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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey, folks, this is Jack in 2025. We are presenting for you, at listener request, an episode from way back in 2017 in which I talked to novelist Joshua Ferris about Vladimir Nabokov and the case he made against Sudden Sigmund Freud. Nabokov hated Freud. Hated him. Called him a witch doctor. We unpack all of that here without commercial interruption. I hope you enjoy. Hello, I'm Jack Wilson. Welcome to the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Let's jump right in. We've got a great episode today. Joshua Ferris is here. I hope you're all familiar with Joshua Ferris, author. His books are great. The Dinner Party is his collection of short stories. That's the most recent one. But his novels are excellent, too. He's a smart guy, a very, very perceptive observer, and a beautiful writer. Highly recommended. So on today's show, Joshua Ferris stops by to discuss Vladimir Nabokov and Sigmund Freud, two titans of the 20th century, and their relationship, if that's the right word, their connection, their spiritual connection. Nabokov had a particular animosity towards Sigmund Freud, which he returned to again and again. He can't quit Freud. He discusses his hatred for Freud in the prefaces to many of his novels. The novels themselves are often suffused with Freudian characters and thoughts and commentary told in a satirical or venomous way. He cites Freud, he borrows from Freud, he mocks him, he satirizes him, and he can hardly give an interview without bringing him up. Here's an example. Or you know what? Let's save the example. Let's save that for the end. Let's do this like a mystery that we're going to unlock, a puzzle that's appropriate given our people today. Freud spent his career trying to unlock the puzzle of human consciousness. And Nabokov was a great fan of inventing problems and chess puzzles. All his life, that's how he entertained himself. Studying butterflies and writing novels and devising chess problems, finding elegant solutions. Let's listen to him answer the question of why he wrote Lolita.
- [02:57]
Vladimir Nabokov
Why did you write Lolita? It was an interesting. An interesting, perhaps, thing to do. I wrote. Why did I write Lita? Why did I write any of my books? After all, for the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. See, I have no social purpose, no moral message. I'm not a messenger. I have no general ideas to exploit. I'm not a general, but I like composing Riddles. I like finding elegant solutions to my riddles, to those riddles that I have composed myself.
- [03:38]
Jack Wilson
Are we getting any clues there? Does that get us closer to the answer to our riddle of why Nabokov hates Freud? Let's listen to another clip.
- [03:49]
Vladimir Nabokov
Lolita is a very special favorite of mine. It was my most difficult book, the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote from my own emotional life, that it gave me special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real.
- [04:09]
Jack Wilson
Another piece of the puzzle, another hint. But you may say, having read your Freud, surely it's not that simple, Mr. Nabokov. Surely there's something brewing inside you, some dark, deep unconscious drive, something that pointed you toward this theme. The emotions there, the agonizing love, the relentless obsession. We can see it, even if Mr. Nabokov can't, right? Or even if he can't admit it to himself. We can find it, can't we? Let me tell you a story of my own. When I was teaching, back in my university teacher days, I had this innocent student, very innocent student, a young, eager Michigander, very nice kid. And it was a Great Books course. And we read Freud and it blew his mind. He wrote a response paper which is unforgettable. He said, I just can't believe that all dreams can be sexual in nature. For example, last night I had a dream where my mother was wearing white gloves and making me ketchup sandwiches. How in the world could that be sexual? I don't know if you've read Freud, listener, but if you have, you can probably sense my dilemma. I didn't know what to say. I didn't think I should explain it to him. I didn't know what I should do. Him and his mother. What would you have done, dear listener? What would you have done? This wasn't a class I'd psychoanalysis or I wasn't his therapist, didn't want to analyze him or suggest that I was in any way interpreting anything that he told me in any particular way that might embarrass him or confuse him was not my place. I am not qualified. On the other hand, I had an obligation to educate, right? To present Freud and his ideas, to show him what Freud meant, to show him, at a minimum, how everyone who came after Freud might interpret a dream like dreaming of your mother wearing white gloves, handing you ketchup sandwiches. Why am I telling you the story? Because it shows, I think, something important, that there's a before and an after. There's a before and after. You've read or understood Freud and an after. I was an after. And I was touched and moved to be dealing with a before. And Nabokov, I think, was realizing just what it meant to be dealing with a whole society, a whole civilization that was an after. He too was an after. And all his readers and his critics and all of his characters, all of them afters, wondering, I think Nabokov was wondering, if they could be befores or not befores. Exactly. Never was never wases. A whole new world full of never wases. An alternative world. If only he could erase Freud and the afters. See how tangled this puzzle is getting Nabokov, Nabokov's complete hatred for Freud. It's turned me into a linguistic mess. Good thing I have some help in this case, a great 21st century writer to help me explore two writers from the 20th. And you'll hear the surprise bonus question. It's a special surprise bonus question. I don't think I've ever had a guest quite so stymied by this surprise bonus question you'll hear. His response was a good question. I devised it to be difficult. That's appropriate, right? Today's a day of riddles and puzzles and trying to figure things out. So let's get to Joshua Ferris, who's helping us tackle the main question we're after. After that I'll read a little bit more from Nabokov, an interview that he gave. That's coming up on today's History of.
