Jansy Mello: In one of my former postings (March 22) there was a sentence that, on a second reading, made me uncertain about the meaning I’d been striving to express:  “However, the irrational (in opposition to a putative “direct apprehension of the world”) is not synonymous to the ineffable nor, as I see it, to Freud’s unconscious processes.” (I had just quoted Michael Glynn in Vladimir Nabokov, Bergsonian and Russian Formalist Influences in his novels). Namely, why oppose the possibility of a “direct apprehension of the world” to “irrationality” when my intention had simply been an exploration of different representational resources allied to conscious perception (For example, would a visual pun only become fully intelligible after being described in words?)

Although I still cannot formulate my query in a more precise way, I discovered why the term “irrational” presented itself to me so readily. I’d been exploring snippets related to “the meaning of life” and “scientific thought”: Alvin Toffler’s question to Vladimir Nabokov had brought the “irrational” up in confrontation with the “exact knowledge of science,” (it was quoted by S.Blackwell’s reviewer) and I’d recently separated his review to read it with leisure: 

“Interviewing Vladimir Nabokov for a 1964 edition of Playboy magazine, the American futurist Alvin Toffler raised the question of the place of the ‘irrational’ in what he described as ‘an age when the exact knowledge of science has begun to plumb the most profound mysteries of existence’. ‘In point of fact,’ Nabokov responded, ‘the greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery. […] We shall never know the origin of life, or the meaning of life, or the nature of space and time, or the nature of nature, or the nature of thought.’ Readers of that august publication unfamiliar with the author of Lolita’s parallel career in entomology might have been forgiven for mistaking this verdict for a wholesale rejection of both the scientific method and its more hubristic designs. On the contrary, fascinated as he was by the fragile truth-directedness of scientific rationality, and as the creator of fictional universes so resistant to authoritative readings as are those depicted in such novels as Pale Fire, The Gift and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s deeper reflections on the issue are perhaps better encapsulated by the words of one of his many fictional scientists: ‘Attainment and science, retainment and art,’ the nameless narrator of his 1945 story ‘Time and Ebb’ muses, ‘the two couples keep to themselves, but when they do meet, nothing else in the world matters’. In the sense that it seeks to find the common ground upon which such ‘meetings’ take place within Nabokov’s work, Stephen H. Blackwell’s The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science represents a timely attempt to distil from the growing accumulation of scholarship in this area a comprehensive and unified account of the terms through which it might be plausible to assert, as Blackwell does from the outset, that the ‘inseparability of art and science is the core of Nabokov’s creative vision’ […] Ultimately, Blackwell concludes, it is his ‘epistemological skepticism, combined with a passion for discovering what can be known, that defines Nabokov as an artist and a scientist’ (169). As Blackwell himself exemplifies, such a stance is also to be admired in the context of the literary monograph, and particularly in one with such a large biographical content as has The Quill and the Scalpel. Functioning as both an intellectually agile response to existing scholarship and an imaginatively contrived vehicle for locating discrete readings of individual novels within a largely cohesive overall schematic, then, Blackwell’s work succeeds both as an introduction to a discourse evidently amenable to continued study and an invaluable case study of a novelist who, as Blackwell puts it, ‘occupies a unique place in modern intellectual history not only because of his dual status as an artist and a scientist, but because his scientific work left him skeptical about the ultimate ability of science to provide answers to questions that most concern humanity’ (168).” Peter Johnston, Royal Holloway, University of London reviewing Stephen H. Blackwell, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009). http://www.bsls.ac.uk/reviews/modern-and-contemporary/steven-h-blackwell-the-quill-and-the-scalpel-nabokovs-art-and-the-worlds-of-science/

For V.Nabokov “We shall never know…the meaning of life” but, as also quoted by P.Johnston, it is possible to explore “attainment and science, retainment and art.” As we may also read in B.Boyd’s essay: “Art at its best offers us the durability that became life’s first purpose, the variety that became its second, the appeal to the intelligence and the cooperative emotions that took so much longer to evolve, and the creativity that keeps adding new possibilities, including religion and science. We do not know a purpose guaranteed from outside life, but we can add as much as we can to the creativity of life. We do not know what other purposes life may eventually generate, but creativity offers us our best chance of reaching them.” Purpose-Driven Life Evolution does not rob life of meaning, but creates meaning. It also makes possible our own capacity for creativity by Brian Boyd, 2009; https://theamericanscholar.org/purpose-driven-life/#.VRn7mNLF_O0.  

I remembered Henri Bergson’s hypothesis about the Élan vital [coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, in which he addresses the question of self-organisation and spontaneous morphogenesis of things in an increasingly complex manner. Elan vital was translated in the English edition as "vital impetus", but is usually translated by his detractors as "vital force". It is a hypothetical explanation for evolution and development of organisms, which Bergson linked closely with consciousness - with the intuitive perception of experience and the flow of inner time, apud wikipedia]  and Freud’s divergent paths (he’d read Bergson) when, after examining “Eros” (which he named “the Life Drive”), he added the “Death Drive,” to adjust the balance. For him, if allowed to attribute to life a purpose, its chief aim would be achieving repose in death but… (and this is an important theoretical admonishment) since every organism must strive after the kind of death that belongs exclusively to its species, it was thanks to the external obstacles that life and its variety was sustained during the interval in which its specific road to death wasn’t conquered more directly. The outside world, for S.Freud, seems to play a role that is similar to Art in the maintenance of life!  [Since I’m relying on my recollections of past readings, for those who are interested in this contrast and demand more serious research, please start with S.Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.”(1922)].