Stalking Nabokov (22 page)

Clinical, comparative, developmental, evolutionary, and social psychology over the past thirty years have devoted a great deal of attention to theory of mind and to metarepresentation.
¹¹
Theory of mind is our capacity to understand other minds, or our own, in terms of desires, intentions, and beliefs, and metarepresentation, our capacity to understand representations
as
representations, including the representations other minds may have of a scene. While some intelligent social animals appear to understand others of their kind in terms of desires and intentions, only humans have a clear understanding of others in terms of what others
believe
and factor these beliefs effortlessly into their inferential systems. By adolescence, we can readily understand four degrees of intentionality: A’s thoughts about B’s thoughts about C’s thoughts about D’s. As adults, we start to make errors with but can still manage five or six degrees: our thoughts as rereaders, say, about our thoughts as first-time readers about Nabokov’s thoughts about Van the narrator’s thoughts about Van’s thoughts at Ardis about Van’s thoughts on the train to Ardis.

Nabokov finds fascinating the multilevel awareness of the mind and worked to develop it in himself and in his readers and rereaders—as he discusses most explicitly through Fyodor in
The Gift
. Fyodor deliberately sets himself exercises of observing, transforming, recollecting, and imagining through the eyes of others. Frustrated at earning his keep by foreign- language instruction, he thinks: “What he should be really teaching was the mysterious thing which he alone—out of ten thousand, a hundred thousand, perhaps even a million men—knew how to teach: for example— multilevel thinking”—which he then goes on to define (
Gift
176). The very idea of training the brain in this way, as Fyodor does for himself, as he imagines teaching others, as he learns to do for his readers, as Nabokov learned over many years to do for
his
readers, fits with neuroscience’s recent understanding of brain plasticity, the degree to which the brain can be retrained, fine-tuned, redeployed.
¹²

Play has been nature’s main way of making the most of brain plasticity. It fine-tunes animals in key behaviors like flight and fight—hence the evolved pleasure animals take in chasing and frisking and in rough-and-tumble fighting, nature’s way of ensuring they’ll engage in this training again and again. In
On the Origin of Stories
I look at art as a development of play, and as a way of fine-tuning minds in particular cognitive modes that matter to us: in the case of fiction, our expertise in social cognition, in theory of mind, in perspective taking, holding multiple perspectives in mind at once. As I made that case, I was not thinking of Nabokov, but he takes this kind of training of the mind—perception, cognition, emotion, memory, and imagination— more seriously, and more playfully, than any other writer.

I have used one brief and superficially straightforward example from
Ada
to show how much psychological work we naturally do when we read fiction, especially when we read Nabokov’s fiction, and how much light psychology can now throw on what we do naturally when we read fiction. Literature’s aims differ considerably from those of research psychology. Nevertheless literature
draws on
human intuitive psychology (itself also a subject in recent psychology) and
exercises
our psychological capacities. Literature aims to understand human minds only to the degree it seeks to move human minds. It may move readers’ minds, in part, by showing with new accuracy or vividness, or at least with fresh particulars, how fictional minds move and by showing in new ways how freely readers’ minds can move, given the right prompts. Psychology, too, wants to understand minds, both simply for the satisfaction of knowing and also in order to make the most of minds, to limit mental damage or to extend mental benefits. It uses the experimental method. We can see fictions, too, as thought experiments, experiments about how characters feel, think, and behave and about how readers feel, think, and behave and how they can
learn
to think more imaginatively, feel more sympathetically, act more sensitively.
¹³
Fictions are experiments whose results will not be systematically collected and peer reviewed—and then perhaps read by a few psychologists—but will be felt vividly by a wide range of readers.

Nabokov thinks that at their best art and science meet on a high ridge. Psychology, after wandering along wrong paths to Freud Falls or the Behaviorist Barrens, has just emerged onto the ridge. Nabokov may have doubted psychology could crest this particular ridge, but I think he has met science there.

NABOKOV AND THE ORIGINS AND ENDS OF STORIES

11. Stacks of Stories, Stories of Stacks

In 2010 I gave the Frederic Alden Warren Lecture at Trinity College, University of Toronto. Its regular theme, Literature/Libraries/Culture, prompted me to consider stories and other aspects of culture in relation to the accumulation, preservation, and innovation epitomized in library holdings. I decided to explore also, on the one hand, Nabokov’s relation to evolution and to the ideas in my evolutionary account of stories, and, on the other, the ways libraries feature in his fiction.

Others have written books on Nabokov and trains, cars, and planes (Leving), Nabokov and geography (Manolescu); Nabokov and painting (De Vries et al.; Shapiro); Nabokov and cinema (Appel; Wyllie); Nabokov and science (Blackwell); Nabokov and translation (Grayson); Nabokov and Berlin (Zimmer); Nabokov and Central Asian exploration (Zimmer); Nabokov and politics (Rampton); Nabokov and Freud (Green); and Nabokov and, of course, butterflies (Zimmer; Johnson and Coates); and much else. Books on Nabokov and food or humor or play or symbols or liberalism have been proposed or written, and books on Nabokov and birds or flowers or trees or light or gesture or personality disorders would seem among the many that
could
be written. A whole volume on Nabokov and libraries, though, might push too far. Or would it?

