[EDNote: In some forthcoming work, probably soonest in a chapter to
appear in Will Norman and Duncan White's Transitional Nabokov
volume, I argue that a version of Intelligent Design was a certain kind
of metaphor for Nabokov, but that one can't actually determine his
belief in it as a metaphysical doctrine. As for "democracy of
ghosts"-- this is the believe that the narrator ascribes to Pnin. I'm
away from home and can't Pnin-point the location just now. Amazingly,
this formulation echoes precisely a passage in Kant's Dreams of a
Spirit-Seer (again can't be precise, but it's toward the end;
apologies if someone else has made this discovery). Deliberately? Who
knows? Kant's text is marvelously ambivalent and even playful. ~SB]
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 09:53:46 -0700
From: vanveen13@SBCGLOBAL.NET
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS: artists don't have to be
consistent...or do
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
JA:
I completely disagree with you that if a reader can't see the coherence
then they're necessarily the ones with the problem, who should just
look even deeper until the contradictions are resolved.
LH: Of course in any work of art there may be inconsistencies and
incoherences; an artist is neither a god nor a prophet and readers
don't have to be worshippers; but we'd better probe the depths of a
text before pronouncing it inconsistent; that's all I meant.
JA: there's no way you can argue that he didn't believe in Intelligent
Design,
LH: Intelligent Design implies one and unique god, one and unique
source of consciousness; moreover, it also implies that everything has
been planned in advance and that, as a consequence, the Future already
exists. Now, VN didn't believe in a pre-determined future, he believed
in surprises! He wrote or said I don't remember where that he prefered
a democracy of spirits to an autocratic god (something like that...
does someone have the exact quotation?)
Vasilyi
Shishkov writes, in the eponymous story: "But religion is boring and
alien to me and relates no more than a chimera to what is to me the
reality of the spirit." (collected stories, penguin, p499)
Laurence Hochard