The question Vladimir Nabokov did not pose to his students at Cornell University concerning the magic of literature is whether there needs to be an actual wolf in the fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

Out of curiosity I put the question to first-year lit students. Sentimental souls tend to wish away the awful comeuppance in order to save the boy, while those stuck on the moral lesson infallibly point to the necessity of him being eaten by the wolf. If the tale fails to hold without the final arrival of said wolf, this is of a piece with the constitutional makeup of the village itself. That is, the villagers would like to kill the boy for his lies, so they allow him to be killed. There is a wolf because there must be a wolf, even if there is no longer any boy.

Another way to approach the question is by way of measure, although it should be noted that proportionality, especially where ‘divine,’ is no surrogate for the practical governance of populations. Where it is justified in the minds of some by an idealist notion of proportionality, that is only because anything can be justified once a void has been introduced.

To stay within the confines of our present literary concern, how much faith and how much certainty will hold open Nabokov’s gate, that “shimmering go-between” of artifice and actuality? And what accounts for the continued existence of the lesser quantity? Why doesn’t it fall off? The question is informed in part by the definition of measure attributed to Pythagoras: “By measure I mean what will not cause you regret.” This is in the sense of sovereignty of will confined to individual bodily action — drink, food, exercise — rather than with unlivable austerity measures imposed on others. But, again, and speaking of holding two thoughts, if the boy in the story is permitted sovereignty of will, and as much as we may wish to concern ourselves only with the literary motive, it seems the “incidental” moral lesson can’t be avoided. Which is to say, the excesses Nietzsche cautioned against in “The Birth of Tragedy” via the ancient Greek imperatives to “know thyself” and “not too much” would appear to bear out. Taken altogether, the prescriptive against tragic knowledge might be “to know thyself as situated within the domains of individual sovereignty.” This allows for the realization that one would not be able to do otherwise after the fact, a view which does not preclude the burden of individual culpability that always accompanies individual freedom.

To say individual free will is an illusion therefore gives a partial and incomplete view, though it may be the case that, in the world of tragic drama, characters are free to act only in the ways that seal their fate. Outside of that world, if one advances by forgetting themselves a little at a time, drawing upon invention as they go, it certainly would take a village to ensure that freedom doesn’t get construed as something else.

At heart would seem to be a fundamental “stubborn psychic element that withholds understanding (and change),” as Liran Razinsky pointed up in an essay on psychoanalysis and autobiography.

Such an ideal (of self-understanding and transparency) where it is held, is for both psychoanalysis and autobiography only one side of the coin. The other would be a structural impediment, an impediment-in-principle, in realizing this ideal. As far as psychoanalysis is concerned, some of its fundamental terms are names for a stubborn psychic element that withholds understanding (and change) in both analysand and analyst. The repetition compulsion is one name for this element. The drives themselves constitute a blind force immune to meaning. (Journal of Modern Literature; Bloomington, Vol. 44, Issue 1, Fall 2020)

The impediment is my own situated-ness that is “concealed” from me only to the extent that I fail to take notice of it. It could be that I’m overly habituated to it, or it could be due to an accumulation of unmindful or automated behaviors and assumptions that I lean on without noticing them. Whatever may be the case pardoning my actions presently, the other side of Razinsky’s “coin” awaits me. 

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