Vladimir Nabokov’s Despair: The protagonist has both psychotic and dissociative symptoms, the latter probably reflecting the novelist’s multiple personality

In the author’s Foreword, Nabokov refers to his main character, a first-person narrator, as “mad Hermann” (1, p. xiv). Writers use the vague word “mad” when they do not distinguish between psychotic conditions like schizophrenia and dissociative conditions like multiple personality.

In the novel, Hermann is portrayed as having both psychotic and dissociative symptoms. His main psychotic symptom is the visual hallucination and delusion that another man, Felix, is his look-alike “double.”  Based on his psychotic misperception of objective reality—the two men do not look alike—Hermann kills Felix to collect life insurance on himself, which is the novel’s plot.

In contrast, Hermann’s dissociative symptoms have nothing to do with the novel’s plot. They are gratuitous. As previously discussed in this blog, gratuitous multiple personality in a novel probably reflects the author’s own multiple personality. Hermann’s two best-described dissociative symptoms are his dissociative split and his multiple handwritings.

“Dissociation” of “that imp Split”

“I had noticed lately…a certain aberration which, I understand, is not as uncommon as I thought at first among high-strung men in their middle thirties. I am referring to a well-known kind of ‘dissociation’…For example, I would be in bed with Lydia [his wife]…when all at once I would become aware that imp Split had taken over…at the same time [that he was in bed with Lydia] I was standing naked in the middle of the room…the sensation of being in two places at once gave me an extraordinary kick” (1, p. 27). Herman describes this experience of dissociation as being very enjoyable, and he sought to experience it as often as possible.

Twenty-five Handwritings

“I have exactly twenty-five handwritings, the best (i.e., those I use the most readily) being as follows: a round diminutive one with a pleasant plumpness about its curves, so that every word looks like a newly baked fancy-cake; then a fast cursive, sharp and nasty, the scribble of a hunchback in a hurry, with no dearth of abbreviations; then a suicide’s hand, every letter a noose, every comma a trigger; then the one I prize most: big, legible, firm and absolutely impersonal…It was in such a hand that I began writing this book now offered to the reader; soon, however, my pen ran amok: this book is written in all my twenty-five hands mixed together…” (1, p. 80).

The only psychiatric condition with multiple handwritings is multiple personality.

1. Vladimir Nabokov. Despair [1932; revised 1965]. New York, Vintage International, 1989.