Victor Fet: A *real* news
item below seems to be relevant both to Vadim's affliction in LaTH and to Van
Veen's professional studies..."Although we can't technically travel through time
(yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental
time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time
arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at
how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate
human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly
coupled...These findings ...suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in
processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past=
backward) to our systems of perception and action.
Provided by Association
for Psychological Science http://www.physorg.com/news183297421.html ."
JM: Interesting report about chronesthesia in
its relation to Vadim, Van Veen and, perhaps, Nabokov's own "chronophobia,"
as it has been described in Speak Memory's opening chapter.
Space-time, evolution, human
history and consciousness, for Nabokov, can also be apprehended from
another perspective, following the exchanges and reports
presented below.
In Nov.15, 1948, p;238, E.Wilson writes to
Volodya:
"I have never been able to understand how you manage, on the
one hand, to study butterflies from the point of view of their habitat and, on
the other, to pretend that it is possible to write about human beings and leave
out of account all question of society and environment."
Wilson hasn't
described another curious approximation between the individual and his
"environment," as we read in one of Nabokov's comments about firemen. For
VN, firemen must not only save a child from the blaze but also his/her
favorite toy... Perhaps Wilson is not considering the nature of VN's
"holistic" vision, which led him to oppose the dominance of
theories based on "causality" (in their historical, economic and
psychic dimensions) and limited to empirical data.
The outline of
Nabokov's artistic project, unlike Wilson's assumption that linked VN
to "Ars gratia Artis," or his puzzlement in relation to Nabokov's
indifference to sociological or historical projects, was brought up in their
correspondence in Nov.18, 1950, when VN writes (p.282): "In
discussing Bleak House, I completely ignored all sociological and
historical implications, and unravelled a number of fascinating thematic lines (
the "fog theme," the "bird theme," etc.) and the three main props of the
structure..."
Even in art, Nabokov is ever the
"morphologist" and this characteristic is
ingeniously brought up by Stephen Blackwell, in his chapter about Nabokov
and Science ("The Quill and the Scalpel'). For him, pattern, structure and
correspondences, both in science and in art reveal, for Nabokov, that which
underlies and guarantees our comprehension of social and natural history: a
"holistic vision," related to an unfanthomable external eye (or consciousness)
and "evolution".
At least, this is how I interpret Blackwell's
elegant demonstration, when he links VN's "scientific fancies", "scientific
discoveries," to what happens in his novels and... in life!
Unfortunately for me I cannot render the
"sensuous movement of life" through Nabokov's instantaneous vision of its
continuity, as demonstrated and rendered by S.Blackwell, using my own
words. I must rely on excerpts ( parts of which I've underlined).
Here are some excerpts from "The Quill and the Scalpel:
Nabokov and the Worlds of Science" ( Chapter Two: Nabokov as a Scientist):
"Nabokov challenges his readers...to re-think the very nature of the
scientist’s work and the possibility of the marvelous even within a scientific
life,... secret loopholes in the norms of scientific practice ... Nabokov denied
the primacy of “biological” definition, which relies upon real or theoretically
interbreeding individuals, as too restrictive and dismissive of what to him was
the true test of an organism’s identity: morphology."
According to SB " Nabokov’s emphasis on form, or what he called 'the
morphological moment,' is telling [in contrast to the “biological” criterion of
interbreeding] ... For him, "Morphological features themselves are amenable to
one of the distinguishing traits of the human mind: the ability to collect and
systematize perceptible details...Nabokov seems most delighted of all when he
can detect what looks like a continuous movement of variation across an entire
group of species, with all the intermediate forms preserved, because it creates
a simulacrum of nature in flux across time. What most intrigues Nabokov is
the development of change itself, the fluid sweep of species variation.
He writes of one creature “becoming” another, as if such a metamorphosis
actually takes place when an insect crosses a particular geographical
boundary. His picture of intergraded species represents also a kind of
play with the interaction of time, space, and the progress of life.
We imagine a series of forms that look as if they move chronologically,
progressing from one extreme to the other as time advances—and in fact they
might have evolved that way, although in reality Nabokov is talking about
simultaneously existing species, not about a proposed evolutionary
sequence... Nabokov draws attention to the dangers of such metaphors,
which create the illusion of grasping the mysteries of time by means of spatial
variations: "This scheme is of course is not a phylogenetic
tree but merely its shadow on a plane surface, since a sequence in time is not
really deducible from a synchronous series" [Cf.“The
Nearctic Forms of Lycaeides Hüb. (Lycaenidae, Lepidoptera). Psyche 50; NB
280] ...These intergradations—almost like the frames of a
film—between forms among living organisms become an emblem of the processes of
life as they continue beyond our efforts to describe them in the shape of
individual species. In contrast, the traditional species description
based on a single individual leads to a deceptively static picture of nature…”
For Nabokov, quoted by SB , "if [species] do exist they
do so taxonomically as abstract conceptions, mummified ideas severed from and
uninfluenced by the continuous evolution of data-perception, some historical
stage of which may have endowed them at one time with a fugitive sense… To
adopt them as logical realities in classification would be much the same as
conceiving a journey in terms of stopping places" [NB,302] For SB, "Nabokov’s scientific work always
reached out to consider the breadth of nature’s motion. … The evolution of
forms… compressed in time as if viewed by the narrators of Transparent
Things,* becomes the sensuous movement of life itself." He believes that
it is possible to find "a blend of different aspects of consciousness brought to
bear upon the perception of the natural object..." Therefore Nabokov, "from an
early age...began to see things like mimicry as emblematic of special and
mysterious powers behind nature’s ebullience...he was clearly persuaded that
life was evolving."
For SB, in "The Gift" there are "passages describing
extraordinary or even unlikely feats of mimicry are connected to the idea of
design in nature and indeed in human life, and to the relationship between such
design and the perceptive abilities of human consciousness... These
“miracles” of nature, or of life, do seem to indicate a designing presence, but
that they seem to do so is, as Kant demonstrated, a necessary part of the way
human beings perceive the world... Part of Nabokov’s effort to suggest that
nature was not purely mechanistic and driven by causality. There must be,
he felt, alongside or even above selection and competition, another force behind
nature: one that drives the development of life and its intricacies in the first
place."...
"And so when Nabokov, through Godunov-Cherdyntsev, comes to offer a vision
of evolution—the diversification of life—he focuses not on the forces that drive
the elimination of species but rather on those that drive the generation of new
forms. Hence his “spherical” theory, according to which forms of life
arise in bubble-like groups from some unknown generative source behind all of
nature, the “wind” that “animates the dance of the planets.” This process,
as he describes it, has certain self-reinforcing traits (feedback) inherent to
it, which contribute to its development and its complexity. What is
especially curious is that he does not, in this proposal, deny natural selection
in all its forms, but he does refuse to give it central attention in a story
that is, to him, really about the generation of nature’s immense variety and of
consciousness itself. The fact that nature, life, and consciousness
seem intertwined and mutually reinforcing produces a vision of the world that
attempts to comprehend it as a whole. It is not scientific in the
Newtonian sense: it is not amenable to quantification because it does not break
down the object under study (the natural world [universe] as embraced by
consciousness), but rather attempts to view it and understand it as a
whole."
* - The narrators of Transparent Things see in four
dimensions; that is, they see in an object the complete history or all its
constituent parts as well as its current physical situation...