- [09:11]
Joshua Ferris
Okay.
- [09:11]
Jack Wilson
Joining me now is Joshua Ferris, author.
- [09:14]
Joshua Ferris
Of the novels Then We Came to.
- [09:15]
Jack Wilson
The End, the Unnamed, to rise again at a decent hour.
- [09:19]
Joshua Ferris
In his most recent work, a collection of short stories called the Dinner Party, he's been answering questions about working in an office for the past 10 years. So today we're going to talk about something else altogether.
- [09:30]
Jack Wilson
Joshua Ferris, welcome to the History of Literature.
- [09:33]
Joshua Ferris
Hey, Jack, thanks for having me on your show.
- [09:35]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
- [09:36]
Joshua Ferris
So am I correct in thinking that people still ask you about ad agencies.
- [09:40]
And cubicles less and less these days? To be honest, I think they've tired of me talking about stories from 1999.
- [09:49]
Right.
- [09:49]
Jack Wilson
Well, it was a book that really.
- [09:51]
Joshua Ferris
Caught the zeitgeist, I think in 2007, I guess it came out. You were right there with Steve Carell.
- [09:56]
Yeah, it was me and Steve. Steve co wrote it. Actually it was just a ghost written ghost written by Steve Carell.
- [10:03]
Yeah. I was listening to an interview did with Terry Gross last night in preparation for this and I was struck by how she had to bring that up. You know the office must have just started. And it must have been quite a coincidence for you when you were out there on the tour.
- [10:18]
I don't know. I don't remember. I mean, I know it was going at that time, but I. I thought it had been on for a couple years. The UK version obviously had come and gone. Although I don't think I had watched it by the time I wrote the book. Maybe I even purposely avoided watching it. But, you know, I mean, the connections between the two were impossible to avoid for people. So I just thought, well, hell, if it will contribute to more sales, I'll run with it.
- [10:49]
Well, the book is still worth a read. I think everyone should run out and buy it. I hope my listeners do. So I remember once I went to a reading with Richard Ford and he had just come out with his novel Independence Day, and he was talking about how he was getting a little bit lost in the shuffle of the movie that was doing things like blowing up the Statue of Liberty and blowing up the White House and everything. It all came out at the same time. I guess that's the occupational risk that you take.
- [11:16]
Yeah. To be confused for Michael Bay. Was it Michael Bay?
- [11:20]
It might have been, yeah. One of the.
- [11:22]
Richard Ford and Michael Bay. That's a Google search that will yield no results.
- [11:31]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so I asked if you had.
- [11:33]
Joshua Ferris
Some books that you loved or some.
- [11:34]
Jack Wilson
Authors that you loved, and you said, let's talk about Nabokov and Freud.
- [11:38]
Joshua Ferris
And I thought that was a great topic. Yeah. So why these two?
- [11:43]
Well, you know, when I was very young and I didn't know anything, and Nabokov was the first author that I read, like, you know, adult literature. I was probably 13 or 14, and I didn't really understand the damn thing, but I did know that I liked what I read. And I was very, extremely impressed in the way that any other reading adult would be. And a lot of the mysteries that were there too, you know, it was Lolita that I read and a lot of the mysteries that were embedded, that were embedded in that book so deliberately and with such coy intelligence made me really try to figure it out as well. I mean, if you'll remember, at the beginning, there is a kind of foreword by a doctor by the name of John Ray Jr. And he claims basically that the following manuscript is a case study based in fact. And I remember reading that and looking on the back then of the book that had the book labeled fiction literature and flipping back to the forward and back to the back of the book and back to the forward Trying to figure out which was more truthful, which was right. And so I was drawn to him in particular by the mysteries and by the playfulness and by the uncertainty that over time, I figured out. And, you know, when you read him and you devote a lot of attention to him and thinking to him, and I read. You know, by the time I was out of high school, I think I had read all of the books, although probably still rather uncertain about most of them. Just probably more than anything, given my age. You also know that he hates Freud. Yeah, I mean, he hates Freud. He just hates him.
