NABOKV-L post 0005110, Thu, 25 May 2000 08:19:26 -0700

----- Original Message -----
From: Jennifer Parsons
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2000 10:41 PM
Subject: Re: Kurt Johnson response to Boyd on Comments on NY TimesReview:Nabokov'sButterflies


I have reached a part of Nabokov's Blues that I find intensely moving and that is where K. Johnson begins to study the Blues he brings back from the south and can't quite make them fit the popular accepted schemes and then takes a good look at Nabokov's drawings and articles and realizes - "Nabokov had it right."
Especially wonderful is the description of Johnson's teacher Downey and his first run-in with Nab on the side of a mountain (I've read about this before in Boyd - but now in context of this story, very exciting again) - it's like hand reaching out to hand reaching out to hand down through the generations, cutting through all the accepted errors to tentatively but then firmly grasp what's right. From Nabokov's Blues:

Johnson had initially heared of Nabokov's work when studying in a master's degree program under John C. Downey, first at Southern Illinois University and then at the University of Northern Iowa. Downey became a prominent specialist on Blue butterflies during the 1960sh, but his connection with Nabokov began with an oddly Nabokovian coincidence that has become part of the writer's legend. As a teenager in the late 1940s, driving a truck for the Forest Service in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, Downey happened to encounter a man with a butterfly net walking along a canyon highway, naked to the waist, in shorts, and wearing a knotted handkerchief for a cap. Downey stopped and offered the man a ride, explaining tht he was a lepidopterist himself, but he was covered with the dust from the coal he was hauling and the stranger seemed suspicious. Then a butterfly flashed across the highway, and the stranger pointed and asked, "What's that?" Downey identified the butterfly, and then two more in rapid succession, by their scientific names. Finally won over, the stranger put out his hand and said, "Hello! I'm Vladimir Nabokov."
Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates - NABOKOV'S BLUES ...
Just one more:

Downey often spoke of Nabokov and his work in discussions with students and colleagues. At the University of Northern Iowa in 1969, while Kurt Johnson was Downey's student, the two were preparing a study of the North American Blue genus Everes for the Iowa Academy of Sciences. Faced with a ticklish question about the differentiation of two species, Johnson suggested to Downey that perhaps they should write to Harry Clench. Nabokov's fellow researcher at Harvard. Downey snapped, "Clench wouldn't know! Nabokov might know, but Clench wouldn't know!"
As Downey was obviously well aware, Nabokov had done hundreds of genitalic preparations during his studies of the northern genus Lycaeides and his pioneer study of Latin American Blues, but dissection was not one of Clench's strong points.

Kurt Johnson and Steve Coates - NABOKOV'S BLUES..
As far as Nabokov being a "splitter" rather than a "lumper" goes, lepidopterally speaking, there is definite connection here to his art: he was always more interested in the differences between things, and people - than the things they had in common - though he did love and love to write about the natural occurrences of seemingly highly unlikely coincidences, paralleled perhaps in nature by "mimesis" - at any rate, he was most definitely a "splitter" in his art just as he was in his science.

"D. Barton Johnson" wrote:

