Abstract
Hamrit employs poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, and Derridean approaches to illuminate philosophical concepts such as love and giving in Nabokov’s last Russian novel, The Gift. The chapter identifies the main characteristics of love in this novel, focusing on various relationships—often expressed as triangles—involving friendship, unrequited passion, filial affection, desire, and artistic creativity. It also describes the endless plenitude suggested by “the gift.” After establishing these concepts, “Loving and Giving in Nabokov’s The Gift” analyzes the human and ethical dimension of love as a source for moral action. Hamrit argues that love illuminates what is good in life, acting as if it were writing the world anew; love leads, therefore, to moral action characterized by what Nabokov and Derrida both call “the possibility of its impossibility.”
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Notes
- 1.
My intention is to show how fiction renews the impact, meaning, and apprehension of philosophical ideas. Whereas, in my previous analyses of Nabokov’s fiction, I resorted to Derridean philosophy to analyze literary notions, in this essay I reverse my stance and start from notions within literature (such as love) in order to renew philosophical concepts, privileging in a way the “bottom-up” (inductive) approach to the “bottom-down” (deductive) one. Moreover, I wish to show that a psychoanalytical and poststructuralist approach can be useful for a comprehension of Nabokov’s fiction, and notably of his treatment of morality, despite his distrust of Freud and the social sciences in general.
- 2.
See, for example, Derrida’s Donner le temps [Given Time] and Donner la mort [The Gift of Death].
- 3.
Nabokov’s 1962 foreword to the novel’s English translation tells us that the greater part of The Gift (in Russian, Dar) was written from 1935 to 1937 in Berlin, its last chapter being completed in 1937 on the French Riviera. It was published serially by an émigré magazine in 1937–1938, but with the fourth chapter omitted; not until 1952 was the entire novel published, in New York, by the Chekhov Publishing House. The Gift was translated from Russian into English by Michael Scammell and revised by the author, who is responsible, he says, for the versions of various poems scattered throughout the book.
- 4.
Dolinin continues by saying that The Gift declares the “love of the creator for his creature, and of the creature for its creator, love of a son for his father, love of an exile for his native land, love for language and those who love it, love for the beauty of the world, and last but not least, love for its readers” (165).
- 5.
It seems that circular forms appealed to Nabokov and were particularly meaningful for him, as he declares in Speak, Memory: “The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious, it has been set free” (211).
- 6.
The notion of “community” can be applied to the tragic triangle formed by Yasha, Rudolph, and Olya and the particular relations they entertain, because they do have something in common, that is, the desire to die together. Yet this community explodes because Yasha is the only one to commit suicide.
- 7.
This notion recalls the lightness of being that Blanchot describes in a short autobiographical story, published in book form as L’Instant de ma mort [The Instant of My Death], when he experiences the imminence of death.
- 8.
Blackwell examines this same sentence in his subtle monograph on The Gift, although he focuses on how the imagery of “forming a single shadow” illustrates how their bond creates a new whole out of unitary autonomous parts (Blackwell 134–135).
- 9.
In his essential and comprehensive Keys to The Gift, Leving expatiates on the title’s meaning, recalling that the English term “gift” is a translation of the original Russian title “dar,” a one-syllable word one can hear in the protagonist’s very name, “Fyodor.” Leving adds that, in Russian pronunciation, the vowel in the second syllable of the name is reduced to sound like the title: Fyodar (127–133).
- 10.
I summarize here, with the help of Lucy’s A Derrida Dictionary and Wortham’s The Derrida Dictionary, the notion of the gift developed in Derrida’s Donner le temps and Donner la mort. In Donner le temps [Given Time], Derrida wonders about that expression because, he says, one does not possess time. So is it possible (or impossible) to give time? In Donner la mort [The Gift of Death], Derrida expatiates on the sacrificial gift as experienced by Abraham, who associates death with infinite giving and therefore infinite love. I also draw on Marion’s analysis of Derrida’s statement that he never concluded that the gift was absolutely impossible, and that there was no such thing as a gift. According to Marion, Derrida means that, if there is a gift, it must be the experience of the impossible and should appear as impossible (165).
- 11.
According to French psychoanalyst Thamy Ayouch (personal correspondence), the formula cannot be found in Lacan’s works in its entirety. The initial phrase (“loving is giving something one does not have”) appears in the following texts: Le Séminaire, livre V, “Les formations de l’inconscient” (Leçon du 29 janvier 1958); Le Séminaire, livre VIII, “Le Transfert” (Leçons du 23 novembre 1969, 18 janvier, 15 mars et 22 mars 1961);“La direction de la cure et les principes de son pouvoir” (1958), from Écrits; and “Jeunesse de Gide ou la lettre et le désir” (1958), also from Écrits. The second part of the formula (“to someone who does not want it”) is often reconstituted from what is said later, but does not appear affixed to the first part. I am grateful to Professor Forbes Morlock for providing references to the English translations: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V, “The Formations of the Unconscious,” 1957–1958, and Book VIII, “Transference,” 1960–1961, trans. Cormac Gallagher from unedited French manuscripts and privately published; and “The Youth of Gide, or the Letter and Desire,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 2006), 623–644, 828–831.
- 12.
Leving, the source of this information (127), cites two letters from Nabokov to Zinaida Shakhovskaia now in the Library of Congress. In an undated letter from 1936, for example, Nabokov writes: “I am afraid that my next novel (its title has been extended by one letter: not ‘Da’ but ‘Dar,’ transforming the initial statement in to something flourishing, pagan, even priapic), will disappoint you.”
- 13.
As I have shown, Nabokov has prefigured Derrida’s analysis of the gift in his own novel with that very title. Indeed, because love is an affect and not merely a concept, it is best described in a literary work which can explore the different nuances of love’s singularities and renew its own representations of them. Our new critical stance, therefore, should be one that alternates between philosophy and literature in a “give-and-take” manner. After all, philosophy helps us to understand and regenerate the meaning of literature, while literature fleshes out and revives the concepts defined by philosophy.
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Hamrit, J. (2016). Loving and Giving in Nabokov’s The Gift . In: Rodgers, M., Sweeney, S. (eds) Nabokov and the Question of Morality. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59221-7_8
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