Yesterday we got various quotes from V.Nabokov's "Despair" and I isolated two, because I wanted to compare them with something I posted on the same day. Both mention certain “similarities” that arise between unconnected objects. The comparison itself between the two groups of sentences suggests another type of similarity. I hope that my bringing them up once again to set them side by side will provoke the same “ripply-grayish” surprise as the one I felt by the germinative power of words, similes, metaphors…
1. "… The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living. Analyze the impression you get from two faces that are too much alike, and you will find that you are thinking of two copies cast in the same mold, or two impressions of the same seal, or two reproductions of the same negative,--in a word, of some manufacturing process or other. This deflection of life towards the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter." (Chapter Four);
2. "...It even seems to me sometimes that my basic theme, the resemblance between two persons, has a profound allegorical meaning. This remarkable physical likeness probably appealed to me (subconsciously!) as the promise of that ideal sameness which is to unite people in the classless society of the future…" (Chapter Nine)
And, from “Father’s Butterflies”:
“A crawling root, the extremity of a tropical creeper vivified by the wind, turned into a snake solely because nature, noticing movement, wished to reproduce it, as a child amused by the flight of a forest leaf picks it up and tosses it back up […] At times nature found it amusing, or artistically valid, to retain, near a selected species, an elegant corollary, generically quite unrelated, but simply picked up from the ground simultaneously back in the times when a dragonfly might simultaneously be a butterfly. Or else it pained nature to disjoin two of its initial creations, which, despite the abyss of differences separating them, nonetheless modulated between one another. From one angle, you see a lichen; from another, an inchworm moth. Whatever subsequent alterations this plant and this insect underwent, the ripply-grayish something that, in the depths of ages, corresponded to them was conserved by nature (which had not given up mythogenesis for the sake of scientific system, but had cunningly united them)...” http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/04/nabokov1.htm
In this chapter, V. Nabokov discusses the concept of “species” and describes a time when “the specimen reigned supreme” contending that most of the observable similarities cannot be linked to evolution:
“However, in that most remote of times that we must now imagine, none of this had yet been conceived. Nature was ignorant of genera and species; the specimen reigned supreme. As a crude illustration of the position it occupied one might say that a squirrel that mated with a goose would give birth to a giraffe, a sturgeon, and a garden spider[…] numerous accumulated observations had persuaded [my father], in the first place, of the absolute impossibility that given similarities were attained through evolution, through the gradual accumulation of resemblance, or through the fixation of magical mutations (the very thing that caused him to reexamine and reject the more "logical" theory of the origin of species); and, secondly, of the utter uselessness (which incidentally disproves the obtuse lex parsimoniae of the old-time naturalists) of such resplendent masks for the well-being of mimetic forms...”
Not content with that, I made an attempt to retrieve a controversial idea proposed by Ernst Gombrich in his book “Art and Illusion” to explore the artistic point of view related to “individuals,” “schools” and “concepts,” from what I could still recollect from his writings. I mean that, for Gombrich, the sculpted or painted panels by the ancient Egyptian artists represented strangers and slaves frontally whereas Pharaohs and their entourage were shown in profile because the latter were immortal and could exhibit no transient individual traits. Unfortunately, my google search was not very successful. What I could recuperate were the opening lines of his “The Story of Art”: "There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists." [http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Fl-Ka/Gombrich-Ernst-Hans-Josef.html#ixzz3WplEuc7y ]
(and to think that this line of associations started with Lake’s “comparison” (‘Pnin’) between Salvador Dali and Norman Rockwell!)