- [13:33]
It's in the prefaces. It's every interview. It's amazing how often he returns to it.
- [13:41]
Astonishing. Something is up.
- [13:46]
And it's with such energy and such vitriol. I mean, it's. He's always calling it the Viennese witch doctor or the man with the shabby umbrella, or. He calls it a thought prison. He calls it blackmail. Like, he just. It just goes on and on. He comes up with new ways to denigrate Freud or Freudianism or readers or critics.
- [14:09]
Yeah, it's wicked. It's dismissive, it's intolerant, it's absolute. It is so often, actually frequently evocative of the kind of generalities that Freud himself makes when arguing on behalf of his own claims and neuroses and theses and all the rest of it. I mean, he does. Nabokov, who is so subtle and so preternaturally attuned to so much, simply deals with Freud in the crudest, most generalized terms. He simply either could not be bothered to really address and spend time with the books and the essays that Freud was writing and the argumentation that Freud was putting forth, or he simply had no way of actually getting down into the muck and defeating him at his own game.
- [15:08]
Did you come to Freud via Nabokov, or did you encounter Freud from another source, like in college or something?
- [15:16]
So to go back. So I'm reading a lot of Nabokov, as you point out, finding his dismissals in the prefaces. In the prefaces, I'm seeing his. I'm reading some of the interviews that, you know, crop up in Strong Opinions and. And the references that are in those interviews and essays, and then, you know, frankly, you know, to read the books themselves, there are quite a lot of references made throughout the fiction to his scorn and dismissal. So I'm encountering those as well. And I'm thinking, well, I know I like this guy, so this Ford guy just must be bunk. He Must be silly.
- [15:59]
Yeah.
- [15:59]
And without doing much critical thinking about either one of them, I dismiss the one and embrace the other. So that's where things stood for like 10 or 15 years. And, you know, I mean, obviously, I think just to be a human being in the world in the 20th century is to understand. To say, when I was being educated in college is to understand some Freudian theories and is to understand basically what, you know, Freud put forth, even if in cartoonish terms. So it wasn't as if I was completely ignorant of him, but I would deliberately avoid him out of some sort of sense of weird sense of loyalty that I had to a man who, you know, died when I was three. I don't know why that's the case.
- [16:50]
But.
- [16:53]
I didn't show a lot of personal curiosity for him.
- [16:56]
Oh, that's interesting. You know, I almost had the opposite experience where I came to Freud first, and it was because I didn't encounter either one until college. But they were everywhere. I think you and I went to college around the same time in the 90s, and they were everywhere. I mean, you couldn't take a literature course without Freud either being discussed or at the center of it. Or it was a deliberate turning away from Freud one or the other. And Nabokov was what everybody was reading in their spare time. You know, that was. Even if you didn't have them assigned, that'd be what everyone wanted to read on the weekends and everything. And so what I found was I had started to feel like Freud was kind of a con game, or I was starting to feel like I didn't like the way Freud was making me and everyone else read literature. And I wanted to read Middlemarch. And instead people told me I had to read Freud so that I would learn how to read Middlemarch or something. And so I was getting kind of. I felt like I was being kind of pushed around and. And I didn't like the way that it would ascribe to authors this sort of unconscious determination of what was going into the works. And I didn't like it when an author said, no, I didn't mean that at all. And the answer was, well, your unconscious probably did, which maybe has some merit, but I felt like we were really ending up kind of privileging the critic more than the author and the reader. And so when I then encountered Nabokov and he was attacking Freud, I was ready. I was ready to, you know, then I thought, I want to read more of Nabokov's works, because I thought, here's a guy who gets what I'm getting, which is there's real problems with the way that Freud is immersed in literature. So it sounds like when you got to Freud, then you found there was more to it than what you had gotten from Nabokov.
