I do not deny that some scientists see trees but not forests, thereby functioning as trustworthy experts of meticulous detail, but showing little interest or skill in handling more general, theoretical questions. I also do not deny that Nabokov’s work on butterfly systematics falls under this rubric. But I strenuously reject the argument that Nabokov’s attention to descriptive particulars, or his cherishing of intricate factuality, precluded strength in theory on principle. I do not understand Nabokov’s psyche or his ontogeny well enough to speculate about his conservative approach to theoretical questions, or his disinclination to grapple with general issues in evolutionary biology. We can only, I suspect, intone some clichés about the world’s breadth (including the domain of science), and about the legitimate places contained therein for people with widely divergent sets of skills.
I therefore strongly reject any attempt to characterize Nabokov as a laboratory drudge for his love of detail and his lack of attention to theoretical issues. The science of taxonomy has always honored, without condescension, professionals who develop Nabokov’s dedication to the details of a particular group, and who establish the skills and “good eye” to forge order from nature’s mire of confusing particulars. Yes, to be frank, if Nabokov had pursued only butterfly taxonomy as a complete career, he would now be highly respected in very limited professional circles, but not at all renowned in the world at large. But do we not honor the dedicated professional who achieves maximal excellence in an admittedly restricted domain of notoriety or power? After all, if Macbeth had been content to remain Thane of Cawdor—a perfectly respectable job—think of the lives and grief that would thus have been spared. But, of course, we would then have to lament a lost play. So let us celebrate Nabokov’s excellence in natural history, and let us also rejoice that he could use the same mental skills and inclinations to follow another form of bliss.
An Epilogue on Science and Literature
Most intellectuals favor a dialogue between professionals in science and the arts. But we also assume that these two subjects stand as polar opposites in the domain of learning, and that diplomatic contact for understanding between adversaries sets the basic context for such a dialogue. At best, we hope to dissipate stereotypes and to become friends (or at least neutrals), able to put aside our genuine differences for temporary bonding in the practical service of a few broader issues demanding joint action by all educated folk.
A set of stereotypes still rules perceptions of “otherness” in these two domains—images based on little more than ignorance and parochial fear, but powerful nonetheless. Scientists are soulless dial-twirlers; artists are arrogant, illogical, self-absorbed blowhards. Dialogue remains a good idea, but the two fields, and the personalities attracted to them, remain truly and deeply different.
I do not wish to forge a false union in an artificial love feast. The two domains differ, truly and distinctly, in their chosen subject matter and established modes of validation. The magisterium (teaching authority) of science extends over the factual status of the natural world, and to the development of theories proposed to explain why these facts, and not others, characterize our universe. The magisteria of the arts and humanities treat ethical and aesthetic questions about morality, style, and beauty. Since the facts of nature cannot, in logic or principle, yield ethical or aesthetic conclusions, the domains must remain formally distinct on these criteria.
But many of us who labor in both domains (if only as an amateur in one) strongly feel that an overarching mental unity builds a deeper similarity than disparate subject matter can divide. Human creativity seems to work much as a coordinated and complex piece, whatever the different emphases demanded by disparate subjects—and we will miss the underlying commonality if we only stress the distinctions of external subjects and ignore the unities of internal procedure. If we do not recognize the common concerns and characteristics of all creative human activity, we will fail to grasp several important aspects of intellectual excellence—including the necessary interplay of imagination and observation (theory and empirics) as an intellectual theme, and the confluence of beauty and factuality as a psychological theme—because one field or the other traditionally downplays one side of a requisite duality.
Moreover, we must use the method of “replication with difference” if we wish to study and understand the human quintessence behind our varying activities. I cannot imagine a better test case for extracting the universals of human creativity than the study of deep similarities in intellectual procedure between the arts and sciences.
No one grasped the extent of this underlying unity better than Vladimir Nabokov, who worked with different excellences as a complete professional in both domains. Nabokov often insisted that his literary and entomological pursuits shared a common mental and psychological ground. In Ada, while invoking a common anagram for “insect,” one of Nabokov’s characters beautifully expresses the oneness of creative impulse and the pervasive beauty of chosen subject matter: “‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously—c’est le mot—art and science meet in an insect.’ ”
Returning to his central theme of aesthetic beauty in both the external existence and our internal knowledge of scientific detail, Nabokov wrote in 1959 (quoted in Zimmer, page 33): “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” When Nabokov spoke of “the precision of poetry in taxonomic description”—no doubt with conscious intent to dissipate a paradox that leads most people to regard art and science as inexorably distinct and opposed—he used his literary skills in the service of generosity (a high, if underappreciated, virtue underlying all attempts to unify warring camps). He thus sought to explicate the common ground of his two professional worlds, and to illustrate the inevitably paired components of any integrated view that could merit the label of our oldest and fondest dream of fulfillment—the biblical ideal of “wisdom.” Thus, in a 1966 interview, Nabokov broke the boundaries of art and science by stating that the most precious desideratum of each domain must also characterize any excellence in the other—for, after all, truth is beauty, and beauty truth. I could not devise a more fitting title for this essay, and I can imagine no better ending for this text:
The tactile delights of precise delineation, the silent paradise of the camera lucida, and the precision of poetry in taxonomic description represent the artistic side of the thrill which accumulation of new knowledge, absolutely useless to the layman, gives its first begetter. . . . There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.
