But he knew then that he was wounded by gravity, falling.
The descending wound of a dull sword.
Who was it who said that thing about “I hate writing, I love having written”? Ingenious, but, in his case, imprecise: he liked having written, but he didn’t like no longer writing, no longer liking to write. Having written was nothing but a permanent reminder that he wasn’t writing anymore. Something like an art gallery that’s been robbed: silent walls where before hung eloquent paintings, the paint on the walls slightly discolored, outlining empty squares and rectangles where once had been faces and landscapes and shapes and colors and no, no, that thing about how you never forget how to ride a bicycle wasn’t true.
You could lose your balance and fall down and never get up again.
You could forget how to write, how to swim, how to sleep, how to dream.
† More or less waking notes for a talk on Vladimir Nabokov and dreams or lack of dreams and his psychoanalytic (non) treatment / Vladimir Nabokov had, also, had a more than interesting relationship with the insomnia that pursued him and caught him and made him suffer throughout his entire life. “I suffocate in uninterrupted, unbearable darkness. The marvelous terror of consciousness rocks my soul in emptiness” with “intervals of hopelessness and nervous urination,” he said. But he also considered the act of sleep to be “the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing … I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block.” Which didn’t keep him from doting on the great value of the “white birds of dreams” and nightmares “full of wanderings and escapes, and desolate station platforms.”
Nabokov dreamed, consciously eschewing any possible interpretation of the Freudian (“that Viennese quack”) variety, founded on the symbolic and interpretable at one’s will and pleasure: “I think he’s crude. I think he’s medieval and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me. I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books. I don’t see umbrellas in my dreams, or balloons.”
“Another thing we are not supposed to do is to explain the inexplicable. Men have learned to live with a black burden, a huge aching hump: the supposition that ‘reality’ may be only a ‘dream.’ How much more dreadful it would be if the very awareness of your being aware of reality’s dreamlike nature were also a dream, a built-in hallucination! One should bear in mind, however, that there is no mirage without a vanishing point, just as there is no lake without a closed circle of reliable land … How can one treat dreams, unless one is a quack?” he wonders in Transparent Things.
And Nabokov claimed all dreams were clear and diaphanous in their intentions and meaning. And each vision could be instantaneously narrated and understood in its context: “I cannot conceive how anybody in his right mind should go to a psychoanalyst, but of course if one’s mind is deranged one might try anything: after all, quacks and cranks, shamans and holy men, kings and hypnotists have cured people—especially hysterical people. Our grandsons no doubt will regard today’s psychoanalysts with the same amused contempt as we do astrology and phrenology. One of the greatest pieces of charlatanic, and satanic, nonsense imposed on a gullible public is the Freudian interpretation of dreams. I take gleeful pleasure every morning in refuting the Viennese quack by recalling and explaining the details of my dreams without using one single reference to sexual symbols or mythical complexes. I urge my patients to do likewise.”
And, pressed by journalists on the subject, he ends up casting all Freud’s descendants (“I may have aired this before but I’d like to repeat that I detest not one but four doctors: Dr. Freud, Dr. Zhivago, Dr. Schweitzer, and Dr. Castro”) and their worshippers by the wayside with a “Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by the daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care.”
Nabokov preferred to understand the dreamed world through of a combination of good bad jokes and good aphorisms (“Youth dreams: forgot pants; old man dreams: forgot dentures” and “Genius is an African who dreams up snow” or “Images are the dreams of language”). And his interest went in the direction of understanding them as transparent narrations, like addenda to his waking work: “When about to fall asleep after a good deal of writing or reading, I often enjoy, if that is the right word, what some drug addicts experience—a continuous series of extraordinary bright, fluidly changing pictures. Their type is different nightly, but on a given night it remains the same: one night it may be a banal kaleidoscope of endlessly recombined and reshaped stained-window designs; next time comes a subhuman or superhuman face with a formidably growing blue eye; or—and this is the most striking type—I see in realistic detail a long-dead friend turning toward me and melting into another remembered figure against the black velvet of my eyelids’ inner side. As to voices, I have described in Speak, Memory the snatches of telephone talk which now and then vibrate in my pillowed ear. Reports on those enigmatic phenomena can be found in the case histories collected by psychiatrists but no satisfying interpretation has come my way. Freudians, keep out, please! […] About twice a week I have a good long nightmare with unpleasant characters imported from earlier dreams, appearing in more or less iterative surroundings—kaleidoscopic arrangements of broken impressions, fragments of day thoughts, and irresponsible mechanical images, utterly lacking any possible Freudian implication or explication, but singularly akin to the procession of changing figures that one usually sees on the inner palpebral screen with closing one’s weary eyes”; to those “so-called muscae volitantes—shadows cast upon the retinal rods by motes in the vitreous humor, which are seen as transparent threads drifting across the visual field” and whose flitting and buzzing increases as the years pass by across that gelatinous material on the inside of the eyeball (scientific name: miodesopsias).
