Conventional solutions fail because they have focused on too specific a level—that is, to the search for how one domain, usually science in this case, impacted the other. But the basic source of relationship may be hiding at a deeper level (deeper, that is, in a geometric sense, not in any claim about morality or greater importance). Perhaps the major linkage of science and literature lies in some distinctive, underlying approach that Nabokov applied equally to both domains—a procedure that conferred the same special features upon all his efforts. In this case we should not posit a primary and directional impact of one domain upon the other. Rather, we should investigate the hypothesis that Nabokov’s art and science both benefited, in like measure, from his application of a method, or a mode of mental functioning, that exemplifies the basic character of his particular genius.
All natural historians know that “replication with difference” builds the best test case for a generality—for how can we prove a coordinating hypothesis unless we can apply it to multiple cases, and how can we be confident in our conclusion unless these cases be sufficiently different in their immediate context to demonstrate that any underlying commonality must lie in a single mental approach applied to disparate material? Among great twentieth-century thinkers, I know no better case than Nabokov’s for testing the hypothesis that an underlying unity of mental style (at a level clearly meriting the accolade of genius) can explain one man’s success in extensive and fully professional work in two disciplines conventionally viewed as maximally different, if not truly opposed. If we can validate this model for attributing interdisciplinary success to a coordinating and underlying mental uniqueness, rather than invoking the conventional argument about overt influence of one field upon another, then Nabokov’s story may teach us something important about the unity of creativity, and the falsity (or at least the contingency) of our traditional separation, usually in mutual recrimination, of art from science.
Above all else—and why should we not take him at his word?—Nabokov vociferously insisted that he cherished meticulous accuracy in detail as the defining feature of all his productions (as illustrated in the passage quoted on page 41 from Ada). All commentators have noted these Nabokovian claims (for one could hardly fail to mention something stated so frequently and forcefully by one’s principal subject). Previous critics have also recognized that a commitment to detailed accuracy not only defines Nabokov’s maximally rich and meticulously careful prose, but might also be greatly valued for professional work in the description of butterfly species. Unfortunately, however, most commentary then follows a lamentable stereotype about science (particularly for such “low status” fields as descriptive natural history), and assumes that Nabokov’s commitment to accuracy must have imposed opposite qualities upon his work in these two professions—thus, and again lamentably, reinforcing the conventional distinction of art and science as utterly different and generally opposed. Such detail, we are told, enriches Nabokov’s literature, but also brands his science as pedestrian, unimaginative, and “merely” descriptive (as in the cliché about folks who never see forests because they only focus on distinctive features of individual trees). The stereotype of the taxonomist as a narrow-minded, bench-bound pedant then reconfirms this judgment. Zaleski (page 38), for example, sums up his article on Nabokov’s lepidoptery by writing:
In both books and butterflies, Nabokov sought ecstasy, and something beyond. He found it in the worship of detail, in the loving articulation of organic flesh and organized metaphor. . . . He was perfectly suited as a master novelist and a laboratory drudge.
Zaleski goes on to report that Nabokov importuned his Cornell students with a primary motto: “Caress the details, the divine details.” “In high art and pure science,” he stated, “detail is everything.” Indeed, Nabokov often praised the gorgeous detail of meticulous taxonomic language as inherently literary in itself, speaking of “the precision of poetry in taxonomic description” (in Zimmer, page 176). He also, of course, extolled precision in anatomical description for its scientific virtue. He wrote a letter to Pyke Johnson in 1959, commenting upon a proposed jacket design for his Collected Poems (cited in Remington, page 275):
I like the two colored butterflies on the jacket but they have the bodies of ants, and no stylization can excuse a simple mistake. To stylize adequately one must have complete knowledge of the thing. I would be the laughing stock of my entomological colleagues if they happened to see these impossible hybrids.
In reading through all Nabokov’s butterfly references (in his literary works) as preparation for writing this essay, I was struck most of all by his passion for accuracy in every detail of anatomy, behavior, or location. Even his poetical or metaphorical descriptions capture a common visual impression—as when he writes in “The Aurelian,” a story from 1930, about “an oleander hawk [moth] . . . its wings vibrating so rapidly that nothing but a ghostly nimbus was visible about its streamlined body.” Even his occasional fantasies and in-jokes, accessible only to a few initiates (or readers of such study guides as Zimmer’s) build upon a strictly factual substrate. For example, Nabokov thought he had discovered a new species of butterfly during his Russian boyhood. He wrote a description in English and sent the note to a British entomologist for publication. But the English scientist discovered that Nabokov’s species had already been named in 1862 by a German amateur collector named Kretschmar, in an obscure publication. So Nabokov bided his time and finally chose a humorous form of revenge in his novel Laughter in the Dark (quoted in Zimmer, page 141): “Many years later, by a pretty fluke (I know I should not point out these plums to people), I got even with the first discoverer of my moth by giving his own name to a blind man in a novel.”
