JM: The great bulk of writings on Nabokov is currently
unavailable to me. The list of titles and abstracts at Brian Boyd's University
of Auckland "Upside Down International Vladimir Nabokov Conference" was
truly "incandescent" and I would thank participants who
would mail a copy of their papers to me off-list, should this not
go against the adopted policies.
Stephen Blackwell's abstract offers a tantalizing paragraph for
"Space-‐Time and Nabokov’ Upside-‐Down Butterflies"
"This abiding
sense of the temporal depth of species, akin to temporal depth in human
life, allowed him to make discoveries about butterfly classification that
were advanced for their time and have been upheld by genetic sequencing
techniques developed decades later. Nabokov’s discoveries are an example of the
productive journey of a scientific concept (space-‐time) making its way
through creative, artistic consciousness, where it facilitated advances in an
unrelated branch of science,
taxonomy."
I could just eke my way through the black rectangle at the Wikipedia
(a bit guiltily, though, because I'm in full agreement with
their campain [ "Imagine a World Without Free
Knowledge"], against recent IAP laws), to find information about
"the theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or
embryological parallelism...is a disproven biological hypothesis that in
developing from embryo to adult, animals go through stages resembling or
representing successive stages in the evolution of their remote ancestors.
..While some examples of embryonic stages showing superficial features of
ancestral organisms exist, the ontological hypothesis itself has been completely
disproven for the field biology. By contrast, there is no consensus against its
validity outside of biology; recapitulation theory is still considered plausible
and applied by some reasearchers in fields like Behavioral Development, the
study of the origin of language, and others," trying to refresh my memory
about the law expressed as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."
Although I'm unsure if Steve Blackwell was working with this
biological formulation (it differs from the parallel SB has
established*), it was immediately brought to my mind when when I read about
"space-time" and the relation bt. "the concept of species and the
temporal depth in human life," applied to Nabokov's discoveries on
butterfly classification.
I do hope I'll get the opportunity to get S.Blackwell's article to fully
understand its rich promise.
S. E. Sweeney's "Backwards,Contrariwise,Downside Up:Thinking in Different
Directions in Nabokov" was equally tantalizing - for Nabokov's kinaesthetic
imagery has always struck a deep chord in me, mainly because there's something
in the way he discovers "natural" patterns to express
them through rythm and style, thereby evoking
the sensation of broken symmetries, spirals, sudden thrusts
and sweeping flights in his readers .
"Nabokov's characters often imagine themselves or, perhaps, try to imagine
themselves in new positions in space. That is, they attempt to conceive of
the body as moving in an entirely different direction. To cite just a few
examples, consider Van walking on his hands in Ada, Vadim reversing his
position at the end of an imaginary walk in Look at the Harlequins! or
Philip Wild mentally erasing his body from the toes upwards in The Original
of Laura. Many of Nabokov's other novels and stories also describe a
protagonist's efforts, whether peripheral or pivotal, to mentally transcend the
body's physical orientation. In figures of speech, meanwhile, he often compares
instances of metaphysical thinking to an acrobatic feat -‐-‐ from the
description of his father's elevation in Speak, Memory to the
personification of thought as a trapeze artist in Bend Sinister. Such
proprioceptive, kinaesthetic imagery suggests that Nabokov may have conceived of
thought itself as analogous to the body's physical movement through space.
Certainly, he repeatedly drew on this analogy to depict his characters' mental
processes for readers, especially with regard to thinking of something new or
unexpected. By describing, in his fiction, the effort to imagine one's body
moving differently through space, Nabokov evokes the twists and turns of
consciousness, emphasizes each narrative's implicit spatial form, and prompts
readers to follow a mental trajectory that will lead them
somewhere they have
never been before.."
.....................................................................................................................................................................
* - In the early XXth Century it inspired Sigmund Freud's phylogenetic
fantasy (only published in 1985) "Overview of the Transference
Neuroses," edited by Ilse
Grubrich-Simitis; translated by Axel Hoffer and Peter T.Hoffer,
Cambridge,Mass:Harvard
Univ.Press,1987