Kurt Johnson: offers "...a link to an article in
Spanish from Roger Vila's institution
http://www.ibe.upf-csic.es/ibe/_pdf/Nabokov.pdf
...Roger Vila appears on this video interview:
http://www.youtube.com/user/rtvcardedeu#p/u/13/Y0EbdsrozV0;
The Vila, Pierce et. al paper is in the headlines/features at the gene
sequencing scientific website in what they call The Daily Scan
http://www.genomeweb.com/newsletter/daily-scan."
Johnson also adds "an interesting and insightful article from
Bioephemera posted today by another molecular biologist discussing whether S. J.
Gould's published assessment of Nabokov would have been changed by these
developments" found at
http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/2011/01/nabokov_was_right_-_so_was_gou.php "
JM:
Nabokov once described reality as "
a very subjective affair.
I can only define it as a kind of gradual
accumulation of information; and as specialization. If we take a
lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural
object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary
person. But it is still more real to a botanist... You can get
nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never
get near enough because reality is an
infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms,
and hence unquenchable, unattainable....So that we
live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects-- that machine, there, for
instance. It's a complete ghost to me-- 1
don't understand a thing about it and, well, it's a mystery to
me..." (1962, Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher
Burstall BBC television interview). He doesn't mention butterflies
here, but a lily, as it's perceived, in successive levels
of specialization, by an ordinary person, a naturalist, a
botanist, moving towards the "reality" of an object.
Nabokov concludes that "we live surrounded by...ghostly objects."
However, for him, butterflies are the truest representatives of
a progressive investigation into "unquenchable
reality," therefore, the must be the less ghostly
among animated beings and things. Inspite of this, in his novels,
butterflies often appear as ghostly entities, instruments of
enchantment or emblematic of a spiritual quest.Perhaps, to the trained eyes
of a lepidopterologist. his novels may also reveal other layers and levels
of "butterfly reality," or recurrent "false-bottoms" (as in "Ada," when a
depiction of a specimen in a triptych painted by J. Bosch is criticized for
its inverted artificiality).
In the article just posted to the Nab-L, Veríssimo muses
about how "artistically caged" we live, for we are dependent of words
and prision-bound by their invisible bars. He quotes King Salomon
directly (not the lilies of the fields *): "It is the glory
of God to conceal a thing: but the honor of kings is to search out a
matter." (Proverbs 25:2) to conclude that God's true glory can only be
discerned after language reaches its limits and all words fail
- as it's bound to happen to every writer, even those of Clarice
Lispector's and Vladimir Nabokov's stature and talents.
Nabokov, at his most playful, often presented himself as "God"
creating a fictional world, a mir-age (or as a rival, who
could teach him a thing or two, even about butterflies). From all the
reports about his recent "vindication" I suppose one
could safely crown him King, were it not for the fact that the
achievements in science always rely on
an efficient team-work. "Monarchs" are milkweed
butterflies...
...........................
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they
neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these." (Matt. 6:28-29). Luiz Fernando's father,
Erico Veríssimo, wrote
"Olhai os Lírios do Campo (
Consider the
Lilies of the Field, Macmillan, 1948). "Erico Verissimo was presented
for the first time in the English language in 1943, when his second novel was
translated by L.C. Kaplan and published by Macmillan in New York.
Crossroads is often taken to represent the author's condemnation of the
hypocrisy of the little bourgeois." His "technique of fragmentation points
to the general question of influence on Verissimo's fiction, and beyond that to
the wider issue of its place in the development of Brazilian modernism. The debt
to Aldous Huxley and John Dos Passos was fully evident and in his memories
Verissimo admitted the influence of Huxley's counterpoint technique...Verissimo
was fluent in French" and perhaps, "because he disliked the experiments with
language of the modern French novel, his attention was caught by the structural
innovations of the English novelists." (
http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Marco_Bomfoco
). Luiz Fernando is a cartoonist, a journalist and a writer who
often quotes and mentions Nabokov in his writing.