Stalking Nabokov

by Brian Boyd

  Think how different this is from our experience as readers of Tolstoy characters on trains. In Tolstoy we seem to enter immediately into the minds and experience of the focal characters because he conjures up all the relevant elements of the situation, the physical presence, the personalities of those involved, the interactions between them, and relevant information about their past relations. Our imaginations seem contained entirely within the scene: we feel ourselves within the space the characters occupy. But Nabokov prefers to evoke and exercise our recognition of the manifold awareness of consciousness: the different Vans here, character now, character slightly later, narrator much later, felt from inside or seen from outside; the different appeals to recognize what we share and what holds us at a distance from Van; and the awareness, on rereading, of the appeal to first-time readers and to our accumulated knowledge of the rest of the book on rereading or our awareness of specific puzzles we can now recognize as puzzles because we have seen the solution. Tolstoy also builds up scenes gradually, coordinating characters’ actions and perceptions. Nabokov speeds us into his railroad scene without warning, without explicitness (only “first-class compartment,” “skimming,” and “passenger” specify the situation), without lingering (the scene ends here), and without spelling out the when or where until we infer them at the beginning of the next chapter. He has confidence in our pleasure in imagination, inference, and orientation.

  Clinical, comparative, developmental, evolutionary, and social psychology over the past thirty years have devoted a great deal of attention to theory of mind and to metarepresentation.11 Theory of mind is our capacity to understand other minds, or our own, in terms of desires, intentions, and beliefs, and metarepresentation, our capacity to understand representations as representations, including the representations other minds may have of a scene. While some intelligent social animals appear to understand others of their kind in terms of desires and intentions, only humans have a clear understanding of others in terms of what others believe and factor these beliefs effortlessly into their inferential systems. By adolescence, we can readily understand four degrees of intentionality: A’s thoughts about B’s thoughts about C’s thoughts about D’s. As adults, we start to make errors with but can still manage five or six degrees: our thoughts as rereaders, say, about our thoughts as first-time readers about Nabokov’s thoughts about Van the narrator’s thoughts about Van’s thoughts at Ardis about Van’s thoughts on the train to Ardis.

  Nabokov finds fascinating the multilevel awareness of the mind and worked to develop it in himself and in his readers and rereaders—as he discusses most explicitly through Fyodor in The Gift. Fyodor deliberately sets himself exercises of observing, transforming, recollecting, and imagining through the eyes of others. Frustrated at earning his keep by foreign- language instruction, he thinks: “What he should be really teaching was the mysterious thing which he alone—out of ten thousand, a hundred thousand, perhaps even a million men—knew how to teach: for example— multilevel thinking”—which he then goes on to define (Gift 176). The very idea of training the brain in this way, as Fyodor does for himself, as he imagines teaching others, as he learns to do for his readers, as Nabokov learned over many years to do for his readers, fits with neuroscience’s recent understanding of brain plasticity, the degree to which the brain can be retrained, fine-tuned, redeployed.12

  Play has been nature’s main way of making the most of brain plasticity. It fine-tunes animals in key behaviors like flight and fight—hence the evolved pleasure animals take in chasing and frisking and in rough-and-tumble fighting, nature’s way of ensuring they’ll engage in this training again and again. In On the Origin of Stories I look at art as a development of play, and as a way of fine-tuning minds in particular cognitive modes that matter to us: in the case of fiction, our expertise in social cognition, in theory of mind, in perspective taking, holding multiple perspectives in mind at once. As I made that case, I was not thinking of Nabokov, but he takes this kind of training of the mind—perception, cognition, emotion, memory, and imagination— more seriously, and more playfully, than any other writer.

  I have used one brief and superficially straightforward example from Ada to show how much psychological work we naturally do when we read fiction, especially when we read Nabokov’s fiction, and how much light psychology can now throw on what we do naturally when we read fiction. Literature’s aims differ considerably from those of research psychology. Nevertheless literature draws on human intuitive psychology (itself also a subject in recent psychology) and exercises our psychological capacities. Literature aims to understand human minds only to the degree it seeks to move human minds. It may move readers’ minds, in part, by showing with new accuracy or vividness, or at least with fresh particulars, how fictional minds move and by showing in new ways how freely readers’ minds can move, given the right prompts. Psychology, too, wants to understand minds, both simply for the satisfaction of knowing and also in order to make the most of minds, to limit mental damage or to extend mental benefits. It uses the experimental method. We can see fictions, too, as thought experiments, experiments about how characters feel, think, and behave and about how readers feel, think, and behave and how they can learn to think more imaginatively, feel more sympathetically, act more sensitively.13 Fictions are experiments whose results will not be systematically collected and peer reviewed—and then perhaps read by a few psychologists—but will be felt vividly by a wide range of readers.

  Nabokov thinks that at their best art and science meet on a high ridge. Psychology, after wandering along wrong paths to Freud Falls or the Behaviorist Barrens, has just emerged onto the ridge. Nabokov may have doubted psychology could crest this particular ridge, but I think he has met science there.