Bibliography
Boyd, B. 1990. Valdimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Gould, S. J. 1983. The Hardening of the Modern Synthesis. In Marjorie Greene, ed., Dimensions of Darwinism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, K., G. W. Whitaker, and Z. Balint. 1996. Nabokov as lepidopterist: An informed appraisal. Nabokov Studies. Volume 3, 123–44.
Karges, J. 1985. Nabokov’s Lepidoptera: Genres and Genera. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis.
Kinsey, A. C., W. B. Pomeroy, and C. E. Martin. 1948. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders.
Provine, W. 1986. Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Remington, C. R. 1990. Lepidoptera studies. In the Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, 274–82.
Robson, G. C., and O. W. Richards. 1936. The Variation of Animals in Nature. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Zaleski, P., 1986, Nabokov’s blue period. Harvard Magazine, July–August, 34–38.
Zimmer, D. E. 1998. A Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths. Hamburg.
3
Jim Bowie’s Letter and Bill Buckner’s Legs
CHARLIE CROKER, FORMER FOOTBALL HERO OF GEORGIA Tech and recently bankrupted builder of the new Atlanta—a world of schlock and soulless office
towers, now largely unoccupied and hemorrhaging money—seeks inspiration, as his world disintegrates, from the one item of culture that stirs his limited inner self: a painting, originally done to illustrate a children’s book (“the only book Charlie could remember his father and mother ever possessing”), by N. C. Wyeth of “Jim Bowie rising up from his deathbed to fight the Mexicans at the Alamo.” On “one of the happiest days of his entire life,” Charlie spent $190,000 at a Sotheby’s auction to buy this archetypal scene for a man of action. He then mounted his treasure in the ultimate shrine for successful men of our age—above the ornate desk on his private jet.
Tom Wolfe describes how his prototype for redneck moguls (in his novel A Man in Full) draws strength from his inspirational painting:
And so now, as the aircraft roared and strained to gain altitude, Charlie concentrated on the painting of Jim Bowie . . .as he had so many times before. . . . Bowie, who was already dying, lay on a bed. . . . He had propped himself up on one elbow. With his other hand he was brandishing his famous Bowie knife at a bunch of Mexican soldiers. . . . It was the way Bowie’s big neck and his jaws jutted out towards the Mexicans and the way his eyes blazed defiant to the end, that made it a great painting. Never say die, even when you’re dying, was what that painting said. . . .He stared at the indomitable Bowie and waited for an infusion of courage.
Nations need heroes, and Jim Bowie did die in action at the Alamo, along with Davy Crockett and about 180 fighters for Texian independence (using the i then included in the name), under the command of William B. Travis, an articulate twenty-six-year-old lawyer with a lust for martyrdom combined with a fearlessness that should not be disparaged, whatever one may think of his judgment. In fact, I have no desire to question Bowie’s legitimate status as a hero at the Alamo at all. But I do wish to explicate his virtues by debunking the legend portrayed in Charlie Croker’s painting, and by suggesting that our admiration should flow for quite different reasons that have never been hidden, but that the legend leads us to disregard.
The debunking of canonical legends ranks as a favorite intellectual sport for all the usual and ever-so-human reasons of one-upmanship, aggressivity within a community that denies itself the old-fashioned expression of genuine fisticuffs, and the simple pleasure of getting details right. But such debunking also serves a vital scholarly purpose at the highest level of identifying and correcting some of the most serious pitfalls in human reasoning. I make this somewhat grandiose claim for the following reason:
The vertebrate brain seems to operate as a device tuned to the recognition of patterns. When evolution grafted consciousness in human form upon this organ in a single species, the old inherent search for patterns developed into a propensity for organizing these patterns as stories, and then for explaining the surrounding world in terms of the narratives expressed in such tales. For universal reasons that probably transcend the cultural particulars of individual groups, humans tend to construct their stories along a limited number of themes and pathways, favored because they grant both useful sense and satisfying meaning to the confusion (and often to the tragedy) of life in our complex surrounding world.
Stories, in other words, only “go” in a limited number of strongly preferred ways, with the two deepest requirements invoking, first, a theme of directionality (linked events proceeding in an ordered sequence for definable reasons, and not as an aimless wandering—back, forth, and sideways—to nowhere); and, second, a sense of motivation, or definite reasons propelling the sequence (whether we judge the outcomes good or bad). These motivations will be rooted directly in human purposes for stories involving our own species. But tales about nonconscious creatures or inanimate objects must also provide a surrogate for valor (or dishonorable intent for dystopian tales)—as in the virtue of evolutionary principles that dictate the increasing general complexity of life, or the lamentable inexorability of thermodynamics in guaranteeing the eventual burnout of the sun. In summary, and at the risk of oversimplification, we like to explain pattern in terms of directionality, and causation in terms of valor. The two central and essential components of any narrative—pattern and cause—therefore fall under the biasing rubric of our mental preferences.
