Nabokov's "Screen Memory"

Abstract

Abstract:In his essay, Mikołaj Wiśniewski returns to the question of Nabokov's denunciation of Freud as (in the words of Geoffrey Green) "a demonic monomaniacal champion of one interpretation for all situations" who reduces the complexity of the individual mind, and the richness and originality of artistic vision, to vulgar clichés. Drawing on Green's analyses which point out striking similarities between Freud and Nabokov, most importantly—that they were "two writers for whom the order of artistic form was also a falsification," Wiśniewski proposes to consider various well-known passages from Speak, Memory (most importantly, the Kuropatkin episode) in the light of Freud's 1899 essay "Screen Memories." These passages, Wiśniewski argues, are perfect examples of memories serving as screens for disagreeable content which is "displaced on to something associated by continuity" in order to compensate for the disappointments of an inadequate reality. However, in the context of Nabokov's novels the notion of "screen memories" can also be read as "memories produced for the screen," movie-memories, so to speak, which are produced with the help of cinematographic techniques. These techniques are described in Ada by Marina who is called a "dummy [with a] screen-corrupted mind." Such "screen memories" are treated by Nabokov as examples of "bad" memory which he distinguishes, in one of his "strong opinions," from the work of a "good memoirist [who] does his best to preserve the utmost truth of the detail." Wiśniewski suggests that all such efforts on Nabokov's part to strictly separate "good memory" from "bad" are intentionally misleading and, in the long run, untenable. After all, in Nabokov's novels, time and again, the boundary separating memory from consoling fiction, or outright delusion, artistic genius from madness, often turns out to be quite fluid. What is more, in Speak, Memory Nabokov seems unable to do without the strategies of montage described by Marina. Similarly, Nabokov's oft-avowed aversion to Freud is designed to mask both the affinities between them and, perhaps, the real causes of that aversion.