  NABOKOV AND THE ORIGINS AND ENDS OF STORIES

  11. Stacks of Stories, Stories of Stacks

  In 2010 I gave the Frederic Alden Warren Lecture at Trinity College, University of Toronto. Its regular theme, Literature/Libraries/Culture, prompted me to consider stories and other aspects of culture in relation to the accumulation, preservation, and innovation epitomized in library holdings. I decided to explore also, on the one hand, Nabokov’s relation to evolution and to the ideas in my evolutionary account of stories, and, on the other, the ways libraries feature in his fiction.

  Others have written books on Nabokov and trains, cars, and planes (Leving), Nabokov and geography (Manolescu); Nabokov and painting (De Vries et al.; Shapiro); Nabokov and cinema (Appel; Wyllie); Nabokov and science (Blackwell); Nabokov and translation (Grayson); Nabokov and Berlin (Zimmer); Nabokov and Central Asian exploration (Zimmer); Nabokov and politics (Rampton); Nabokov and Freud (Green); and Nabokov and, of course, butterflies (Zimmer; Johnson and Coates); and much else. Books on Nabokov and food or humor or play or symbols or liberalism have been proposed or written, and books on Nabokov and birds or flowers or trees or light or gesture or personality disorders would seem among the many that could be written. A whole volume on Nabokov and libraries, though, might push too far. Or would it?

  Once I accepted the invitation to speak here at Trinity College, I was asked for a title and an abstract based on my recent work on stories. Work? I happened to feel like play. Playing with the occasion and topic of the lectures, I added libraries to my literature and culture game, to produce what seemed an appealing abstract:

  What can the long perspective of evolution suggest about the past and future of stories—and multi-story library stacks? How do stories—and the libraries that stack up more stories than any mind can hold— preserve and generate knowledge and imagination? How will stories and libraries stack up in the digital age?

  This sounds rather fun, but it’s not quite what transpired. If you put some bite into abstracts written in advance they have a nasty habit of biting back.

  Tonight, returning to the University of Toronto, I want to combine my new work and my old: the new, evolution and literature, and the old, my Nabokov work, which reached orbit when I c
ame here. But I also wanted to keep to the occasion: libraries, but seen within the trajectory of evolution and the work of Nabokov. This may only have produced a grotesque hybrid, like the mouse with a human ear growing in its back.

  The highlight of the coursework in my first two years of the Ph.D. was taking Professor Patricia Brückmann’s Scriblerus class. A Circe of a scholar, Pat bewitched us into becoming allusion bloodhounds: we could spend weeks on Swift’s A Tale of a Tub or Gulliver’s Travels without getting past the allusions on the title pages. I had an even better next two and a half years working on my dissertation under Pat, exploring Nabokov’s longest and most complex novel, Ada, in the context of all his other work and his styles, strategies, and thought. For more than a year I worked day after day in the Reference Room of the Robarts Library sniffing through the allusions and the arcana in Ada, line by line, discovery by discovery. Oddly enough, I’m still annotating Ada, now in journal form and online, with hypertext links between text, notes, illustrations, and motifs, and in this form I’m only a third of the way through the novel but already up to 900 pages of annotations. All happy scholars, as Vladimir Tolstoy might have said, are mad in their own way.

  Now I use Google, although my main source for AdaOnline is still the penciled marginalia on the copy of Ada I would take every day to the Robarts Reference Room along with my boxes of index cards. I was young and hairy, not fifty-plus and ideally bald and endearing like Nabokov’s Professor Pnin, but Nabokov’s description of Pnin researching at the Waindell University Library wonderfully evokes aspects of researching in the days before computers ousted index cards:

  He then returned to his carrell for his own research.

  He contemplated writing a Petite Histoire of Russian culture, in which a choice of Russian Curiosities, Customs, Literary Anecdotes, and so forth would be presented in such a way as to reflect in miniature la Grande Histoire—Major Concatenations of Events. He was still at the blissful stage of collecting his material; and many good young people considered it a treat and an honor to see Pnin pull out a catalogue drawer from the comprehensive bosom of a card cabinet and take it, like a big nut, to a secluded corner and there make a quiet mental meal of it, now moving his lips in soundless comment, critical, satisfied, perplexed, and now lifting his rudimentary eyebrows and forgetting them there, left high upon his spacious brow where they remained long after all trace of displeasure or doubt had gone. He was lucky to be at Waindell. Sometime in the nineties the eminent bibliophile and Slavist John Thurston Todd (his bearded bust presided over the drinking fountain), had visited hospitable Russia, and after his death the books he had amassed there quietly chuted into a remote stack. Wearing rubber gloves so as to avoid being stung by the amerikanski electricity in the metal of the shelving, Pnin would go to those books and gloat over them: obscure magazines of the Roaring Sixties in marbled boards; century-old historical monographs, their somnolent pages foxed with fungus spots; Russian classics in horrible and pathetic cameo bindings, whose molded profiles of poets reminded dewy-eyed Timofey of his boyhood, when he could idly palpate on the book cover Pushkin’s slightly chafed side whisker or Zhukovski’s smudgy nose.