- [18:57]
Well, yeah, I mean, I found that there was a hell of a lot more to it and a hell of a lot more than I thought. I mean, I want to preface it by saying that almost everything Freud writes is wrong in its literal sense. If I do in fact, understand what he's trying to say, I disagree with it.
- [19:17]
Right.
- [19:18]
So it's fairly extraordinary how right a man so wrong can be. And I don't exactly know how it happens, because the prison, the sort of. Like, there's a way to look at Freud and to frame him and to really agree with. I mean, this is sort of a really backhanded compliment. It's like. It reminds me of a Michael Keaton movie in which he's going around to his superior's office and saying when he's looking at family photographs, nice frame. But that's. Freud's frames are all right, but it's the picture inside of them, the details that are so off. Yeah, but somehow you managed. Somehow he manages to convey a friend. That almost seems perfectly right to me. So, yeah, I mean, suddenly I realized that the effective argumentation, which is almost none, no argumentation at all, but nevertheless, the effective argumentation that Volkov made against Freud, which really just was like a kind of propaganda, had worked on me, that I was propaganda Bolton. I was capable of being propagandized against Freud by somebody who was as good as Nabokov, as consistent and as withering as he could be.
- [20:40]
Yeah, well, that's interesting to talk about that, because they are both very seductive prose writers.
- [20:47]
Yes.
- [20:48]
Nabokov is. When you read him, you want to be right there with him. And his enemies, it's fun to have them be your enemies as well. He's so passionate and he's got such facility with the language and with his tone. And he is a little over the top, but it's fun and it's funny and Freud is seductive. And I think of him as being like a Conan Doyle where he presents these. His case studies are presented almost like detective novels. And you read them and you want to agree with Freud because he's uncovering a mystery and it's exciting. It makes you want to do it as well, that there are details and clues and hidden patterns and you can really help people or you can come to this deeper understanding by being able to almost creatively put the pieces of this puzzle together.
- [21:49]
I think that's right. I mean, I think one of the things that makes him so seductive is that we have an innate. We have an innate urge as human beings to feel as if the answer is hidden but can be arrived at. And with some effort and with some acuity and over time, with the right kind of tools, we will eventually get at what some otherwise maybe diabolical force has kept hidden from us for so long. So when you encounter Freud, you're like, aha. And I think this is sort of like the collective aha that happened circa 1910, certainly by 1920, in which everybody was like, here at last is the answer to all of our troubles. That makes no reference to religion, and it, frankly, is absolutely no historical surprise, as far as I'm concerned, that it took off with such force.
- [22:52]
Yeah. And that was. I mean, a lot of authors. Updike I know is a good example, who really valued Freud and said, you know, Freud washed away Puritanism in America and almost made it gave artists and readers, but also just people, the tools that they needed to explore a different side of themselves.
- [23:18]
Yeah, yeah. While, as I say, being wrong almost on almost every particular score. I mean, it's astonishing the amount of leeway I think we could give him. Although there was a lot of argument on his behalf for things being right in the particular and not just in the general.
- [23:40]
Right. Right. Now, do you think what you described when you said that Freud kind of showed that there was this mystery that we could get to if only we could remove the obstacles in our way. I'm not sure Nabokov would exactly disagree with that. He just seemed to disagree with the idea that when it came to art, it was that easy, or that it was simple, or that you could reduce the. I guess, the magic of art or the complexity of art into some easily explainable, determined force?
- [24:15]
I'm not sure about that. I mean, I do think he believed that the mysteries of science in particular and of nature were vast and. And fairly out of. I mean, he had some sturdy opinions of himself and his thinking, so he wasn't afraid to declaim. And, you know, he makes some very intriguing remarks outside of the fiction, speaking on behalf of himself, very infrequent, but nevertheless to the effect of, I know more about the afterlife and what. What awaits us, then I'm willing to put down on paper.
- [24:56]
Yeah, I don't remember that. That's fascinating. Was that in a book I'm not going to.
- [25:02]
No, I don't think it was in a book. I'm not going to be able to remember now, though. I wish I had looked it up before our talk. But nevertheless, if you look, if you don't mind, I would like to, if I can find it, I would like to read something from Panim.
- [25:17]
Okay.