I will refer to the small set of primal tales based upon these deep requirements as “canonical stories.” Our strong propensity for expressing all histories, be they human, organic, or cosmic, in terms of canonical stories would not entail such enormous problems for science—but might be viewed, instead, as simply humorous in exposing the foibles of Homo sapiens—if two properties of mind and matter didn’t promote a potentially harmless idiosyncrasy into a pervasive bias actively derailing our hopes for understanding events that unfold in time. (The explanation of temporal sequences defines the primary task of a large subset among our scientific disciplines—the so-called “historical sciences” of geology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, and many others. Thus, if the lure of “canonical stories” blights our general understanding of historical sequences, much of what we call “science” labors under a mighty impediment.)
As for matter, many patterns and sequences in our complex world owe their apparent order to the luck of the draw within random systems. We flip five heads in a row once every thirty-two sequences on average. Stars clump into patterns in the sky because they are distributed effectively at random (within constraints imposed by the general shape of our Milky Way galaxy) with respect to the earth’s position in space. An absolutely even spacing of stars, yielding no perceivable clumps at all, would require some fairly fancy, and obviously nonexistent, rules of deterministic order. Thus, if our minds obey an almost irresistible urge to detect patterns, and then to explain these patterns in the causal terms of a few canonical stories, our quest to understand the sources (often random) of order will be stymied.
As for mind, even when we can attribute a pattern to conventional nonrandom reasons, we often fail to apprehend both the richness and the nature of those causes because the lure of canonical stories leads us to entertain only a small subset among legitimate hypotheses for explaining the recorded events. Even worse, since we cannot observe everything in the blooming and buzzing confusion of the world’s surrounding richness, the organizing power of canonical stories leads us to ignore important facts readily within our potential sight, and to twist or misread the information that we do manage to record. In other words, and to summarize my principal theme in a phrase, canonical stories predictably “drive” facts into definite and distorted pathways that validate the outlines and necessary components of these archetypal tales. We therefore fail to note important items in plain sight, while we misread other facts by forcing them into preset mental channels, even when we retain a buried memory of actual events.
This essay illustrates how canonical stories have predictably relegated crucial information to misconstruction or invisibility in two great folk tales of American history: Bowie’s letter and Buckner’s legs, as oddly (if euphoniously) combined in my title. I will then extend the general message to argue that the allure of canonical stories acts as the greatest impediment to better understanding throughout the realm of historical science—one of the largest and most important domains of human intellectual activity.
Jim Bowie’s Letter
How the canonical story of “all the brothers were valiant, and all the sisters virtuous” has hidden a vital document in plain sight. (This familiar quotation first appears on the tomb of the Duchess of Newcastle, who died in 1673 and now lies in Westminster Abbey.)
The Alamo of San Antonio, Texas, was not designed as a fortress, but as a mission church built by eighteenth-century Spaniards. Today the Alamo houses exhibits and artifacts, most recalling the death of all Texian defenders in General Santa Anna’s assault, with a tenfold advantage in troops and after nearly two weeks of siege, on March 6, 1836. This defeat and martyrdom electrified the Texian cause, which triumphed less than two months later when Sam Houston’s men captured Santa Anna at the Battle of San Ja
cinto on April 21, and then forced the Mexican general to barter Texas for his life, his liberty, and the return of his opium bottle.
The Alamo’s exhibits, established and maintained by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and therefore no doubt more partisan than the usual (and, to my mind, generally admirable) fare that the National Park Service provides in such venues, tells the traditional tale, as I shall do here. (Mexican sources, no doubt, purvey a different but equally traditional account from another perspective.) I shall focus on the relationship of Bowie and Travis, for my skepticism about the canonical story focuses on a fascinating letter, written by Bowie and prominently displayed in the Alamo, but strangely disregarded to the point of invisibility in the official presentation.
In December 1835, San Antonio had been captured by Texian forces in fierce fighting with Mexican troops under General Cos. On January 17, 1836, Sam Houston ordered Jim Bowie and some thirty men to enter San Antonio, destroy the Alamo, and withdraw the Texian forces to more defendable ground. But Bowie, after surveying the situation, disagreed for both strategic and symbolic reasons, and decided to fortify the Alamo instead. The arrival, on February 3, of thirty additional men under the command of William B. Travis strengthened Bowie’s decision.
An illustration of the conventional myth about Jim Bowie’s death at the Alamo. Although bedridden and dying, Bowie still manages to kill several Mexican soldiers before his inevitable defeat.
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