Speaking of ideology, you have often expressed your hostility to Freud, most noticeably tn the forewords to your translated novels. Some readers have wondered which of Freud's works or theories you were most offended by and why. The parodies of Freud in Lolita and Pale Fire suggest a wider familiarity with the good doctor than you have ever publicly granted. Would you comment on this?
Uh, 1 am not up to discussing again that figure ot fun. He is not worthy of more attention than I have granted him in my novels and in Speak, Memory. Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. I really do not care. ,
Your contempt for Freud's «standardized symbols» extends to the assumptions of a good many other theorizers. Do you think literary criticism is at all purposeful, and if so, what kind of criticism would you point to? Pale Fire makes it clear what sort you find gratuitous (at best).
My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on «ideas». Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the «how» above the «what» but do not let it be confused with the «so what». Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.
As a writer, have you ever found criticism instructive — not so much the reviews of your own books, but any general criticism? From your own experiences do you think that an academic and a literary career nourish one another? Since many writers today know no other alternative than a life on campus Yd be very interested in your feelings about this. Do you think that your own work in America was at all shaped by your being part of an academic community?
I find criticism most instructive when an expert proves to me that my facts or my grammar are wrong. An academic career is especially helpful to writers in two ways: 1) easy access to magnificent libraries and 2) long vacations. There is of course the business of teaching, but old professors have young instructors to correct examination papers for them, and young instructors, authors in their own right, are followed by admiring glances along the corridors of Vanity Hall. Otherwise, our greatest rewards, such as the reverberations of our minds in such minds as vibrate responsively in later years, force novelist-teachers to nurse lucidity and honesty of style in their lectures.
What are the possibilities of literary biography?
They are great fun to write, generally less fun to read. Sometimes the thing becomes a kind of double paper chase: first, the biographer pursues his quarry through letters and diaries, and across the bogs of conjecture, and then a rival authority pursues the muddy biographer.
Some critics may find the use of coincidence in a novel arch or contrived. I recall that you yourself at Cornell called Dostoevski's usage of coincidence crude.
But in «real» life they do happen. Last night you were telling us at dinner a very funny story about the use of the title «Doctor» in Germany, and the very next moment, as my loud laughter was subsiding, I heard a person at the next table saying to her neighbor in clear French tones coming through the tinkling and shuffling sounds of a restaurant — «Of course, you never know with the Germans if 'Doctor' means a dentist or a lawyer». Very often you meet with some person or some event irl «real» life that would sound pat in a story. It is not the coincidence in the story that bothers us so much as the coincidence of coincidences in several stories by different writers, as, for instance, — the recurrent eavesdropping device in nineteenth-century Russian fiction.
Could you tell us something about your work habits as a writer, and the way you compose your novels. Do you use an outline? Do you have a full sense of where a fiction is heading even while you are in the early stages of composition?
In my twenties and early thirties, I used to write, dipping pen in ink and using a new nib every other day, in exercise books, crossing out, inserting, striking out again, crumpling the page, rewriting every page three or four times, then copying out the novel in a different ink and a neater hand, then revising the whole thing once more, recopying it with new corrections, and finally dictating it to my wife who has typed out all my stuff. Generally speaking, I am a slow writer, a snail carrying its house at the rate of two hundred pages of final copy per year (one spectacular exception was the Russian original of Invitation to a Beheading, the first draft of wich I wrote in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration). In those days and nights I generally followed the order of chapters when writing a novel but even so, from the very first, I relied heavily on mental composition, constructing whole paragraphs in my mind as I walked in the streets or sat in my bath, or lay in bed, although often deleting or rewriting them afterward. In the late thirties, beginning with The Gift, and perhaps under the influence of the many notes needed, I switched to another, physically more practical, method — that of writing with an erasercapped pencil on index cards. Since I always have at the very start a curiously clear preview of the entire novel before me or above me, I find cards especially convenient when not following the logical sequence of chapters but preparing instead this or that passage at any point of the novel and filling in the gaps in no special order. I am afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think that in my case it is true that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to. The greatest happiness I experience in composing is when I feel I cannot understand, or rather catch myselt not understanding (without the presupposition of an already existing creation) how or why that image or structural move or exact formulation of phrase has just come to me. It is sometimes rather amusing to find my readers trying to elucidate in a matter-of-fact way these wild workings of my not very efficient mind.
One often hears from writers talk of how a character takes hold of them and in a sense dictates the course of the action. Has this ever been your experience?
I have never experienced this. What a preposterous experience! Writers who have had it must be very minor or insane. No, the design of my novel is fixed in my imagination and every character follows the course I imagine for him. I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth. Whether 1 reproduce it as fully and faithfully as 1 would wish, is another question. Some of my old works reveal dismal blurrings and blanks.
Pale Fire appears to some readers to be in part a gloss of Plato's myth of the cave, and the constant play of Shades and Shadows throughout your work suggests a conscious Platonism. Would you care to comment on this possibility?
As I have said I am not particularly fond of Plato, nor would I survive very long under his Germanic regime of militarism and music. I do not think that this cave business has anything to do with my Shade and Shadows.
Since we are mentioning philosophy per se, / wonder if we might talk about the philosophy of language that seems to unfold in your works, and whether or not you have consciously seen the similarities, say, between the language of Zemblan and what Ludwig Wittgenstein had to say about a «private language». Your poet's sense of the limitations of language is startlingly similar to Wittgenstein's remark on the referential basis of language. While you were at Cambridge, did you have much contact with the philosophy faculty?