JM: I enjoyed Aisenberg's well-written arguments,
particularly the point concerning how Nabokov's constructions
about an after-life are related to a first-person narrator, also
its variants in "Invitation" and "BS." Aisenberg draws a parallel
between "writers construct worlds" and the hypothesis of an "intelligent design"
in nature, which he sees as the result of a deliberate
strategy by Nabokov, whereas I prefer to connect it to a particular kind of
" imitative playfulness" on his part.
I heartilly agree with him that it's always "we" who have to
piece information together and give it significance, because we
cannot expect to find an "objective confirmation" of the
spiritual world in a novel. However, in "Speak, Memory" and in his
lepidopterological writings about mimetism, Nabokov does reveal some
of his beliefs. They are outlined in his novels or
they constitute their basic pattern (perhaps this is what JA has indicated
above?) but, at all times, Nabokov shuns a didactic katydid's
explicitation in Art (he'll write about something "nonutilitarian in a game
of intricate enchantment and deception"*).As I see it,
whether or not Nabokov adopts some of the ID's arguments
about design in the natural world, against Darwin's proposition
of "evolution by natural selection" (the Origin of Species
in 1859), his "God" is not an established divinity, as the biblical
Jeovah: "...the highest enjoyment of timelessness -
in a landscape selected at random - is when I stand among rare butterflies
and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something
else, which is hard to explain...A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern
- to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky
mortal."( Speak Memory, Vintage,139) Nabokov will always
playfully alternate their operations in his novels and the reader shall know
whom to be grateful for his thrills...
JA's conclusion about "living with the exciting uncertainties of
existence..." is confirmed by Nabokov's commentary in
SO (44-45): "The greater one's
science, the deeper the sense of mystery. ..We shall never know the origins of
life, or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of
nature, or the nature of thought."
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* - In SM Nabokov observes that “Natural
selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence
of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory
of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of
mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of
appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought
in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and
deception.".
Websters online cites Nabokov on "mimicry" (but on a different point
from "mimetic sublety"): "It is widely accepted that mimicry evolves as a
positive adaptation; that is, the mimic gains fitness via convergent evolution
which results in resemblance to another species, though there are a few who have
suggested that evolution is non-adaptive or merely a result of structural
similarities. The lepidopterist (and sometime author) Vladimir Nabokov argued
that much of insect mimicry, including the Viceroy/Monarch mimicry, resulted
from the fact that coloration patterns in both species simply had a common
structural basis, and thus the tendency for convergence by chance was high.
However, this very example provides evidence precisely to the contrary, as the
viceroy's color pattern is completely unlike any of the species to which it is
closely related, and the viceroy itself has three color forms, each adapted to
resemble a different species of Danaus."
www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/mimicry
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Joseph Aisenberg: And again, I think one of the more
interesting problems with Nabokov the fictionist's constructions of "shades" of
the after-life is that they are almost always hung around a first-person
narrator. Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister are pretty much the only
ones of the novels that use outside narration to suggest that
writers-construct-worlds-therefore-the-world-might-have-been-constructed-by-something-analogous-to-a-writer...Shade
theorizes that light might be an expression of immortal souls, a charming idea
until he makes a qualitative distinction between the amount of light that
Shakespeare would generate, a whole city, versus a lesser poet, maybe a street
lamp I think...Despite what Nabokov experienced during his childhood illness,
beautifully discussed in Speak Memory and transformed with equal brilliance in
The Gift, he always wistfully withholds any objective straight forward
confirmation--we reach out for what we want but it's always something WE have to
find, WE have to piece together; WE have to give it significance...I think N's
writing about living with the exciting uncertainties of existence, working with
them, trying triumph over them and not step on everything else in the process.
Meaning, in short, that I agree with Twiggs
take.