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Subject: Fw: [NABOKV-L] [OXFORD CONFERENCE] Darwin and Nabokov

From: "jansymello" <jansy@aetern.us>

Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:04:21 -0300

To: <nabokv-L@listserv.ucsb.edu>

On August 05, 2007 4:44 PM, in [NABOKV-L] [THOUGHTS] Darwin and Nabokov -  William Blake's lines about "whose immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry" were mentioned and a query was next addressed to invite S.Blackwell and De La Durantaye to discuss their ideas concerning the possibility that Nabokov had silently asked himself a similar question when he wrote about the detailed mimicry work that far excelled natural selection's demands: had VN drawn a parallel bt. nature as art and art as nature and questioned this same "mysterious  hand"?

 

Rachel Trousdale asked:"does Nabokov draws a clear line between aesthetic/artistic and scientific reasoning or knowledge?[...] Both of your papers suggest a distinction between scientific and aesthetic kinds of knowledge....

S.Blackwell answered that Nabokov [...] "tends in his public comments to draw attention both to distinctions and to commonalities [...] 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." and De la Durantaye wrote:[...] "the answer is:  no and yes.  Not only does Nabokov not draw a clear line, he inverts the things normally separated by it[...] 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.[...] 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)." 

 

Jansy Mello:  We remember that in an interview with Alfred Appel Jr. ( Montreux, 1966) Nabokov blurred the line bt. the aesthetic and scientific in one aspect, namely, the need to work both with facts and with fancy which he thought was as necessary to the scientist as it was to the artist ( "I certainly  welcome  the  free  interchange  of terminology  between  any  branch  of science and any raceme of art. There is no science without  fancy,  and  no  art  without facts."). In the envoy of Lectures on Literature, Nabokov also offered another point in common bt. art and science, now very distinct from the one quoted above, because he departed from his subjective experience of "a tingle" ( Cf."the thrill of pure science is just as pleasurable as the pleasure of pure art. The main thing is to experience that tingle in any development of thought or emotion.")

 

In a letter to E.Wilson, Nabokov mentioned, informally, that whereas science was always open to revision ( changing the perspective from where we look at nature), a work of art was not.  I would like to hear S.B comments about this distinction (science and work of art) and return to my original question of Aug.05, formulated now as: If we could now leave out the pair "science and art" and shift to the pair "nature and art"  would we find other indications about VN's clear-line separation bt. those two? Would we discover more about his concept of "a design" in nature and art? 

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From Leland de la Durantaye:

Shifting to “nature and art” seems to me a fine idea.  Our discussions of “science and art” indeed were much concerned with the more or less fearful symmetry found by science in nature and whether Nabokov felt this symmetry was framed by an immortal hand or not. It seems to me that the second pair ("nature and art") would lead us to ask, first and foremost, whether there was a relation between Nabokov’s conception of nature and his conception of art. Perhaps he saw himself holding a mirror up to nature and expressed this idea at subtle points in his work.  Perhaps not.  It seems to me that another way of posing the question would be:  in what way is Nabokov’s art mimetic? Did he conceive of his artistic designs as reproducing/ recreating the designs he perceived in nature?  This question (or these questions) might, of course, be posed at the level of process rather than object, as in Brian Boyd’s discussions of the process of discovery in Nabokov’s art.

From Stephen Blackwell:



My response to the first proposal is to agree--and what is even more interesting is that in a certain inevitable sense a work of art is a part of nature, and for that reason our understanding of it is just as revisable as any scientific theory.  I think that by drawing attention to the mimetic phase of process as opposed to object, Leland has suggested something crucial.  In his scientific works, Nabokov does not talk about design at all, but he does talk about patterns (including hidden ones) that exist or emerge as a kind of secondary, aesthetic reality expressed in living forms--an aesthetic reality --what he called the "synthetic character" of a species, in "Notes on the Morphology of the Genus Lycaeides (Lycaenidae, Lepidoptera)," Psyche 51 (3-4): 137--sometimes perceived only by the scientist who has studied morphology at the smallest scales.  Aesthetic approaches to deep patterns in nature may have seemed to him extremely rich and potentially productive, but  perhaps it too was far ahead of its time.  Likely there was no economical, feasible way to apply such methods within the time constraints and productivity expectations of the day.  But consider more recent fields like data visualization, which transform numerical or statistical results into shapes or forms that can assist the scientist in interpreting the data's significance.  Or explorations into the role of aesthetics in nature (or even computer programming).  A question that arises for me, while thinking through VN's evident attitudes, is: Why should art be distinct from nature, even when it looks very different from nature?  In both cases, the perception of design is generally a product of the teleological bent of aesthetic judgment, as described by Kant; but the stripping away of the goal (telos) while perceiving pattern appears to attempt to uncover new perceptual models.  I cannot remember where offhand, but VN does in one or two places emphasize the non-teleological quality of evolution.  I think that Konstantin Godunov-Cherdyntsev's fictitious suggestion (in "Father's Butterflies") that evolution ends in the world of physical things and continues in the world of consciousness shows us one of VN's fascinating thought experiments concerning specific analogies between "art" and "nature".  That very same idea was also developed, somewhat differently and of course independently, by Karl Popper.