Tag Archives: nabokov

internet & disengagement & dissociation

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I’m having a hard time with structure–the structure of drafts and the revision of structure that inevitably comes when those drafts work their way into polished stories.  It’s a process that turns–if all goes well–something hulking and lumbering to something airy and light.  A clydesdale into a thoroughbred.  Though perhaps that’s not fair, because lord knows I love slow and gentle beasts more than anything that moves too quickly.

Maybe it’s an issue of just getting distracted all the time.  By music, by movies, by food, by drink, by dogs, by sleep, by television, by people.  The Internet is the worst for writing.  And when I say “The Internet,” I don’t mean the Internet that we all use, those benign sites we all keep in our arsenal–Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, Tumblr, whatever else.  I mean the Internet that exists below the surface of all that, the one that you find when you dig deep into the sixth or seventh page of search results, the one of weird old articles and hidden forums and unfiltered life writing.  That’s the Internet that sucks me in.  And it’s the worst because it aids research but lets you research too much and too easily, and before you know it, you’re neck deep in some early-aughties, long-abandoned blog written by a once seventeen-year-old from maybe Ohio though you can’t really be sure because the whole thing is so vague and you can’t even begin to remember how this was supposed to be research to help your story.  Every so often, though, it will uncover something smart and somewhat unreal, things like this discussion of Lolita written by a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, that I return to at least a few times a year, maybe especially for this passage:

Here, Nabokov does more than write about a self-contained world of horror in a beautiful way. He also presents a curious way in which the human mind can experience that world of horror. One of the things that always bothered me most was how my awful recollections could come back to me in exquisite wrapping: how I could recall overripe apples thumping to the ground in the night, a shooting star, or Bach being played on the piano in an adjacent room. In attempting to make sense of what happened to me, I seized on those moments as “evidence” of the fact that I “liked” what had occurred. If I could focus on the loveliness of Prelude No. 1 in C Major as something disgusting and illegal was going on, wasn’t I just reveling in that which was disgusting and illegal? I punished myself for a way of thinking that, reading Lolita, was revealed to me as a survival tactic. I realized, for the first time, that there was nothing wrong or strange with how I had been coping, by stepping out of the horror and into the beauty that was running parallel to it.

Because for the past however many years (too many), I’ve been trying to write fiction about traumatic things and I’ve been trying to be authentic to the experience of a survivor:  where the mind goes, where the body goes, and, finally, where the self goes.  Oftentimes those are three different directions.  You’d think that fiction, with all its endless leg room and tricks and tools, would be the ideal vehicle for trauma narratives, but again and again I find myself stuck, and pretty soon my characters get stuck too, and I start yearning for the cool-headed, steady-eyed voice that I can only seem to achieve in memoir.

I think of the passage in Lolita that describes, from a distance, the first time Humbert assaults Lo, the framing of the “Carmen” song, the apple she tosses around in her hands, and the lingering description of Humbert as a spider feeling little tugs on his silk strings. This deleted scene from Lyne’s Lolita captures it, in my opinion, rather well.

And then I think of the passage that describes, from a very great distance, the first instance of Humbert raping Lo–the description of the massive painting, the colors, the birds, the column of onyx, the sultan and snake, and finally the child wincing in pain.  Because Humbert is the abuser, he’s able to disengage from his own crimes in very pretty ways–that is, he remains in control.  Oh, the luxury of being an abuser!  Because the dissociation of a survivor of sexual trauma is generally very un-beautiful, but not grotesque or even anything dramatic at all.  It’s banal, maybe even boring.  Staring at a single spot on a ceiling, the mind retreating to something monotonous with a hypnotizing rhythm–loaves of bread rising, flowers opening and then closing, groceries rolling down a conveyer belt to be scanned.  How does one write that?  How do I write that?  Without suffocating the plot or having the story collapse in on itself as the character’s world essentially shrinks into nearly nothing?

It’s hard to find fiction that deals with dissociation brought on by sexual trauma in a way that’s both “realistic” (and I know that’s a loaded word) and from a p.o.v. cognitively very close to the survivor character.  ”Lawns” by Mona Simpson (sadly unavailable online unless you have JSTOR access and can bring up the issue of the Iowa Review it originally appeared in) is one of my favorite short stories for many reasons, but maybe especially for the detail of its narrator acutely remembering the sound of her brother’s baseball hitting the side of the house as she was abused by her father–no glorified sultan or serpent, no beautiful sweeping scenery, no wistful conjured up images of some lost love at a seaside, not even an ethereal otherworld whose gates of escapism only open at the moment trauma begins (because this, I think, is often portrayed as something that commonly occurs for the abused).  It’s just the monotony of suburbia continuing on even as the most horrific thing of your life is forced upon you, a reminder of how vast the world is, and how unfair, and unflinching.  I guess what I’m saying is, the experience of a survivor of abuse does not easily lend itself to fiction–though perhaps I only believe that because I’ve spent my whole life reading things written by white men who have found the point of view of an oppressor more interesting than that of the oppressed.

