ABSTRACT
Sigi Jöttkandt takes Vladimir Nabokov as the focus of a meditation on the links between psychoanalysis and literature. This is necessary because of Nabokov’s ferocious and repeated attacks on Freudian psychoanalysis. However, Nabokov kept choosing topics suspiciously close to psychoanalysis, as with the narrator’s confession in Lolita or the plot of Ada in which a brother-sister incest is presented as key to creativity. In “Signs and Symbols, or the Nabokovian Unconscious,” Jöttkandt reads the encoded patterns in Nabokov’s novels not as spectral signs indexing the existence of a world beyond but as a de-realization of the seeming solidity and reality of this world. Nabokov launches a performative expression that exceeds its own mimetic models. Nabokov’s conscious memory, a memory that he comically pits against the Freudian unconscious, hides another principle of representation, which deposes the myth of the author, even as it generates worries about our ability to read Nabokov. Unpacking his knots of private images, Nabokov provides an untimely message about the extinction of intentional systems, for against his declared intentions, he paradoxically extolls the power of the Unconscious.
