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Vladimir Nabokov: Speak, Memory
For a book with the word “memory” in its title, I am more than a little taken aback early on in his autobiography with, as Nabokov himself characterizes it in the first instance, his “vicious snap” at Freud. The second instance occurs a few pages later in the first chapter when he looks at the the process of reanimating the past from earliest memory and its vicissitudes. This affords him an opportunity to takes aim at the Viennese Doctor:
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.
Nabokov pushes hard against any uses of the psychoanalytic discourse in approaching his life story. It was, at mid-century, somewhat intellectually fashionable to ridicule the inventor of psychoanalysis and one shouldn’t be too surprised that Nabokov would pile on a theory that has at its heart the past’s inaccessibility for a writer whose task before him is its, if not immediate then at the least its eventual, access.
Nabokov satirizes the dreamwork as of little or no value to him in retrieving those darkest and most hidden aspects…
