Dear List,
A past joint effort, in the List, to
understand what was meant by an "inscrutable
sculpture...catalogued as 'Pauline anide'," in
Transparent Things, was without issue: Hugh and Armande share a
femme-de-ménage, named Pauline, with a Belgian sculptor
who lives in the flat above theirs.
Pauline usually leaves their apartment at
night, after nine o' clock, but already, a little before ten, the
Belgian artist starts to drag his "Pauline anide" on-going sculpture,
from the center of his apartment to its nest in a corner.
I was reminded of this passage through our
nymph-butterfly discussion after I selected a quote from
ADA: "Nymphalis danaus Nab., orange-brown, with black-and-white
foretips, mimicking, as its discoverer Professor Nabonidus of
Babylon College, Nebraska..."
In relation to Professor Nabonidus' discovery, we find,
in Victoria N. Alexander's NABOKOV AND INSECT
MIMICRY ( http://www.dactyl.org/directors/vna/papers/InsectMimicry.pdf),
data about Darwin's theories on natural selection. V.A noted that [...] The
monarch and the viceroy resemblance arose, not due to function, but due to the
laws of pattern formation. The viceroy-monarch pattern would appear even if
selection were always random[...] Common forms in nature are known as
"structural attractors." [...] Attractors are notable in environments where
selection is inconstant or random, and forms are not being pushed and pulled
according to fitness. Attractors account for the existence of order when the
natural tendency in nature is to vary randomly. In his comparison of
speciation to the bursting of a bubble, one could say that Nabokov described
something like an attractor basin. He noted that species can vary to a definite
limit before they jump to another altogether different form ("Father's
Butterflies" 218).
The recurrence of the
word "nidus" (nest) was the only verbal( and superficial - a note
to SKB) element that served to connect an unseen "pauline" sculpture
to a mimicry sample among butterflies.
In TT the couple is
comparing "coincidences" related to a tourist guidebook
which links two locations in the Savoie:Condom and Pussy,
thereby introducing the theme of "reproduction" (its avoidance).
In
ADA, the name "Nabonidus" almost (a
second note to SKB) forms a variation of "danaus" (his 50 daughters,
the Danaid brides, killed their 50 cousins during their wedding night and their
punishment, by Artemis, forced them to perform a sterile task, ad
infinitum).
From V.Alexander's article I
deduced that Nabokov was intent on "reproductive fitness related to order in
nature" in contrast to the laws of pattern formation in insect
reproduction*.
Would there be a
special pattern in common here, in TT and Ada, or a description
of events related to a "survival of the fittest" and insect reproduction?
What about this information on "a species can vary to a definite limit
before they jump to another altogether different form" and an
"attractor basin"?
Pupa, apparently (another information from
Dr.Penalva) is related to "pupil" (a student, also... the iris)
....................................................................................................................................
*- "If
natural selection had only one pattern
that it could select for fitness, for example a pattern that looked like the
wing pattern of another insect, then the chance that natural selection would
find it would be relatively low. [...] If we try to imagine how the viceroy
might have come to resemble the monarch through natural selection, the story
does not seem plausible. It did not seem plausible to Nabokov [...] In this
story, the (proto)viceroy populations adapts toward a prespecified goal, the
monarch population, that presumably remains stable, allowing the viceroy to
catch up to it. As Nabokov argued in "Father's Butterflies," this is unlikely
(225). The monarch population would also be undergoing random variation. As many of you know, Nabokov performed the
viceroy-monarch taste test himself and found that both were bitter..." (V.Alexander, in
op.cit)