The politics of perception: Vladimir Nabokov's images of the 1940s

Gregory Alan Wickliff, Purdue University

Abstract

Nabokov's published texts of the 1940s--his lepidoptera articles, Nikolai Gogol, Conclusive Evidence, ten short stories, and Bend Sinister--are read in terms of Henri Bergson's theories of image perception. For both authors, time is real, and change is basic to human perception. Consequently, any static representation of time, including language, is finally mechanistic, false, and even deterministic in the sense of presenting a single, closed future. In Nabokov's texts, mechanism and determinism are rejected, subverted by reflexive techniques, and parodied as aesthetically and morally empty doctrines. In Nabokov's lepidoptera articles this thesis takes the form of Nabokov's theory of the creative evolution of butterfly genitalia, a hypothesis which rejects Spencerian "survival of the fittest" and the single line of biological development implied by Darwin's theory of "natural selection." Instead, Nabokov argues for the mind-like development of species in novel and plural directions, and the constant need for revolutionary revision in science. Similar principles are carried into the human social realm by Spencer's deterministic theories of sociology which, especially as represented by nineteenth century Russian literary criticism, by Marxist-Leninist dogma, by Stalinism, and by Hitler's National Socialism, Nabokov rejects utterly. In Nabokov's literary biography of Gogol, he revises criticism of the Gogol texts to continue a critique of nineteenth century Russian literary and social criticism, and to parody the biological determinism of associationist psychology, especially as practiced by Freud. Nabokov's autobiography creatively explodes many genre conventions and imitates the flow of human memory in the structure of its recurrent themes, one of the greatest of which is the political liberalism of Nabokov's father. The short stories treat quite directly the conflict between mechanism and individual creative consciousness which Nabokov suggests underlies the causes of World War II, and projects itself as kind of neurosis, even the wake of the war. Bend Sinister, the most important work for the purposes of this study, presents an exhaustive parody of a mechanistic police state which destroys every vestige of creative consciousness within its borders, but is itself destroyed by the unexpected intervention of the creative author of that world.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Ross, Purdue University.

Subject Area

American literature

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