Stalking Nabokov (74 page)

37
.   Edward O. Wilson,
The Diversity of Life
(New York: Norton, 1992), 132–33.

9. NETTING NABOKOV: REVIEW OF DIETER E. ZIMMER, A GUIDE TO NABOKOV’S BUTTERFLIES AND MOTHS 2001

1
.   David Sexton, “The True Loves of Nabokov,” review of
Nabokov’s Butterflies
,
Evening Standard
, March 20, 2000, 55.

10. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORK OF FICTIONAL PLAY

1
.   Sir Peter Medawar,
Pluto’s Republic
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 140.

2
.   Marco Iacoboni,
Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

3
.   Michael Tomasello,
Origins of Human Communication
(Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 2008).

4
.   Lawrence W. Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition,”
Annual Review of Psychology
59 (2008): 617–45.

5
.   Daniel Goleman,
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
(New York: Bantam, 2006).

6
.   Barsalou, “Grounded Cognition”; Lisa Aziz-Zadeh et al., “Congruent Embodied Representations for Visually Presented Actions and Linguistic Phrases Describing Actions,”
Current Biology
16 (2006): 1818–23.

7
.   Frederic C. Bartlett,
Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932).

8
.   Daniel L.Schacter and Donna Rose Addis, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B
362 (2007): 773–86.

9
.   John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts,”
Substance
30 (2001): 6–27.

10
.   See
chapter 20
; see also Galdys Reichard, Roman Jakobson, and Elizabeth Werth, “Language and Synesthesia”
Word
5 (August 1949); Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman,
Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia
(Cambridge. Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 2009).

11
.   Rebecca Saxe and Simon Baron-Cohen,
Theory of Mind
, special issue of
Social Neuroscience
, 2006 (Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press, 2007); Dan Sperber, “Meta-representations in an Evolutionary Perspective,” in
Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
, ed. D. Sperber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117–38.

12
.   Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Penguin, 2007).

13
.   See Peter Swirski, Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory (New York, London: Routledge, 2007).

11. STACKS OF STORIES, STORIES OF STACKS

1
.   Richard Dawkins,
The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004), 158.

2
.   Michael Tomasello, quoted in David Sloan Wilson,
Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives
(New York: Delacorte, 2007), 169.

3
.   BB,
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 104, citing Michelle Scalise-Sugiyama, “Narrative Theory and Function: Why Evolution Matters,”
Philosophy and Literature
25 (2001): 238.

4
.   Marek Kohn and Steve Mithen, “Handaxes: Products of Sexual Selection?”
Antiquity
73 (1999): 518–26.

5
.   Barry Powell,
Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

6
.   “Confabulation” is the filling in by fiction of gaps in our knowledge, most strikingly demonstrated in those who have right-hemisphere strokes that, say, paralyze a limb that the patient’s mind refuses to recognize as paralyzed, or those who have had cerebral commisurotomies, severing the corpus callosum that normally acts as the information interchange between the two cerebral hemispheres. When doctors ask stroke victims to move a paralyzed limb or commisurotomy patients to explain why they made a choice in tests where each hemisphere has been offered different information, the left hemisphere immediately invents or confabulates an answer, without the individuals’ apparent recognition of their invention. Like the writers of recent “neurofiction,” who create characters with conditions like autism, de Clérambault’s syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome, Nabokov would have been fascinated.

7
.   Ángel Gurría-Quintana, “Orhan Pamuk: The Art of Fiction Interview No. 187,”
Paris Review
175 (Fall–Winter 2005): 119.

8
.   Marie Nyreröd, Ingmar Bergman—3 dokumentärer om film, teater, Fårö och livet, 2004.

9
.   Robert Root-Bernstein, “The Art of Innovation: Polymaths and Universality of the Creative Process,” in
International Handbook on Innovation
, ed. Larisa Shavinin (Amsterdam: Elsevier), 267–78; Root-Bernstein, “The Sciences and the Arts Share a Common Creative Aesthetic,” in
The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science
, ed. A. I. Tauber (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), 49–82.

10
.   Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (London: Penguin, 1996).

12. NABOKOV’S HUMOR

1
.   Sir Philip Sidney,
A Defence of Poetry
, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 44.

2
.   Unpublished letter to Véra Nabokov, 10 January 1924.

13. NABOKOV AS STORYTELLER

1
.   For the metaphysics, see chapters 6 and 7 and their notes. Among work on Nabokov’s morals, see Ellen Pifer,
Nabokov and the Novel
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980); Boyd,
NAPC
; Leona Toker,
Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); and Richard Rorty, “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty,” in
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 141–68.

2
.   D. Barton Johnson and Brian Boyd, “Prologue: The Otherworld,” in
Nabokov’s World
, vol. 1:
The Shape of Nabokov’s World
, ed. Jane Grayson, Arnold McMillin, and Priscilla Meyer (London: Palgrave/School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 2002), 18–25; also see this volume,
chapter 7
.

3
.   For a particularly comprehensive and subtle but uninvitingly formalistic analysis of Nabokovian narrative, see Pekka Tammi,
Problems of Nabokov’s Poetics
(Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985).

