The Nabokov Effect Sigi Jöttkandt
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Abstract: “The truth only progresses from a structure of fiction,” Lacan C R maintains, yet which “truth” can we say is emerging from the prevailing I fictitiousness of reality in this era of the “new Real”? In today’s “post-truth” S Spectral I environment, where everything becomes language games, psychoanalysis S returns to the problem of interpretation. In this essay, I suggest some Nabokovian pointers for a spectral reading praxis in the era of climate & change and its “worse Real.” Psychoanalysis: C R Key words: Psychoanalysis, post-truth, post-interpretation, the Real, I T reading, the letter, discourse, revolution, cinema, memory, materiality, I the Nabokov Effect spectrality Q U E “...I definitely felt my family name began with an N and bore / an odious resemblance to the surname or pseudonym of a Volume 6 / presumably notorious (Notorov? No) Bulgarian, or Babylonian, Issue 1 or, maybe, Betelgeusian writer with whom scatterbrained Sigi Jöttkandt emigres from some other galaxy constantly confused me.” – Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins “The truth only progresses from a structure of fiction,” Lacan maintains, yet which “truth” can we say is emerging from this era of the “new Real”?1 What this century is increasingly understood by is a ‘fracturing’ in the Symbolic order, its sham, flammable cladding now tragically going up in smoke on the towers of former certainties around the world. From the vantage point of a post- or perhaps ‘spectral’ psychoanalysis, such fissures are becoming legible in what one now calls the “post-truth” public sphere. The signifier’s original basis in deception, its first nature as semblance, arrives as the unconscious truth of the capitalist discourse. And as climate change tips the Earth headlong into a “worse Real,” evacuated of the sureties with which a certain “Nature” by “returning to the same place” once comforted us, it seems timely to revisit this fictional structure that moves truth along. Miller, following the lead of Lacan’s Seminar XXVII, has identified this as the “moment to conclude.” “The age of interpretation is behind us.” 2 But following this declaration, the question facing us is how to get one’s bearings in the new praxis Miller calls “post-interpretation,” – particularly if one is, like Jean-Claude Milner,3 left a little “cold” by the Joycean sinthome with which Lacan left off in his late teachings. 1 Lacan, 1971, lesson of 19.5.71; Miller 2014a. 2 Miller 2007, p. 4. 3 Jean-Claude Milner, comment made during the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy Col- loquium, Melbourne, Australia, 3-4 July, 2017. 189 Spectral Psychoanalysis: the Nabokov Effect Before suggesting some possible directions, we can note the C In a “post-truth” environment where everything becomes language C R 6 R phrase the “climate change unconscious” as the articulation of the way I games, truth abdicates; it disappears back into “misty abysses,” I the Western world is failing to come to terms “Symbolically” with the S putting new agents in charge of deciding which hallucinatory version of S ecological catastrophe unfolding “before our lying eyes” – as the Marx I reality prevails. Perfectly justified too, then, is Miller’s admonition that I S S brothers once quipped. Anthropogenic climate change still remains psychoanalysis must take its bearings today not from the structure of effectively barred from public discourse, even to the extent of deleting & neurosis and its hysterical symptom but from psychosis, the elementary & its references on official sites (although this may be changing as its phenomenon and the delusion. As the Name-of-the-Father is unmasked C C phenomenal effects are now being dramatically felt around the world). R as the originary fiction, one might turn to Vladimir Nabokov, the 20th R However, psychoanalysis is nothing if not uniquely equipped to attend to I century’s most prodigious figure of literary deception, disguise and dupery. I T T the message contained in the unsaid, enabling one to chart a structural I Nabokov, who for too long has been read either as a postmodern destroyer I path through what is emerging as an exorbitant new shamelessness, Q of ontological certainties, or as an all-powerful Auteur winking at us in Q emboldened by Trump and his administration, of course, but which really U the direction of Romantic and humanist paradigms, seems finally to have U E E only supplements other, longer-standing histories just a few of which discovered his critical moment. As we find ourselves living under the hard might be mentioned here: the ideological rescinding of many forms of / sign of extinction, with the irreversibility of ecological system change / regulation in the years leading up to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis; the now upon us, “Nabokov,” as a signifier for the refusal of linear logics and, Volume 6 / Volume 6 / “new narcissism” of the social media revolution, whose