Once I accepted the invitation to speak here at Trinity College, I was asked for a title and an abstract based on my recent work on stories.
Work?
I happened to feel like play. Playing with the occasion and topic of the lectures, I added libraries to my literature and culture game, to produce what seemed an appealing abstract:

What can the long perspective of evolution suggest about the past and future of stories—and multi-story library stacks? How do stories—and the libraries that stack up more stories than any mind can hold— preserve and generate knowledge and imagination? How will stories and libraries stack up in the digital age?

This sounds rather fun, but it’s not quite what transpired. If you put some bite into abstracts written in advance they have a nasty habit of biting back.

Tonight, returning to the University of Toronto, I want to combine my new work and my old: the new, evolution and literature, and the old, my Nabokov work, which reached orbit when I came here. But I also wanted to keep to the occasion: libraries, but seen within the trajectory of evolution and the work of Nabokov. This may only have produced a grotesque hybrid, like the mouse with a human ear growing in its back.

The highlight of the coursework in my first two years of the Ph.D. was taking Professor Patricia Brückmann’s Scriblerus class. A Circe of a scholar, Pat bewitched us into becoming allusion bloodhounds: we could spend weeks on Swift’s
A Tale of a Tub
or
Gulliver’s Travels
without getting past the allusions on the title pages. I had an even better next two and a half years working on my dissertation under Pat, exploring Nabokov’s longest and most complex novel,
Ada
, in the context of all his other work and his styles, strategies, and thought. For more than a year I worked day after day in the Reference Room of the Robarts Library sniffing through the allusions and the arcana in
Ada
, line by line, discovery by discovery. Oddly enough, I’m still annotating
Ada
, now in journal form and online, with hypertext links between text, notes, illustrations, and motifs, and in this form I’m only a third of the way through the novel but already up to 900 pages of annotations. All happy scholars, as Vladimir Tolstoy might have said, are mad in their own way.

Now I use Google, although my main source for
Ada
Online is still the penciled marginalia on the copy of
Ada
I would take every day to the Robarts Reference Room along with my boxes of index cards. I was young and hairy, not fifty-plus and ideally bald and endearing like Nabokov’s Professor Pnin, but Nabokov’s description of Pnin researching at the Waindell University Library wonderfully evokes aspects of researching in the days before computers ousted index cards:

He then returned to his carrell for his own research.

He contemplated writing a
Petite Histoire
of Russian culture, in which a choice of Russian Curiosities, Customs, Literary Anecdotes, and so forth would be presented in such a way as to reflect in miniature
la Grande Histoire—
Major Concatenations of Events. He was still at the blissful stage of collecting his material; and many good young people considered it a treat and an honor to see Pnin pull out a catalogue drawer from the comprehensive bosom of a card cabinet and take it, like a big nut, to a secluded corner and there make a quiet mental meal of it, now moving his lips in soundless comment, critical, satisfied, perplexed, and now lifting his rudimentary eyebrows and forgetting them there, left high upon his spacious brow where they remained long after all trace of displeasure or doubt had gone. He was lucky to be at Waindell. Sometime in the nineties the eminent bibliophile and Slavist John Thurston Todd (his bearded bust presided over the drinking fountain), had visited hospitable Russia, and after his death the books he had amassed there quietly chuted into a remote stack. Wearing rubber gloves so as to avoid being stung by the
amerikanski
electricity in the metal of the shelving, Pnin would go to those books and gloat over them: obscure magazines of the Roaring Sixties in marbled boards; century-old historical monographs, their somnolent pages foxed with fungus spots; Russian classics in horrible and pathetic cameo bindings, whose molded profiles of poets reminded dewy-eyed Timofey of his boyhood, when he could idly palpate on the book cover Pushkin’s slightly chafed side whisker or Zhukovski’s smudgy nose.

(
Pnin
76–77)

There will be a kind of pas de deux on the library floor between Nabokov and evolution throughout this talk, perhaps ending with them, or me, falling between two stools.

In the 1940s Nabokov was a scientist, a world-class lepidopterist,
the
authority on a small family of butterflies, the Blues. He happily researched the evolution of speciation within the Blues, and the evolution of their main diagnostic characteristics, their genitalia and their wing markings. But while he accepted evolution, as he wrote, “as a modal formula” (
LL
378), and while he admired Darwin as a scientist, he also objected strongly to natural selection as a sufficient explanation for evolution. In his autobiography,
Speak, Memory
, he writes:

There is also keen pleasure (and, after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man’s mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of
Homo poeticus—
without which
sapiens
could not have been evolved. “Struggle for life” indeed! The curse of battle and toil leads man back to the boar, to the grunting beast’s crazy obsession with the search for food. You and I have frequently remarked upon that maniacal glint in a housewife’s scheming eye as it roves over food in a grocery or about the morgue of a butcher’s shop. Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.

(
SM
298)

Nabokov once wrote that “next to the right to create, the right to criticize is the richest gift that liberty of thought and speech can offer” (
LRL
ii), and he was happy to criticize anybody: in this paragraph, even if playfully, he takes on Darwin, Marx, and the Bible at once. Here the crucial point to note is his dislike of natural selection’s stress on competition and his preferred emphasis on stepping outside competition into play, the free play of the imagination.

Nabokov thought, in particular, that natural mimicry was too complex, too perfect, too artful to be explained in terms of natural selection. Earlier in
Speak, Memory
, describing his early passion for butterflies, he notes: