From Rachel Trousdale:
A question for both
[Blackwell and De La Durantaye]: does Nabokov draws a clear line
between aesthetic/artistic and scientific reasoning or knowledge? And
does he admit to drawing such a line? Both of your papers
suggest a distinction between scientific and aesthetic kinds of
knowledge. If we're treating Nabokov's work as a cohesive whole (rather
than, say, a means of understanding the real world), how are we to
divide his reasoning up into scientific and non-scientific? --I'm
asking from a sympathetic position, but I find the problem tricky,
given how willing Nabokov seems to have been to blur the line between
the two.
BLACKWELL: I think the best answer is that sometimes he does, and
sometimes he doesn't draw such a distinction. He tends in his public
comments to draw attention both to distinctions and to commonalities.
But there is a clear aesthetic element in the idealist scientific
approach of Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev, and of Fyodor, who argue
that there are aesthetic realities in nature that can only be perceived
through aesthetic cognitive processes. Nabokov does something similar,
but much more subtle, in his establishment of the "synthetic form" of
species, which can only be perceived by taking in the range of
variation across a group of subspecies. The proposal in Leland's
paper, that the mimicry arguments were primarily emotional rather than
intellectual, suggests that there are commitments that Konstantin has
that have not become a true part of his intellectual, scientific work.
It is worth pointing out that the speciation theory from "Father's
Butterflies" does not specifically relate to whether or not mimicry
disproves the universality of Natural Selection (and in any case,
Darwin did not insist upon its universal efficacy, just upon its
primacy). I agree with Leland that the mimicry argument seems emotional
and
ad hoc (and everyone should read Dieter Zimmer's marvelous
stories about each case of alleged mimicry cited by Fyodor and
Konstantin). However, I have found in my work that Nabokov believed
that there was, or should be, an essential aesthetic component in
scientific work, and that aesthetic knowledge plays a real role in
envisioning aspects of reality that are not amenable to quantification.
In this sense, I have found that he was very close to Goethe.
DE LA DURANTAYE: I quite agree that the
answer is: no and yes. Not
only does Nabokov not draw a clear line, he inverts the things normally
separated by it. He
writes that there is no science without fancy and no art without fact,
as well as consistently linking intuition and imagination with science,
and observation and precision with art. One
thing this means is that science properly done comports elements of
intuition and imagination and art well done requires observational
gifts. This is thus a corrective to blinkered
science and vague art, but it is also a way of saying that all higher
intellectual activity must combine these elements. So: no. Nevertheless,
he does draw an implicit line in that he does not include his
metaphysical arguments (at least not in anything like full form)
against natural selection in his scientific writing—he reserves them
for Speak, Memory, Strong Opinions and, through the prism of art, The
Gift. This is not surprising as they would be
quite of place in his scientific writings (for reasons already
discussed by Zimmer, Pyle, Boyd, Remington, Coates, Johnson, Gould, and
Stephen—as well as, perhaps, others I am forgetting here).
As for the question of knowledge per se, my
sense is that the answer is no, he does not distinguish between
different types of knowledge (though he does write about different
levels—most pertinently for this question, the degrees of “reality” for
the “ordinary person,” the naturalist and the botanist all observing a
lily in Strong Opinions).