For Nabokov, this artistic/literary appreciation of the dreamed world did not, on the other hand, keep him from sensing and researching the possibility that dreams might have a “precognitive flavor” and might let you “catch sight of the lining of time.” Time that—in dreams—can go back or forward and so sometimes you can divine the future by going back. And thus, for the composition of the section “The Texture of Time” in Ada, or Ardor, Nabokov studied with the passion of a convert the works of Gerald Whitrow and J. W. Dunne and established a classification of his own dreams into categories like professional and vocational; memories of the remote past; influences of present interests or current events; “of erotic tenderness” (which didn’t exclude the occasional dispassionate and brutal coitus with a fat old woman); and “very clear and logical,” like losing the notes for a novel, or suffering a heart attack during a lecture, or that his hotel caught fire and he saved, in order, his wife Vera, the manuscript of his novel in progress, his dentures, and his passport.
Dreams that Nabokov dreams and writes down between October 1964 and January 1965: he dreams he’s listening to his father deliver a speech and he clears his throat too forcefully and noisily and his father reproaches him saying, “Even if you are bored you might have the decency to sit quietly”; he dreams he’s dancing with “Ve” (Vera) and a stranger walks by and kisses her and he stops him and, with ecstatic fury, smashes his head, beating it against the walls of the ballroom; he dreams a stranger in a taxi criticizes, in Russian or German, the state of his clothes, and he makes excuses saying he sullied them by absentmindedly stepping in a puddle.
Near death, Nabokov began to dream of guillotines.
From Invitation to a Beheading (Приглашение на казнь): “… in my dreams the world would come alive, becoming so captivatingly majestic, free and ethereal, that afterward it would be oppressive to breathe the dust of this painted
life.”
“Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?” wonders, suffering, sleepless, Timofei Pnin in Pnin.
There, Pnin (though he’d carefully planned it out, and considered his characters “galley slaves,” in the end Nabokov didn’t have the courage to kill him off), sleep-deprived professor skeptical of any psychoanalytic school (his ex-wife, Liza Wind, is a successful psychoanalyst), praying for the possible existence of a third side in his body after being unable to sleep on his left or his right side.
He would never see a psychoanalyst to have his sorrows interpreted, because they’re perfectly clear to him.
His nocturnal terrors have the clarity of sunrises.
† A stellar moment (and not strictly literary, though very nabokovian) in the history of literature / In 1995, in a car parked on Sunset Boulevard, the actor Hugh Grant is surprised by police in a “compromising situation” with the head of prostitute named Divine Brown in his lap. It’s a major scandal: Grant—at the time—is the Americans’ favorite Englishman and a charming boy and ever so amusing for daughters and mothers and aunts alike. So Grant finds himself obligated to do a tour/Via Crucis of all the many morning and evening U.S. talk shows to demonstrate his contrition and that he was as charming and stammering as always. The strategy works, but, in addition, it leads to a perfect, historical moment: when one of the TV hosts asks the actor if he’s considered getting “psychological help,” Grant seems surprised by the question and asks what for. The host explains “to help with your issues.” To which Grant smiles one of those Hugh smiles and diagnoses: “Ah … But in Great Britain, we have novels for that kind of thing … Seriously.”
Once, so long or not so long ago, either way, a young publisher had suggested he open one of his books with the following Author’s Note: “All of this is true.”
And he (who always remembered those ironic quotes from Mark Twain, already suffering these tensions between fiction and nonfiction regarding the perception of his work, when he stated that “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it” and that “The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible” and that “When in doubt tell the truth” and that “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter”) had thought about it, but clearly understanding and clearly reading the fine print in the clause. What untrained eyes, even those of his editor, didn’t know how to perceive: that something was true didn’t necessarily imply that it was something real. It was true because, simply, that particular fiction was now an inseparable part of a reality that, on the other hand and according to the latest research, wasn’t all that real itself; because it was the brain that was in charge of editing it and intuiting it and completing it when data and details were missing).
That fiction existed and projected itself into the future and would be true every time someone read it and it operated like a bomb of profundity, sending the solid structure of the present flying through the air.
But, of course, there are two kinds of liars: writers and publishers.
The former emit lies, the latter omit truths. Beyond the chosen model, sooner rather than later, more before than after, we all turn into true liars. Into redactors or crosser-outers. We lie to everyone else, to ourselves. We lie first to be able to believe in something after, whatever it is. And thus, when we believe the lies of others, we finally gain access to that consoling privilege of being the best we could ever be: we leave behind the hell or purgatory of being writers or publishers to ascend to the heaven of being readers.
And, yes, those were times when what was true had been elevated to the genre of fiction. And when everyone—readers and writers and critics—went around fascinated by the idea of the autobiographical as added value and commercial attraction and topic of conversation in literary supplements and on late-night talk shows.
