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Re: VN and Freud--reply to J. Friedman
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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.
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