- [25:19]
That might give a good example of what I actually think was Nabokov's feeling about the ultimate mysteries. And it comes, I don't know, about halfway through the book. And Pinin has just basically realized that his wife. I mean, they are divorced by this point, but he's never going to get her back, and she's really a terrible woman, and he has nothing left kind of in his life. And he's very sad by this. And I'll read this because it's. I think it's something that Nabokov does constantly, or at least consistently enough that it may give an indication of how he looks at the world. He is thinking about this awful woman, and he starts. He saw her off and walked back through the park to hold her, to keep her just as she was, with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden, he thought, if people are reunited in heaven, I don't believe it. But suppose, then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, over me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the earth, and I am, curiously enough, alive, and there is something in me. And in life. He seemed to be quite unexpectedly, for human despair seldom leads to great truths. On the verge of a simple solution of the universe. But was interrupted by an urgent request. A squirrel under a tree had seen Panin on the path. In one sinuous tendril like movement, the intelligent animal climbed up to the brim of a drinking fountain and as Panin approached, thrust its oval face toward him with a rather coarse spluttering sound. Its cheeks puffed out. Panin understood, and after some fumbling, he found what had to be pressed for the necessary results. Eyeing him with contempt, the thirsty rodent forthwith began to sample the rocks, the stocky, sparkling pillar of water, and went on drinking for a considerable time. So I think that gives you a really good example, like Panin's right there on the verge of making some simple solution to the universe, and Nabokov throws that squirrel, that thirsty squirrel, in his path, and it's forgotten about and it's never landed On. And I think that happens consistently enough in Nabokov's fiction as to really cause anyone thinking that he had a grand design or a universal notion or vision for what the. You know, what the world held in store to be very skeptical about that.
- [28:09]
And what he seemed to have was details, you know, that he was a great celebrator of details. And he seemed to be saying, don't try to smooth out these details. Don't try to place an overlay of an ideology or of meaning on top of what are actually the beautiful individual. Particularized details.
- [28:37]
Yeah, the particularized details informed an individual, essentially, and he was nothing if not a singular individual. And so I think he resented any kind of gathering up of his urges or impulses into the kind of gross maneuvers that Freud trucked in. I think he was dispositionally allergic to such things as that. And I think he was even more allergic to any kind of extrapolation into a larger design that would necessarily include behavior that he would, as an individual, rebel against. I mean, you know, this also has a lot to do, I think, with the political situation in which he was born and through which he lived, you know, that he refused to join the hoi polloi under any circumstances. And so often that was the kind of gross thinking, the kind of crude thinking that would impede the kind of artistic refinement that was not only his work on the page, but his work with butterflies and his understanding of how understanding science and nature from a kind of molecular level up.
- [29:57]
Right. And speaking of the politics, I also ran across a quote as I was getting ready for this show that he. It wasn't in English, but he was giving an interview, I think it was, to a German publication, and he said, the Freudians are. They're like the Bolsheviks, that they're always trying to reduce the particular in favor of the general and trying to make it a collective and trying to make it. So he is very deeply rooted. And I think also it's hard to get around the idea that Lolita and the way that that would have necessarily been, given the climate of the time and the way Freud was reigning at that point, that he probably knew that a lot of readers of Lolita were going to try to trace it back to his childhood or try to examine the author in a way that he probably objected to and was trying to protect against.
- [30:52]
Yeah. And, you know, I mean, Lolita places, at the very beginning, at the very start of the book, places that very trap. So that if you're believing that Humpert. Humpert. Is in some way a pseudonym for Nabokov himself. You find early on the Annabel Lee character whose seduction is averted in various ways and then tragically dies and becomes then, at least in a superficial and hoary way, the answer for Humpert, Humpert's taste for nymphetz. So he was not unaware of it, but only after the fact. He was unaware of going in and planted these little tricks for the unwitting reader to fall into. But I think it remains to be seen to what extent these were simple parodies of Freudian ideas and to what extent Nabokov contained. Freud moved beyond him. It feels like one of Nabokov's chess games. To some extent, Freud lived. Nabokov outlived Freud by 30 years, 35 years, and wrote most of his greater books, most of his greatest books, after Freud had died. So to some extent, the chess player who lives longer wins by necessity. But nevertheless, it does seem to me that Freud had anticipated so much of Nabokov, that some of his scorn and reaction was merely the feeling of a belated discoverer of so much that Freud had already known and interrogated.
- [32:44]
Yeah. And maybe as he was becoming, there was maybe this growing awareness that his readers and the audience for any of his books were becoming so immersed in Freud and it was becoming such a cultural currency that it was going to be inescapable for him that that's what his readers would have in their minds as they were coming to his novels.
