntax."(p.249) for, as Naiman states, "KQKn" "sets impressive standards for lexical nymphomania and satyriasis.
He asks: "At what point does the constant punning sexual banter become a form of pathology? [...]when we do tire is that a sign of weakness or of health? [...] throughout the novel, the characters find words exciting, and this is obviously a thrill Nabokov hopes his reader shares. Moments where words are defined, discussed, and fondled are offered as the good reader's equivalent of voyeur scenes in pornography, where a character within the story or film serving as the viewer's or reader's stand-in watches sexual activity and becomes aroused."(p.251).
For Naiman, in ADA, "Van is arguing against an iconic, Freudian code in favor of a verbal, Shakespearean one..."..."Shakespeare's use of language was playful, literary, and focused on the conscious deployment of language, while Freud's was pseudoscientific and always had the unconscious in its sights. Van's comments indicate an awareness that the two codes are, in a way, competitors."(252).
Fortunately I'm not "that" kind of a Freudian and no good reader of Shakespeare - so there are no conflicting codes looming over me and my love for words, English words, French, Portuguese, German words... Actually, there are no such "codes" and, although I was led to conclude that Nabokov's unceasing punnings were consciously and deliberately contrived* in ways that risked to turn plot and texture, for me, into a competitive verbal shitty waste, fortunately ( again because I'm not that kind of a Nabokov-Freudian), I was able to reformulate at least one item, related to non "phallo-centered"enjoyment. It's related to Nabokov's synesthesia, his colored words, sensuous sounds and variegated texture, tingling all over the skin as they reach one from his hyper-mnemoniac's childhood recollections, artistically rendered.
What Nabokov reveals to me is not something from a Freudian "repressed unconscious," although it has been long lost in my case. Nabokov offers a perverse world - but its perversity derives from a sensitive young boy's epiphanies, something that occurs in any normal "polymorphous perverse" stage**, and is shared by boys of both sexes: a world of explosive thrills, sexual intimations and explorings, joyful profanities, with undifferentiated stimuli acting over the entire body/soul.
As I see it Nabokov has an uncanny power to recreate these emotions and latent, but forgotten sensations. As for the more adult seminal enjoyments to be teased out from literary Nabokoviana...well, I still have a lot of pages to read about them in Naiman's book.
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*In his introduction to Bunny/Volodya's correspondence, Karlinski mentioned the special place "punning" has in Russian (his exact words were quoted in the Nab-List some time ago and perhaps we can use them to distinguish Russian from any other language's insistence and joy with puns).
**- Wiki summary (open to corrections until now): "Polymorphous perversity is a psychoanalytic term for human ability to gain sexual gratification outside socially normative sexual behaviors. Sigmund Freud used this term to describe the normal sexual disposition of humans from infancy to about age five[...] Freud theorized that humans are born with unfocused sexual libidinal drives, deriving sexual pleasure from any part of the body. The objects and modes of sexual satisfaction are multifarious, directed at every object that might provide pleasure. Polymorphous perverse sexuality continues from infancy through about age five, progressing through three distinct developmental stages: the oral stage, anal stage, and phallic stage. Only in subsequent developmental stages do children learn to constrain sexual drives to socially accepted norms, culminating in adult heterosexual behavior focused on the genitals and reproduction. Freud taught that during this stage of undifferentiated impulse for sexual pleasure, incestuous and bisexual urges are normal. Lacking knowledge that certain modes of gratification are forbidden, the polymorphously perverse child seeks sexual gratification wherever it occurs. In the earliest phase, the oral phase, the child forms a libidinal bond with the mother via sexual pleasure gained from sucking the breast. For Freud, "perversion" is a non-judgmental term. He used it to designate behavior outside socially acceptable norms."
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