Бабочки Набокова: Неопубликованное
и несобранное. Новые переводы с русского языка Дмитрия Набокова, редакция
и аннотация Брайена Бойда и Роберта Майкла Пайла. Reviews / Обзоры
The Observer ©
Forget Lolita - let's hear it for lepidoptery...
Science doesn't quite meet literature in a collection of technical
papers and butterfly inspired writing in Nabokov's Butterflies
Adam Mars-Jones
Sunday March 19, 2000
Vladimir Nabokov was an expert on butterflies. He not only collected
them obsessively but invented techniques to make their classification
more precise. This volume brings together technical papers and butterfly-themed
passages from his work. The closest comparable case of a major author
having world eminence in another expertise would be A.E. Housman, who
emended corrupt classical texts with the same analytical exquisiteness
that Nabokov used to revise the classification of butterflies, according
to the details of their dissected genitals.
Classical philology is hardly a more popular or accessible pursuit than
lepidoptery, but the volume (edited by Christopher Ricks), which includes
passages from Housman's technical writings as well as the poems, is an
outstanding success.
The advantages of that book over this one were that it was wieldy, that
it never left the domain of culture and that it showed a side of the writer
absent from his verse. The slyly fatalistic persona of the poet made a
fascinating contrast with the professor of Latin, who was a doughty if
not brutal scrapper, and never split a hair in argument if there was a
chance of splitting the person to whom it was attached.
When Nabokov wrote in 1947 that his scientific papers 'have no interest
whatever for the layman', he was expressing pride as much as melancholy.
Any reader would enjoy the passage reprinted here from his novel, The
Gift, about the living arrangements of those large blues which have 'concluded
a barbaric pact' with ants: 'I saw how an ant, greedily tickling a hind
segment of that caterpillar's sluglike little body, forced it to excrete
a drop of intoxicant juice, which it swallowed immediately. In compensation,
it offered its own larvae as food; it was as if cows gave us Chartreuse
and we gave them our infants to eat.'
His prose, though, is impenetrable even when there are touches of the
same precise fancy dimly detectable: 'The most conspicuous thing about
the upper portion is the presence of a pair of formidable semi-transparent
hooks [the subunci or falces of a peculiar shape not found in allied genera],
produced from the opposite side of the distally twinned uncus and facing
each other in the manner of the stolidly raised fists of two pugilists
[of the old school] with the uncus hoods adding a Ku Klux Klan touch to
the picture.'
Nabokov's Butterflies is edited and annotated by Brian Boyd, a professor
of English (and biographer of Nabokov) and Robert Michael Pyle, a lepidopterist,
each of whom provides a substantial introduction. The editors find a harmony
in Nabokov between artist and scientist - and it would be nice if there
were traces of that virtue in their collaboration. There is overlap and
contradiction in their opening remarks.
The literature man might usefully have advised the butterfly man to pitch
his essay consistently. On one page, we are advanced students, not needing
to be reminded of the meaning of 'phenology'. On another, we are back
in primary school, struggling to understand the advantages of a system
of classification, and asked to imagine 'running a big city without telephones'.
In return, Pyle could have suggested that Boyd not gloss over the crucial
hostility towards evolutionary theory in Nabokov's scientific work.
Mimicry, about which Nabokov wanted to write an ambitious book, seemed
to him impossible to explain in evolutionary terms. Boyd remarks only
on the likelihood that 'had he begun serious work on mimicry, he would
have found sufficient evidence of purely physical explanations to be forced
to abandon his dearly-held metaphysical speculations'.
Pyle isn't so sure, or rather - bizarrely - he asserts (citing no source)
that Brian Boyd 'is not so sure, suspecting Nabokov might well have counter-argued
in ways no one would have guessed'. A writer who famously 'confessed'
(Speak, Memory) that he did not believe in time was always going to resist
an explanation of life that requires nothing else. What is striking in
Nabokov's Butterflies is the consistency of his opposition to scientific
orthodoxy.
He asserts that mimicry, by the gratuitous splendour of its imitations,
disproves evolution, in fiction, memoir and scientific paper. In an essay
on Lysandracormion, he uses such heretical phrases as 'the secret decrees
of nature', while also giving that agency a whiff of Detroit by talking
not of genetic variations but of 'bringing out' particular 'makes' of
butterfly.
Nabokov seems to interpret mimicry as an artificial flaw in an aesthetic
design, a clue left for those able to see it. The amount of emotion he
invested in the metaphysics of lepidoptery - his special sense that mimicry
proved an exemption from determinism - would be hard to underestimate.
Temperamentally, he hated system as much as he loved pattern, and it would
be shattering for him to find the enemy in the stronghold of his beloved
system underlying pattern.
Nabokov ruled out of court any psychological reading of his life or work
(and his critics largely oblige), but is it so surprising that the ambitious
book on mimicry which would settle the matter never got written?
He visualised a 'high ridge', where the mountainside of scientific knowledge
could join the opposite slope of artistic imagination, but the winds up
there are high also, and no hiker, not even the most experienced, can
guarantee to keep his footing.
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