Literary critics sometimes chided Nabokov for his obsessive attention to detail. Nabokov, in true form, described these attacks with a witty (and somewhat cryptic) taxonomic reference—speaking in Strong Opinions (quoted in Zimmer, page 175) of detractors “accusing me of being more interested in the subspecies and the subgenus than in the genus and the family.” (Subspecies and subgenera represent categories for fine subdivision of species and genera. The rules of nomenclature recognize these categories as available for convenience, but not required in practice. That is, species need not be divided into subspecies, nor genera into subgenera. But genera and families represent basic and more inclusive divisions that must be assigned to all creatures. That is, each species must belong to a genus, and each genus to a family.)
Nabokov generalized his defense of meticulous detail beyond natural history and literature to all intellectual concerns. In a 1969 interview, he scornfully dismissed critics who branded such insistence upon detail as a form of pedantry (my translation from Nabokov’s French, as cited in Zimmer, page 7): “I do not understand how one can label the knowledge of natural objects or the vocabulary of nature as pedantry.” In annotating his personal copy of the French translation of Ada, Nabokov listed the three unbreakable rules for a good translator: intimate knowledge of the language from which one translates; experience as a writer of the language into which one translates; and (the third great dictate of detail) “that one knows, in both languages, the words designating concrete objects (natural and cultural, the flower and the clothing)” (my translation from Nabokov’s French original, cited in Zimmer, page 5).
Zimmer (page 8) epitomizes the central feature of Nabokov’s butterfly citations: “They are all real butterflies, including the invented ones which are mimics of real ones. And they usually are not just butterflies in general, but precisely the ones that would occur at that particular spot, behaving exactly the way they really would. Thus they underscore, or rather help constitute, the veracity of a descriptive passage.” In an insightful statement, Zimmer (page 7) then generalizes this biological usage to an overarching Nabokovian principle with both aesthetic and moral components:
Both the writer of fiction and the naturalist drew on a profound delight in precise comparative observation. For Nabokov, a work of nature
was like a work of art. Or rather it was a profound work of art, by the greatest of all living artists, evolution, and as much a joy to the mind and a challenge to the intellect as a Shakespeare sonnet. Hence it deserved to be studied like it, with never ending attention to detail and patience.
But perhaps the best summary of Nabokov’s convictions about the ultimate value of accurate detail can be found in “A Discovery,” a short poem written in 1943:
Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss
Poems that take a thousand years to die
But ape the immortality of this
Red label on a little butterfly.
(Again, some taxonomic exegesis must be provided to wrest general understanding from the somewhat elitist—scarcely surprising given his social background—and not always user-friendly Nabokov. Museum curators traditionally affix red labels only to “holotype” specimens—that is, to individuals chosen as official recipients of the name given to a new species. The necessity for such a rule arises from a common situation in taxonomic research. A later scientist may discover that the original namer of a species defined the group too broadly by including specimens from more than one genuine species. Which specimens shall then keep the original name, and which shall be separated out to receive a different designation for the newly recognized species? By official rules, the species of the designated holotype specimen keeps the original name, and members of the newly recognized species must receive a new name. Thus, Nabokov tells us that no product of human cultural construction can match the immortality of the permanent name-bearer for a genuine species in nature. The species may become extinct, of course, but the name continues forever to designate a genuine natural population that once inhabited the earth. The holotype specimen therefore becomes our best example of an immortal physical object. And the holotype specimen bears a red label in standard museum practice.)
Nabokov’s two apparently disparate careers therefore find their common ground on the most distinctive feature of his unusual intellect and uncanny skill—the almost obsessive attention to meticulous and accurate detail that served both his literary productions and his taxonomic descriptions so well, and that defined his uncompromising commitment to factuality as both a principle of morality and a guarantor and primary guide to aesthetic quality. Science and literature therefore gain their union on the most palpable territory of concrete things, and on the value we attribute to accuracy, even in smallest details, as a guide and an anchor for our lives, our loves, and our senses of worth.
This attitude expresses a general belief and practice in science (at least as an ideal, admittedly not always achieved due to human frailty). Of all scientific subfields, none raises the importance of intricate detail to such a plateau of importance as Nabokov’s chosen profession of taxonomic description for small and complex organisms. To function as a competent professional in the systematics of Lepidoptera, Nabokov really had no choice but to embrace such attention to detail, and to develop such respect for nature’s endless variety.
But this attitude to detail and accuracy carries no ineluctable status in literature—so Nabokov’s unaltered skills and temperament, now applied to his second profession, conferred distinction, if not uniqueness, upon him. The universal and defining excellence of a professional taxonomist built a substrate for the uncommon, and (in Nabokov’s case) transcendent, excellence of a writer. After all, the sheer glory of voluminous detail does not ignite everyone’s muse in literature. Some folks can’t stand to read every meandering and choppy mental detail of one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, but others consider Ulysses the greatest novel of the twentieth century. I ally myself with the second group. I also love Parsifal—and the writing of Vladimir Nabokov. I have always been a taxonomist at heart. Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail. How can you appreciate a castle if you don’t cherish all the building blocks, and don’t understand the blood, toil, sweat, and tears underlying its construction?4
I could not agree more with Nabokov’s emphasis upon the aesthetic and moral—not only the practical and factual—value of accuracy and authenticity in intricate detail. This sensation, this love, may not stir all people so ardently (for Homo sapiens, as all taxonomists understand so well, includes an especially wide range of variation among individuals of the species). But such a basic aesthetic, if not universal, surely animates a high percentage of humanity, and must evoke something very deep in our social and evolutionary heritage. May I mention just one true anecdote to represent this general argument? The head of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., once hosted a group of blind visitors to discuss how exhibits might be made more accessible to their community. In this museum the greatest airplanes of our history—including the Wright Brothers’ biplane from Kitty Hawk and Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis—hang from the ceiling, entirely outside the perception of blind visitors. The director apologized, and explained that no other space could be found for such large objects, but then asked his visitors whether a scale model of the Spirit of St. Louis, made available for touch, would be helpful. The blind visitors caucused and returned with their wonderful answer: Yes, they responded, we would appreciate such a model, but it must be placed directly under the unperceptible original. If the aesthetic and moral value of genuine objects can stir us so profoundly that we insist upon their presence even when we can have no palpable evidence thereof, but only the assurance that we stand in the aura of reality, then factual authenticity cannot be gainsaid as a fundamental desideratum of the human soul.
This difficult and tough-minded theme must be emphasized in literature (as the elitist and uncompromising Nabokov understood so well), particularly to younger students of the present generation, because an ancient, and basically anti-intellectual, current in the creative arts has now begun to flow more strongly than ever before in recent memory—the tempting Siren song of a claim that the spirit of human creativity stands in direct opposition to the rigor in education and observation that breeds both our love for factual detail and our gain of sufficient knowledge and understanding to utilize this record of human achievement and natural wonder.
No more harmful nonsense exists than this common supposition that deepest insight into great questions about the meaning of life or the structure of reality emerges most readily when a free, undisciplined, and uncluttered (read, rather, ignorant and uneducated) mind soars above mere earthly knowledge and concern. The primary reason for emphasizing the supreme aesthetic and moral value of detailed factual accuracy, as Nabokov understood so well, lies in our need to combat this alluring brand of philistinism if we wish to maintain artistic excellence as both a craft and an inspiration. (Anyone who thinks that success in revolutionary innovation can arise sui generis, without apprenticeship for basic skills and education for understanding, should visit the first [chronological] room of the Turner annex at the Tate Gallery in London—to see the early products of Turner’s extensive education in tools of classical perspective and representation, the necessary skills that he had to master before moving far beyond into a world of personal innovation.)
This Nabokovian argument for a strictly positive correlation (as opposed to the usual philistine claim for negative opposition) between extensive training and potential for creative innovation may be more familiar to scientists than to creative artists. But this crucial key to professional achievement must be actively promoted within science as well. Among less thoughtful scientists, we often encounter a different version of the phony argument for disassociation of attention to detail and capacity for creativity—the fallacy embedded in Zaleski’s statement (cited on page 44) that Nabokov’s obsessive love of detail made him a “laboratory drudge,” even while opening prospects of greatness in literature.
The false (and unstated) view of mind that must lie behind this assertion—and that most supporters of the argument would reject if their unconscious allegiance were made explicit—assumes a fixed and limited amount of ment
al “stuff” for each intellect. Thus, if we assign too much of our total allotment to the mastery of detail, we will have nothing left for general theory and integrative wonder. But such a silly model of mental functioning can only arise from a false metaphorical comparison of human creativity with irrelevant systems based on fixed and filled containers—pennies in a piggy bank or cookies in a jar.
Many of the most brilliant and revolutionary theoreticians in the history of science have also been meticulous compilers of detailed evidence. Darwin developed his theory of natural selection in 1838, but prevailed because, when he finally published in 1859, he had also amassed the first credible factual compendium (overwhelming in thoroughness and diversity) for the evolutionary basis of life’s history. (All previous evolutionary systems, including Lamarck’s, had been based on speculation, however cogent and complex the theoretical basis.) Many key discoveries emerged and prevailed because great theoreticians respected empirical details ignored by others. In the most familiar example, Kepler established the ellipticity of planetary orbits when he realized that Tycho Brahe’s data yielded tiny discrepancies from circularity that most astronomers would have disregarded as “close enough”—whereas Kepler knew that he could trust the accuracy of Tycho’s observations.