  (Pnin 76–77)

  There will be a kind of pas de deux on the library floor between Nabokov and evolution throughout this talk, perhaps ending with them, or me, falling between two stools.

  In the 1940s Nabokov was a scientist, a world-class lepidopterist, the authority on a small family of butterflies, the Blues. He happily researched the evolution of speciation within the Blues, and the evolution of their main diagnostic characteristics, their genitalia and their wing markings. But while he accepted evolution, as he wrote, “as a modal formula” (LL 378), and while he admired Darwin as a scientist, he also objected strongly to natural selection as a sufficient explanation for evolution. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he writes:

  There is also keen pleasure (and, after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man’s mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of Homo poeticus—without which sapiens could not have been evolved. “Struggle for life” indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast’s crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife’s scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butcher’s shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.

  (SM 298)

  Nabokov once wrote that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (LRL ii), and he was happy to criticize anybody: in this paragraph, even if playfully, he takes on Darwin, Marx, and the Bible at once. Here the crucial point to note is his dislike of natural selection’s stress on competition and his preferred emphasis on stepping outside competition into play, the free play of the imagination.

  Nabokov thought, in particular, that natural mimicry was too complex, too perfect, too artful to be explained in terms of natural selection. Earlier in Speak, Memory, describing his early passion for butterflies, he notes:

  The mysteries of mimicry had a special attraction for me. Its phenomena showed an artistic perfection usually associated with man-wrought things. Consider the imitation of oozing poison by bubble-like macules on a wing (complete with pseudo-refraction) or by glossy yellow knobs on a chrysalis (“Don’t eat me—I have already been squashed, sampled and rejected”). Consider the tricks of an acrobatic caterpillar (of the Lobster Moth) which in infancy looks like bird’s dung, but after molting develops scrabbly hymenopteroid appendages and baroque characteristics, allowing the extraordinary fellow to play two parts at once (like the actor in Oriental shows who becomes a pair of intertwisted wrestlers): that of a writhing larva and that of a big ant seemingly harrowing it. When a certain moth resembles a certain wasp in shape and color, it also walks and moves its antennae in a waspish, unmothlike manner. When a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in. “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.

  (SM 124–25)

  If man as a species has made God in his own image, Nabokov made God or Nature in his own personal image: as a subtle cosmic and comic prankster, hiding elegant and playful surprises for the observant and curious mind. In The Gift the hero and narrator, Fyodor, reports that his lepidopterist father

  told me about the incredible artistic wit of mimetic disguise which was not explainable by the struggle for existence (the rough haste of evolution’s unskilled forces), was too refined for the mere deceiving of accidental predators, feathered, scaled and otherwise (not very fastidious, but then not too fond of butterflies), and seemed to have been invented by some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man.

  (Gift 122)

  Nabokov was no Christian, but he did believe in his own brand of Intelligent Design, design somehow hidden for “the intelligent eyes of man” to rediscover.

  In the 1940s a scientist could legitimately think that natural selection could not explain mimicry, but experimental work on the survival rates of camouflaged animals in the 1950s, and work on animal perception and cognition after that, confirmed that even elaborate mimicry could be perfectly explained by natural selection. But Nabokov’s sense of human evolution as not being explicable in terms of competition and as needing to stress
imagination anticipates some recent shifts in our understanding of our distant past. While Nabokov was alive, but after he had stopped working as a scientist, modern neo-Darwinism took shape. The new insights into genes and DNA possible after Crick and Watson combined with William Hamilton’s notion of inclusive fitness: that my evolutionary fitness depends on the survival and reproduction of the genes not only in me but also in others closely related to me. In 1975 Richard Dawkins memorably showed the power of a gene’s-eye view of life in The Selfish Gene. Many who have never read the book suppose it must be about genes as selfish, but it actually explains how cooperation could arise from genes that, metaphorically, serve only their own interests. As Dawkins later wrote, he could have called his book The Cooperative Gene without needing to change a word.1

  Recent work in human evolution has shown cooperation to be increasingly central to what we have become. In the 1970s and 1980s, competition was still seen as a key to the emergence of intelligence. A major driving force in intelligence, it was realized, was the ability to understand other minds, the most volatile and usually the most consequential kind of information in the environment. With chimpanzees, a highly competitive species, as a prime research focus, the idea was called the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. In the 1990s came the recognition that social cooperation as well as social competition could drive intelligence. In the last decade, with detailed comparative studies of chimpanzee and human development, researchers have seen the unique extent and importance of human cooperativeness as the key to the emergence of language and complex cognition and to the unique extent of human culture.