Regardless, the contrast between an abuser disengaging with the crimes he commits and the dissociation the victim’s mind performs as a survival technique is something I’m just now beginning to understand from a psychological standpoint, let alone from a narrative one.

And so I research, and I research, and I research.  And when I try to go back and revise, I can’t figure out how to structure a story that follows a fractured mind.  But I will–eventually.  I will, I will, I will.  (Wish me luck.)

Synesthesia

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Her brilliance, her genius.  Of course, she had changed in four years, but he, too, had changed, by concurrent stages, so that their brains and senses stayed attuned and were to stay thus always, through all separations.

- Nabokov, from Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 
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Synesthesia is defined as a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.  You see letters as having distinct colors, some complementary and some not.  Sounds have smells, and some motions have accompanying sounds.  Days of the week have personalities.  The key is that the second sensory experience is involuntary, not a product of prolonged exposure to metaphor.

Nabokov described his synesthesia as “colored hearing”–his ch-sound was sepia, p was an unripe apple, s a mixture or azure and mother of pearl.  It’s a highly romantic and beautiful thing to claim, and when I hear others talk about their won synesthesia, I always sort of roll my eyes because it seems as though synesthesia ought to be paired with a Pale Fire-quality manuscript in order to, like, actually matter.

But the endless associations, involuntary or not, that our minds make both astounds and frustrates me to no end.  I often find myself puzzled when talking to friends and family who don’t seem to be endlessly thrown back into some long ago time at the sound of a song, the scent of lilacs, the feeling of late spring rain on pavement and low tide heavy in the air.  Recently I asked my s.o., “Aren’t there certain songs you just can’t listen to?” and he replied with a cheerful, “I don’t think so!”  Said he didn’t form emotional attachments to things.  It’s only recently that I’ve even begun to believe that it’s possible not to go through life as a spider in the center of a web of threads that lead from memory to object to another memory to another object and back again.

So I’ve been trying to take careful notice of how my associations expand and contract, which memories come hurling forward and which ones drift lazily up to greet me.  Lately I’ve been struck with how certain words–seldom-used words, especially–conjure up not necessarily specific memories, but a wave of emotion that I associate with a specific time in my life.

Yesterday I used the word “concurrent” in conversation and almost immediately I felt a pang in my chest, as though I were missing someone, or carrying around some sort of grief.    The word, when I thought on it for a moment, made me think of Ada or Ardor and then made me think of this quote, which I first pulled from the novel when I was 20 years old, in my bedroom at my parents’ house, the windows open, the day before my sister’s wedding, the white tent erected on the front lawn, white chairs set around empty tables, flower arrangements being carried in, the phone ringing every ten minutes.  I remember, too, my boyfriend at the time and I had been together for two years and it was time for us to break up, though neither of us wanted to take the time to do it.  That passage from Ada made me wonder who he would be in four years, made me realize that even if he and I were trapped in the same room together for four years, we would never grow concurrently.  We would always be growing away from one another.

On the night of the wedding, we drove home my mother’s best friend, who was happily drunk in the backseat, tugging on my hair every so often and telling me that she loved me.  I loved her, too.  She knew how much I loved her–I’d known her since I was born.  My college entrance essay was written about her and how she was my hero.  She carried around a copy of the essay in her purse and showed it to acquaintances she ran into at the grocery store.  She liked making people she didn’t particularly care for read it.  Three years ago she died suddenly from an asthma attack and my father read the essay at her funeral. After my boyfriend and I dropped her off at her house, we stopped for coffees and drove back to the wedding that had been wrapped up while we were gone.  The empty tent, the little white lights still on, plates with half-eaten food, glasses of wine, the dogs passed out on the edges of the lawn.  And there–there’s the pang.  That is who I miss and there is the grief.

Poppycock

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I rediscovered this video the other day.

“The Menninger Foundation, a psychiatric clinic, just for the heck of it.”
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov.

In a 1968 interview, Nabokov said, “I do not write for groups, nor approve of group therapy (the big scene in the Freudian farce).”

In 1966, when asked why he hated Freud, Nabokov said, “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.”

The emphasis on and importance of being solitary is something I struggle with.  I suppose we all do.