4
.   Letter to Katharine White, March 17, 1951: “Most of the stories I am contemplating (and some I have written in the past . . .) will be composed on these lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one” (
SL
117).

5
.   For Nabokov’s brief but important references to preparation and transition as items in the storyteller’s toolkit, see his “Commentary to Eugene Onegin,”
EO
3.80;
SIC
10;
LL
151;
LRL
73.

6
.   See Josef Perner,
Understanding the Representational Mind
(Cambridge, Mass.: Bradford/MIT Press, 1991), and Dan Sperber, ed.,
Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

7
.   Nabokov,
Mary
, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 1.

8
.   Helmut Bonheim,
The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1982).

9
.   Dieter E. Zimmer argues that the ordered sequence of Ganin’s recollections in
Mary
reflect a psychological truth in line with F.C. Bartlett’s 1932 demonstration of memory as “constructional” (“
Mary
,” in
The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov
, ed. Vladimir E. Alexandrov [New York: Garland, 1995], 354–55). But this seriously misreads Bartlett. The mind does reconstruct memories as they emerge into consciousness rather than upload exactly from a veridical databank, but memory does not and could not suppress details as they emerge to consciousness in order to recollect them only in the correct sequence. Nabokov does explain Ganin’s deliberate private reconstruction of his past with Mary in order to motivate the narrative sequence (
Mary
, 33), but he carries on the orderly retelling of Ganin’s past even unprompted by Ganin’s memory (
Mary
, 99–102), only to provide an after-the-fact motivation in terms of memories that are explicitly not orderly: “All this now unfolded in his memory, flashing disjointedly, and shrank again into a warm lump when Podtyagin, with a great effort, asked him ‘How long ago did you leave Russia?’ ” (
Mary
, 102).

10
.   The text should read “passions,” as here and in the manuscript in VNA, not “passing” as in the published version.

11
.   See my analysis of this layering of past on past in the afterword to
Ada
(London: Penguin, 1999), rpt., in
NAPC
.

14. NABOKOV’S TRANSITION FROM RUSSIAN TO ENGLISH: REPUDIATION OR EVOLUTION?

1
.   Alexander A. Dolinin, “Nabokov as a Russian Writer,” in
Cambridge Companion to Vladimir Nabokov
, ed. Julian Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 49–64; hereafter cited by page number in the text.

2
.   “Anniversary Notes,” Supplement to
Triquarterly
17 (1970); reprinted in
SO
.

3
.   Boyd,
Vladimir Nabokov: Russkie gody
, trans. Galina Lapina (Moscow and St.Petersburg: Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Symposium, 2001), 470. Martin Amis and I agreed, after an April 1999 talk at the Town Hall in New York in which he had named Nabokov rather than Joyce his novelist of the century, that
Ulysses
was the greatest single novel of the century but, as Martin added and I concurred, it has its longueurs.

4
.   See
KQK
x;
LL
144, 147; VN to Mark Aldanov, May 6, 1942, Bakhmeteff Collection, Columbia University Library.

5
.   On
Hamlet
as a “miracle,” see unpublished lecture notes, cited in
VNAY
100; and on its not being “flawless,” see unpublished lectures notes for Russian Survey course, VNA.

6
.   Véra Nabokov to Rebekka Candreia, December 29, 1966, VNA.

7
.   Nabokov,
Glory
, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), x–xi.

8
.   Nabokov,
Mary
, trans. Dmitri Nabokov with Vladimir Nabokov (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), xii.

9
.   Nabokov to Guggenheim Foundation, October 8, 1951, VNA.

10
.   Nabokov to Elena Sikorskiy, October 25, 1945, in
Perepiska s sestroy
(Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1985), 18;
SO
89, 190;
PP
14.

11
.   Another claim Dolinin makes is that he de-Russianized his Russian works, sometimes substituting for Russian references in the originals English or “international” references. But Nabokov had done the same in translating Romain Rolland’s
Colas Breugnon
from French into Russian in 1922 as
Nikolka Persik
or in translating his own
Lolita
from English into Russian in the early 1960s. For the former example, see Stanislav Shvabrin, “Vladimir Nabokov as Translator: The Multilingual Works of the Russian Period,” Ph.D. diss., UCLA. 2007: “Nabokov amplifies the ‘Russianness’ of
Nikolka Persik
not only by means of addition, but also by means of subtraction” (146); Shvabrin characterizes Nabokov’s practice, as early as 1922, as “resolute imaginative conversion of the traits peculiar to the native literary tradition to those specific to the literary tradition active in the target language” (180).

12
.   Andrew Field,
Nabokov: Life in Art
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), 381;
VNAY
515–16.

13
.   Unpublished, from Lectures on Russian Literature MS, VNA.

14
.   Unpublished letter, Nabokov to Andrew Field, September 26, 1966, VNA.

15
.   Nabokov responded after reading the book at the galley stage: “A marvelous achievement … and a fascinating story”: unpublished letter, Nabokov to Field, February 3, 1967, VNA.