- [33:07]
Right. And so to counteract that throughout the work as something that was anathema and just did not pertain, would guarantee a lot of attention in that regard. And in fact, I think there's been, you know, insofar as this is a popular pursuit, there's been more investigation into the two thinkers.
- [33:29]
Yeah. Now, before the call, I was thinking that Nabokov, as I was reading some of his quotes, I was thinking, I was reminded of that Saturday Night Live sketch where John Lovitz is playing Michael Dukakis, and he's in the debate and they say, governor Dukakis, your rebuttal. And he says, I can't believe I'm losing to this guy. And it almost seemed like Nabokov sometimes seems to be like, I can't believe I still have to tell you guys the problems with Freud. But since we've been talking, I've been wondering if we could actually maybe say that Nabokov was. It improved his art or it sharpened his skills, or that it was more like, you know, a great tennis Rivalry or something where Nabokov was better for having Freud to work against.
- [34:16]
I think that's right. I mean, somebody has said, I don't know who, but if Freud hadn't existed, Nabokov would have had to invent him. Would have had to invent him.
- [34:26]
Right.
- [34:27]
And I think that that to some extent is right. I mean, you know, he is constantly giving us doubles in his fictions. Almost every book contains a double. And that's certainly the case with his greatest books. And they contain doubles that like the quote, the famous quote from Freud about I won't have it exactly. But it's like the most intimate of friends and the most hated of enemies are wrapped up, often for me, are wrapped up in one. And it seemed as if the animus that Freud inspired in the Brokov was the very thing that made him want to write in ways that were more expansive than Freud could ever dream, while at the same time seemingly to instantiate every theory that Freud put forth. You know, the first time that it ever occurred to me to kind of be like, to really cock my eye at Nabokov and say, what is going on exactly is when very early on in Speak Memory, he says, excuse me, not Speak Memory, strong opinions, collection of essays. He says they ask him about Freud. He says, oh, I am not up to discussing again that figure of fun. And then he goes on in every interview thereafter to mention Freud once, you know, even if asked or not. I mean, all he does is mention this figure of fun. So though he, you know, one gets the sense that he's protesting too much and you want to ask what exactly is up? And I do think that some of the things that we've talked about already, the kind of aversion of generality.
- [35:56]
The.
- [35:56]
Distaste for being included in any collective, the political ramifications that this kind of psychiatry put forth. I mean, I would reference Penin again when he's talking about his big rival in that book even calls Siamese twins a group. He points out, he says, you know, that it is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism, all of this psychiatry. So you get the sense that, like this is deeply embedded into some fundamental ways of looking at the world, and that those two fundamental ways, the Freudian prism and the sort of the Nabokov response, are at odds with one another. But at the same time, the way in which Nabokov in book after book mimics the Freud of the interpretation of dreams in particular and embodies the characters that he is writing into life through the Most dreamlike logic of any writer that's ever written owes a lot, if not to Freud, to. To Freudian ideas, to those kind of primal Freudian ideas that Nabokov couldn't, at least to me, didn't seem to be able to slip the knot of.
- [37:13]
Yeah, you almost get the sense that if Freud had been this undiscovered writer, if he had just been a Viennese intellect that hadn't really reached the masses in any way, or that Nabokov was one of a small, select group of people who knew about his writings and his theories, Nabokov would have not had any criticism for him, he would have thought, here's a gold mine. Here's something I can use and learn from and imagine from. It was really only the idea that it was becoming all pervasive and this explanatory mechanism that he felt was reducing what he was trying to do.
- [37:51]
Yeah, that tyranny of the interpretive prism that you disliked when you were in college, I think probably got at him fairly. Fairly got under his skin pretty well because of the reasons that we've discussed.
- [38:03]
Yeah. Now, as a novelist yourself, do you feel like you have to wrestle against Freud or a Freudian interpretation of anything? Have we moved beyond that now? Or do you still feel like you have to have one part of your brain conscious of symbols that people might try to impose on your work or anything like that? Is that in your mind at all as you're putting together your books?