impacts include Issue 1 especially, of the inevitability of death, appears to us now as if he had been Issue 1 a complete redefinition of what it means to be a private citizen; the lying in wait in advance for this, having been here the entire time... take-the-money-and-run mentality of the Silicon Valley elites currently building multi-million dollar “survival condos” in remote places, and ** plotting escapes from the Anthropocene to Mars, together with their He is sitting on a circular seat, posing (rather unconvincingly) as a gene-edited children; the consolidation of autocratic rule over those dejected old man reading a foreign newspaper7. But a more faithful left behind, and the deterioration of what now rings quaintly as “human likeness emerges in the sun-blinding splinters that greet our literary rights” from another era, etc. These and many other features of 21st train, exploding like a bullet from its tunnel of memory, conduit of his century life seem to reflect another relation to jouissance, one no longer official aesthetic program. We catch him next seeking shelter in the tethered to the castrative cut and its repression that dominated an earlier optical illusion of a portrait that, examined more closely, is composed of period of psychoanalysis. A text-book example of Lacan’s adage that tiny letters, depicting an entire novel (Master and Man) in the contours what is foreclosed in the Symbolic returns in the Real, we witness today a of Tolstoy’s profile.8 Now he lies dormant, a latent time bomb in a ticking frenzied hyper-jouissance, one that, infiltrating much of public and private clock whose numbers flit mechanically sideways like black and white life, suggests a closer reading as unconscious “climate panic.”4 letters, pausing briefly the way “commercial stills did on the old cinema On this basis, one might assess such symptomatic formations of screen.” 9 But startling us from our torpor with the crash of a spilled tea 21st century psychic life as reflections of what Miller identifies as the tray at a Cambridge tutor’s feet, an electrifying shock rockets us to our “mutation” in today’s Symbolic, one that has overseen broad redefinitions feet in the middle of one of his tales.10 With his cuffed hand, cunningly of categories of truth and falsity. Miller comments, shaped from wood, he beckons treacherously in the direction of a slow subdued thumping, easily mistaken for wholesome German “bandstand The traditional categories that organize existence have music” but flowing en verité from ancient fabulous forests.11 The sonorous passed over to the rank of mere social constructions that are rustling of their ancient lime leaves drowns out the siren songs of destined to come apart. It is not only that the semblants are vacillating, they are being recognized as semblants.5 6 Nabokov 1996, p. 283. 7 Nabokov 1996a, p. 626. 8 Nabokov 1996a, p. 491. 4 In making these observations, I am deeply indebted to recent work by Tom Cohen whose terms 9 Nabokov 1996a, p. 514. “climate change unconscious” and “climate panic” I am using. See for example Cohen, Colebrook, Miller 2016. 10 Nabokov 1996a, p. 592. 5 Miller 2014b, n.p. 11 Nabokov 1996a, p. 617. 190 Spectral Psychoanalysis: the Nabokov Effect 191 Spectral Psychoanalysis: the Nabokov Effect “Mnemosyne’s monologue.” His favorite gambit of all of course is to C of textual interference, a “bend sinister” in language that curves C R R assume the name “Vladimir Nabokov,” much as an earlier, similarly “not I linear systems. Resisting the pull of narrative resolution, cross-wiring I harmless” Nabokov (the author’s father), adopted “the mimetic disguise S literature’s plot engines, this “Nabokov effect” appears as a calculated S of a doctor without changing his name.”12 I assault on all teleological models. I S S Who or what is this signature that circulates throughout the novels of Vladimir Nabokov as an assortment of letteral signs and symbols? & ** & Presenting as a seemingly harmless after-dinner parlour game, an A post-interpretive reading practice might begin by tracking instances C C expert’s puzzle, are these the marks of another signifying network that R where authorship gives way to another principle of literary production. As R secretly piggybacks on the authorizing, narrating, memorializing textual I if spawned by the ink blots and boggy puddles that besplatter Nabokov’s I T T systems of one of the twentieth century's greatest literary auteurs? A I characters, one would quickly find other textual figures or, perhaps, non- I parasitic cipher for some other representational aim, this ‘alt’ Nabokov Q figures clamoring for our distracted attention: a mysterious “left-slanted” Q silently consumes its host languages from the inside, much like the U handwriting that interleaves a diary entry’s “factual or more or less U E E English that secretly but indelibly imposes its own formal patterns on fictional” reports in Look at the Harlequins,14 exercise books that dissolve the unsuspecting young would-be poet's Russian rhymes.