EDITORIAL NOTE. Kurt Johnson, lepidoperiest and co-author of NABOKOV's
BLUES, comments on Boyd's response to New Yourk Times review of NABOKOV's
BUTTERFLIES. Those interested in a more extended view of Vn and the
art/science issue should take a look at the discussion goining on the
Nabokov discussion list at NYTimes.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kurt Johnson" <belina@dellnet.com>
.
>
> ---------------- Message requiring your approval (132
lines) ------------------
> A short message can't really do justice to the breath of implications in
> Brian's comment. However, I wanted to mention that some people on
> NYTimes.com Nabokov discussion found Brian's comments very welcome and
> copied them over to that discussion. Historical perspective is always
> important. Someone asked me a question today about defining evolution and
I
> had to briefly take them briefly through the history of both its claims
and
> how those claims were made. Only in that context could they see that what
> "evolution" is has changed dramatically through historical stages
> (pre-Darwinism [no recognition that nature itself selects physical
> attributes just as does a human breeder of dogs, horses or orchids],
simple
> Darwinism [natural selection with no knowledge of genetics], Darwinism
plus
> knowledge of an individual's genetics [Darwin plus Mendel], Darwinsim plus
> population genetics [NeoDarwinism], NeoDarwnism plus vicariance, plus
> catastrophe, plus non-equilibrium thermodynamics etc. etc.
[PostDarwinism])
> and, as such, resists simple soundbites. One can go back to a time (to
wit
> almost like in the branching scientific diagrams of evolution where shared
> nodes before each branching are common ancestors) when the "difference"
> between art and science was rather slight. Not be resort to "no-brainers"
> here but, as examples, daVinci's drawings of war machines for his patrons,
> the degree or "art" or "science" in cave art, or Raphael's studies in
> perspective etc. "Teddy" at NYTimes.com suggested that art and science
are
> like sibling children borne of nature within man's creativity-- a nice
> metaphor; and each child grows and takes its own unique direction. Much
> can be learned by a study like Brian suggests that tries to take the
> divergence back to its roots. I don't know if their are similar
> studies....I imagine there may well be.....certainly there have been
amazing
> analyzes in sociology of the origins of phenomona, like the origin of
cities
> [Eliade], that reduce things to amazingly insightful basics. If its
> instructive at all, I have more than a feeling that the seed of Brian's
new
> venture [book] grew out of his pondering this art/science interface in
> Nabokov while at the same time delving into Karl Popper. Its seems odd to
> some modern thinkers that the revelations of Popper (about what science
was
> really doing all along-- the deductive method, not the inductive one) were
> so long in coming or really "revelations" at all. But, revelations often
> amount to sudden reversals-- like when Stephen Gould and Niles Eldridge
> suggested that the missing data in the fossil record, the "gaps", WAS, in
> fact, data, not lack of it [i.e. that stasis WAS information, not lack of
> it]. That changed everything (anyone notice that Nabokov said this in
> Father's Butterflies?) [I'm waiting to see if any smart biologist catches
on
> to that one]-- or the Manhattan Project suddenly changing from the
explosion
> to the implosion model for nuclear triggers in about day and a half! So,
> Teddy suggested that the material at the base of Brian's question is vast.
> Undoubtedly. The larger part of my question is, of course, not simply how
> science itself, or Nabokov's science, meaningfully eludicates his art, but
> whether there is something in his doing of the science (and perhaps even
the
> struggle amongst "folk" to recognize its "relevance") that says something
> about the sociology of the arts. Lately, I think you may know of this
> artist ["major minor"] who had a stroke which paralyzed one side of her
> brain; now she has become "minor major" (that's how it go into the press,
of
> course) and paints in some ways completely different than before (and
> evidently with incredible visual results). She says that now her left
hand
> is able to do things (totally extemporaneously) that no amount of
> calculation, and her right hand, allowed her to do before. Bring in the
> brain/mind people (of course, Nabokov also had that sensory,
> color/sound-related, brain condition, so there may be connections to that
as
> well re his "mental gynmastics"). Well enough. But thanks Brian for
> responding. We won't mention [I just did] the Nobel laureate who thanked
> his recurring dream of a brilliant red snake biting its tail, releasing,
> biting..... for the discovery of the benzine ring (and hence modern
> cyclo-chemistry). Art/science.
>
> Kurt Johnson
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: D. Barton Johnson <chtodel@gte.net>
> To: <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sent: Monday, May 22, 2000 7:58 AM
> Subject: Fw: Boyd on Comments on NY Times Review: Nabokov'sButterflies
>
>
> > ----------
> > > From: Brian Boyd <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
> > >
> > > ----------------- Message requiring your approval (39 lines)
> > ------------------
> > > From Brian Boyd:
> > >
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: "Kurt Johnson" <belina@dellnet.com>
> > > >That leads me to ask, honestly, does
> > > > anyone have a suggestion about what Nabokov's enterprise in science
> > > > meaningfully elucidates about the arts? I think that would be an
> > > > interesting question to explore.
> > >
> > > May I just say in response to Kurt Johnson's and Wayne Daniels's
> > comments,
> > > that I try my hardest to answer the question of the relationship
between
> > > Nabokov's science and his art in my introduction to _Nabokov's
> > Butterflies_,
> > > and in the quite different introduction to "Father's Butterflies" in
the
> > April
> > > issue of The Atlantic, not of course that there isn't much more to be
> > said. I
> > > don't think Nabokov's art explains anything much in his science
(except
> > > perhaps that the dedication, the intelligence, the memory, the
> curiosity,
> > and
> > > the eye for detail and pattern evident in his art explain why someone
> who
> > > devoted the equivalent of only about three years of research time to
> > > butterflies could have also made innovative and durable contributions
to
> > this
> > > field), but his science does explain certain unique features of his
art,
> > as I
> > > have tried to show at some length.
> > >
> > > I have also asked in more general terms the question of the
relationship
> > > between literary and scientific discovery, with some reference to VN
(as
> > well
> > > as to graffiti and Shakespeare) in "Literature and Discovery" in
> > _Philosophy
> > > and Literature_ 23 (1999), 274-94, and am working on a book that
> > considers the
> > > origins of art in the light of (evolutionary) science, and the role of
> > art in
> > > the origins of science and of science in the development of art.
> > >
> > > Frankly I find it puzzling that reviewers and readers can be intensely
> > > interested in one of the two most amazing achievements of the human
> > creative
> > > imagination (art) and not in the other (science), or in the creativity
> of
> > > nature that gave rise to them both. And that some readers find nothing
> > > revealing in the range and development and local aptness of Nabokov's
> use
> > of
> > > Lepidoptera in his fiction. Believe me, the revelations are there, and
I
> > hope
> > > my introductions help point to some of the ways they can be reached.
> > >
> > > Brian Boyd
>