Stan K-B: [commenting on http://blog.loa.org/2011/01/vladimir-nabokovs-butterfly-studies.html ]: "The vindication of Nabokov’s ‘morphological instincts’ is
less surprising to those who have studiied Stephen Blackwell’s The Quill and the
Scalpel! Chapter 1, in particular, devotes many pages to VN the lepidopterist,
and the relative pros and cons of assessing morphological and DNA evidence. Good
science sees them as complementary."
JM: Once again, congratulations to
Stephen Blackwell for the marvellous chapter 1 in "The Quill and the
Scalpel" ("my favourite"), in itself a successful approximation
between art and science. It's very
difficult to write with elegance and precision, as we find in S.B's
book...
This reminds me that, when I
wrote "Like Nabokov, though, I believe in revelatory 'patterns of
coincidence' but I could never make 'heads or tails' from their design," I
left out an important information. "Patterns of coincidence," in Nabokov, run in
a similar direction as Alexey Sklyarenko's comment on "History playing
strange tricks" (to restrick myself to fresh references in the List).
They do not correspond to what Freud presented under "parapraxis"* (as in
the behavioral 'coincidences' that may be found in
the repeteadly misguided slips
which are committed by human agents...for
these may be interpreted and understood!) - unless
Nabokov's playful demiurges suffer under the influence of
their unconscious drives just like us blundering human
beings!
..................................
* a quick reminder, extracted
from the internet (hbuck@lsu.edu), : "Parapraxis" is the very
general term for some switch in an action, behavior, movement, or a substitutive
"slip-of-the-tongue." Freud was one of the first to make use of "parapraxis" in
his analysis of errors, both in non-pathologically involved subjects and
brain-damaged subjects, and as a result Freud was one of the first to consider
the relations between slips-of-the-tongue and paraphasias in aphasic language.
The notion of "parapraxia" is likely to be deeply embedded in evolutionary
theory of human cognitive processing, and is likely to be found in the work of
Herbert Spencer in his development of comparative descriptions of pathology and
normality - of disease and health. The evolution of the mind (as well as the
body) involves the growing appreciation of the similarities of substitive errors
in non-pathological states as well as in pathological states.