- [38:31]
No, I don't think about it. I mean, you know, I tend to, as I say, think a lot of Freud. I think the framework is really pretty, especially as he gets on, as he goes on, he gets away, I think, from his fixed ideas about sexuality and how certain things work. I mean, the man was a long work in progress and struck upon quite a number of very unlikely theories, all encompassing theories for the way in which the neuroses worked, human sexuality worked. And it was really only as he gets beyond, I think, some of the fixedness of those early years and he, frankly, he becomes less of a psychiatrist and more of a philosopher. And he starts to echo, I think, the best of Schopenhauer and the best of Nietzsche and insisting that especially with the breakout of the First World War and the loss of his daughter and the risk to. There's so much death. He just saw so much death that he starts to speak more broadly about things and becomes willing to depart from his insistence, his fitfully successful insistence on empirical evidence, and just starts to say things that he thinks are True. And suddenly they start to resound a little bit more. And I think that's really what I'm talking. That's what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about Freud, the guy who was less fixed and more broad and speaking things that really only, you know, a few thinkers such as himself landed on.
- [40:10]
Yeah, there's a sense, and I think this is. Nabokov probably felt this as well. There's a quote I Love by Dr. Johnson, and he was speaking with Edmund Burke, who was driving him crazy yet again. And they disagreed on so much. And somebody said, why do you keep inviting him to the dinner? And he said, because that gentleman calls forth all my powers. And you get the feeling that Freud. Something about him, even when he's wrong, he makes us think about things in a way that is. Brings out the best in us.
- [40:44]
Yeah, well, he makes people think, period. You know, you pick up Fortnite. You have to start thinking. You have to start thinking about yourself. You have to start thinking about the ways in which you have deceived yourself. You deceive others. You have to start to interrogate all sorts of intentions and instincts and things that you would probably rather just sort of think, at least as they pertain to you are perfectly fine. But when he insists that they're just as wrapped up in the kind of ugly mess of humanity with its high and low, and it's good and it's bad, and it's beautiful and ugly and it's evil and pure, you don't really want to delve too deeply. I mean, all of a sudden you find yourself in a, I don't know, national nightmare that might reflect 2016 in America.
- [41:32]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [41:34]
Joshua Ferris
Okay. So I have a surprise bonus question. Are you ready?
- [41:39]
What do I get for it? What do I get if I answer it correctly? I didn't know I was walking away with something.
- [41:47]
Well, it depends on how you do it. Depends if you get it right. Okay. Okay. 50 years from now, you find yourself as the wise elder in a society that has forgotten how to remember things. The Internet has become so crammed with information that it's nearly useless. And your society has turned to you to help them and posterity understand the past. They are preparing a time capsule, but there is only room for one author's collected works.
- [42:14]
Jack Wilson
Which of these will help us understand.
- [42:16]
Joshua Ferris
The 20th century the best? They ask, holding up the collected works of Sigmund Freud and the collected works of Vladimir Nabokov.
- [42:25]
Jack Wilson
Which do you choose for the capsule?
- [42:29]
Joshua Ferris
This is a. This is. You're Asking me strictly information wise, like.
- [42:34]
It is, to help us understand the 20th century.
- [42:45]
Man, that's a hard one.
- [42:50]
It was designed to be.
- [42:52]
Did you write this one? Did you write this bonus question? And the exact wording that you set down is to help us understand the 20th century.
- [43:01]
Jack Wilson
To help us understand the 20th century.
- [43:13]
Joshua Ferris
Well, you got to go with Freud, I'm afraid. I mean, I don't like the decision. I object. I think of the line from Speak Memory when the book says, I decided to take my picket or walk outside of nature or no, let me start over. Oh, I want to walk out and picket nature. But I'm afraid that that sort of. I mean, you know, to understand the world, to understand almost everything, it would be Nabokov. But to understand the 20th century, it's Freud. I mean, he's talking about both world wars. I mean, the second one considerably less, given that it hadn't yet quite started.
- [43:55]
Yeah, his influence, like he kind of dominated 20th century thought. He gave people, he unlocked things that people found very valuable that he was unlocking.
- [44:09]
Let's just make the caps a little bigger, Jack. What's the problem with that? It's a couple extra books. Come on.
- [44:17]
What's so difficult for the question? I don't know what I would have answered. So I guess I have to say that I don't think there's a right answer. But what's interesting is, as you said.
- [44:25]
Jack Wilson
Freud was wrong about just about everything.
- [44:28]
Joshua Ferris
And yet it's impossible to imagine the 20th century without him. And I think, even though as much as I love Nabokov, you could kind of imagine the 20th century without him. Although he does a great job of exploring the 20th century. So it's a very difficult, very difficult choice. But clearly the two of them are on the short list of authors we need to include in order to tell the future what was going on in the 20th century.
