Tom Rymor
[addressing Dear Nabokoholics] writes: Regarding
VN's published remarks on evolution, and his feeling that there is more to
mimicry than meets the eye, I speculate that being quoted in support of
creationism/intelligent design would have displeased him.[...] Old McNab is in
the Grand Potato story as a designer of butterflies because of his flyleaf
dedications with drawings of fanciful species. And for VN's intelligence,
needless to say. But not to promote intelligent design!
JM: I should have added
Tom's remarks to my example about "to victors, the potatoes". Machado
de Assis' arguments deal with a precocious darwininian proposition
for "the survival of the fittest" and the life-struggle. Machado's
character, Quincas Borba, believes that "peace is destruction; war is
conservation," because his point of view doesn't take sides or stress the
importance of the individual: all that matters is the continuation of "life"
- whatever shape it needs to assume to go on
prospering. Nevertheless,
Nabokov worried about personal survival and the preservation of individual
memories, something that is not at all "darwinesque".
In Tom's sci-fi there is no place for
chance, but enough room for personal memories and individual "designs".
In Nabokov's there is chance (randomness
and coincidence) and there is design (art), but his personal living
memories have no certified survival should they be transposed, as in
Tom's story, from a sub-sub to a sub-prime level - unless
Nabokov manages to believe in an "intelligent
design".