J.A to JM.: [What strikes me in this debate is the fact that Man was not
considered a predator! A dangerous one, under all accounts, whose
powers of appreciation are equal to his powers of deception...] That
is a very excellent, A+++++ point ;
JA to
BB: That he did not like the usual
idea of God, I understood[...]what he saw through mist was something I took to
be some sort of vaguely Easterny Universal spirit [...] only detected by certain
signs in nature [...] But N. seems to keep his exact views so separated and
unarticulated that I've never been wholy sure what he did believe. I'm honestly
surprised to find out he accepted Darwin as a scientist of genius. Is there any
of the published work in English where he talks about him in this
light?
BB to JA: See, for
instance, Nabokov's Butterflies, p. 566, interview by Jacob Bronowski, 1963:
Bronowski: Do you think scientists are as deeply and personally involved in
their work as the novelist is? Nabokov: I
think it all depends on what scientists or novelists you have in view. Darwin or
Gauss were as deeply and rapturously involved in their work as Browning or
Joyce. On the other hand, we have in both camps those crowds of imitators, those
technicians and administrators and career boys who cannot really be called
scientists and artists.
JM: As BB reminds us by quoting Nabokov, both real scientists and real
novelists are equally "rapturously involved in their
work" and yet, this might be as far as their offspring can be
compared. Scientific reports obey standards that are obviously
disregarded in fictional writings.For a pragmatist, probably VN's scientific
texts shall correctly inform aboyt his exact views about
nature as it is viewd by an "observer" (sometimes a human,
sometimes an extraneous godly eye). For those more mystically
inclined, VN's novels may provide enough inexact
hints, mainly because his views are, indeed, "separated and
unarticulated." qua logical or common-sense vocabulary. In between we find VN's
direct answers to his interviwers, such as those presented in S.O. - these
statements are hard to place.
Should we imagine a scientist, that is also a
novelist, under the guise of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde could we understand one
without the other, inspite of their split? Take something else, "Pale Fire"
for eg. (ponder the egg).
Can we understand Shade's poem without Kinbote's
delirious commentary, foreword and the index if we want to read the
novel as a whole?
If we agree that this is impossible to achieve
without grave distortions or further splits, then we must discover what tools we
must use. They cannot be either a scientist's nor a novelist's: perhaps they are
waiting to be invented.