The young publisher had proposed—once more—that he “do something with his parents … but you have to show yourself as being more traumatized than how you’ve shown yourself so far. Maybe you should start out by saying you’ve only recently felt the impact of all of that and, along the way, tie it together with what happened with your nephew and your sister and …”
To which he’d made the counteroffer of a “story of my life vis-à-vis my library, that place where a writer is born and lives and writes.” An exposition of the character of literature as a feature of the characters of literature. He’d even had a title that seemed to him quite good: Something of that Style.
But no.
That wasn’t interesting. The book market wasn’t interested in a book about books.
It asked for something else: written life but not the life of a writer.
Literature of the I, metafiction, based on a true story (that notice that often flashed at the beginning of certain sickening movies starring sick people, always up for an Oscar), jumping to the first pages of the “Int. Book. Night: We see somebody open a novel and sigh and smile with satisfaction. And close it never to open it again because they’ll be too busy living.” What were the precise dimensions? Where was the appropriate border? He thought there was only one: that the irreal reality of a novel surpass the irreal reality of life. That the “Once upon a time …” win out over the “There was a time …” and turn it into an eternal “This time …” every time you entered into that book. Therefore and for that reason, today you never forget the characters who occupied the salons Marcel Proust and Henry James passed through and you have no idea who inspired them. But, of course, such an effect wasn’t so easily achieved. The wrapping paper was more important than the gift. Yes: fiction was of increasingly less interest if it didn’t come backed by the autobiographical, by that virus incubated on so many blogs and social networks that it’d leapt into literature—or what was called literature—to submit it to its will with the kind of affection used to command a dog to fetch a stick. Over and over again. Recounting, then, the lives of dogs, chewed on by the kind of puppies that bark but do not bite; by domestic dachshunds that dream of being palace mastiffs. Why force yourself to be a writer when it’s so much easier to be a character? Thus, always, like in those fictions: choose your own adventure; choose yourself above all and all others; be your own adventure, brave adventurer.
Ah-ha: so the phenomenon of current sales was just another installment in the epic—common and banal but detailed down to the absurdly microscopic—of the life of a Norwegian or German author (in his day it’d been the frigid fever for those Scandinavian thrillers, where everyone is always taking pills to sleep or commit suicide and the grandfather was always an ex-collaborator with the Third Reich who, though he was loving with his grandchildren, continued worshipping swastika flags on the sly, in his secret basement, behind the Finnish sauna) whose name he could never type right because he never knew which ctrl/alt corresponded to that small accent in the shape of a circle that goes above the vowels of icy surnames or brands of ice cream. The bestseller of the moment by Sieg or by Heil was exclusively devoted—after telling everything there was to tell about his exterior—to narrating the interior of the body of the author in the parasitic voice of Taenia saginata (a.k.a) Tapeworm, eighteen meters long and placidly and reflexively installed in the small intestine of Jussi or Inger, who did nothing but watch TV series, attributing to them almost mystical properties. The opening sentence of the novel was “You can call me Wörm.” And the novel—1,001 pages—was titled Here Inside. And it’d been described as “a collaboration between Melville, Proust, and Joyce, but under the supervision of Tolstoy, James, and Mann. And also Kafka” in the blurb on its cover.
The one responsible for such praise had been none other than the courtly and scheming writer whom he’d rechristened with the name of a popular global Swedish corporation that sold furniture and decorative objects to be, DIY, assemble
d and disassembled with names even more ridiculous than Cirque du Soleil spectacles.
IKEA: his forever-young golem whom, early on, he’d launched into the world with an absurdly generous blurb (that had nothing to do with the word, תמא, truth, which that Rabbi had written on the clay forehead of that creature) and that now he couldn’t erase from the forehead of the monster to deactivate it. Someone—a critic of certain renown whose only strategic error (it tends to happen to the best of his species) had been to publish an atrocious novel that ran contrary to all his prior opinions—had commented to him that IKEA “was to the office of writer what someone had said Ronald Reagan was to the art of politics: ‘He is the most profoundly superficial man I have ever met.’” (Similarly, to tell the truth, that same critic had written about him that “Reading him, I’m never entirely sure if what I’m dealing with is the stupidest genius or the most ingenious stupidity. Probably both.”)
IKEA would never be a writer’s writer because he was a reader’s writer: he fascinated and seduced his followers and made them feel intelligent and refined and sensitive and like such … readers. He was sure IKEA had never inspired anyone to be a writer, but many to want to produce in others that feeling IKEA made them feel: that he was talking to them and showing them the path of the most commonplace clichés. Them and only them. Like someone offering a magic slap or a pinch with a trick: you think I’m only thinking of you, but I only want you not to think that I think that the only thing that interests me is that you only think of me.
The Dreamed Part Page 50