- [44:57]
Yeah, unfortunately, the ways in which we typically think of as understanding something have a lot more to do with fact, or what we think of as fact than art. Art so often is like just a vaguer thing. It's a mushier thing. And how can you really understand anything through art? So I sort of answered the question on behalf of sort of the Freudian collective, like it would be Freud, there's no real doubt about it. But it would be a great loss to humanity to choose the collected works of Freud over Nabokov. I mean, Nabokov is the preeminent novelist maybe of all time. And so of course you want to.
- [45:37]
Go with Him, Yeah, and so much of his time, I mean he almost embodied 20th century history in his figure, his history and his choice of topics and just the journey that he had from Russia to Europe to America was a very 20th century journey.
- [46:01]
Well, had he spent as much time attacking and reducing Lenin, Stalin and Hitler as he did Freud, then you could see the ways in which of course Nabokov would no longer be Nabokov, but he would pivot to appeal to kind of, you know, non fiction minded folk who would want to see Freud in that capsule more than Nabokov. You could see how he would, I don't want to say pander, but certainly address the concerns of the high minded men and women of the world who just want to know the facts, man. You could see how that would change things. But he didn't. I mean he was Nabokov and Nabokov attacked Freud for a reason. So to some extent the decision to put Nabokov in that capsule would be, and I would completely condone it, an enormous flipped bird to the notion that somehow it's information that we need to understand any century at all. Facts and its politics and it's how the world works rather than what Nabokov had to offer, which was basically all the rest.
- [47:16]
Okay, well I think that's a good place to stop.
- [47:18]
Jack Wilson
Joshua Faris, thank you so much for.
- [47:20]
Joshua Ferris
Joining me today on the history of literature.
- [47:23]
My pleasure, thanks for having me.
- [47:35]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. Wasn't that fun? My thanks to Joshua Ferris. Everyone should head out and buy his books and while you're there, buy some Nabokov. Strong Opinions Speak, Memory Panin and of course Lolita. And how about some Freud as well? Dig in. Civilization and Its Discontents is a good one. And the Interpretation of Dreams. And I've always liked Dora. Read a Sherlock Holmes story, then read Dora and tell me what you think. Now I promised you some of Nabokov's thoughts.
- [48:06]
Joshua Ferris
I want to show you how he.
- [48:08]
Jack Wilson
Brings up Freud out of the blue as I read this interview that he gave. And then we'll give him the last word on this issue of why he detests Freud. So here it is. The question is, what do you think of recent American writing? And Nabokov says, well, seldom more than two or three really first rate writers exist simultaneously in a given generation. I think that Salinger and Updike are by far the finest artists in recent years. I'm not a good speaker. You see, when I start to speak I have immediately four or five lines of thought, sort of roads you know trails going various ways, and I have to decide which trail I'm going to follow. And while I decide, this hawing and hemming begins, and it may be very upsetting because I hear it myself, I can never understand those limpid, fluid speakers as my father was, who just deliver perfect phrases, beautifully built, with an aphorism here, you know, and a metaphor there. I can't do it. I have to think it out. I have to take a pencil, I have to write it down laboriously, have it before me. I do things like that. It's probably psychological. I can imagine what old Freud would have said, whom I heartily detest, as my readers know by now. Did you hear that? Where does Freud come from? Always right there, always in the back of his mind, ready to jump into the front of his mind. The follow up question is, Mr. Nabokov, would you tell us why it is that you detest Dr. Freud? And Nabokov says, 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. I think that the creative artist is an exile. In his study, in his bedroom, in the circle of his lamplight. He's quite alone there. He's the lone wolf. As soon as he's together with somebody else, he shares his secret, he shares his mystery, he shares his God with somebody else. End quote. I'm Jack Wilson. You can find us@historyofliterature.com subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you buy your buy. Wait, there's no need to buy, no need to buy. These are free. But if you do want to pay something, if you want to help support the show and good authors and good guests talking about great literature, you can visit my patreon page@patreon.com Literature it's very easy to set up. You only need a credit card. I think a PayPal account works too. And of course, my thanks as always to everyone who signs up. Okay, that's it for now. I'm Jack Wilson. Happy October, or almost October, everyone. And as always, thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.