The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox

  Perhaps I am reading too much into minor stylistic matters, but the differences between Haeckel’s two statements in his own defense—one in 1899 at the outset of his work, and the other in 1904 at the completion—seem to reveal an increasing need to secure his colleagues’ understanding by toeing the expected scientific line. In 1899 he wrote in the active voice of ordinary prose, using the dreaded first person singular, usually shunned in scientific texts, and clearly leaving some space for departure from factuality to the discretion of “real” artists:In these figures, I have restricted myself to objects of nature that truly exist, and I have refrained from all stylistic modeling and decorative uses; I leave these devices to the artists themselves.

  But in 1904, as if to distance himself from his own productions, and now bowing to conventions of scientific prose, Haeckel makes the same point in the passive voice, with no dispensation awarded to artists for any departure from nature’s truth: “All the ‘Artforms’ depicted here are, in truth, forms that really exist in nature; and they have been drawn without any idealization or stylistic license.”

  NABOKOV’S BUTTERFLIES: CLARITY IN FACT

  If this first example of the fusions of unum cites a case so intermixed and intermediate that the conventional labels of “art” and “science” lose all meaning as distinct modes of inquiry, then a second form of fusion, less intense but far more common, uses the ordinary skills and sensibilities of the “other” side to enhance effective argument in a “home” domain of conventional expertise (often beyond the explicit notice of more parochial practitioners). I have already discussed how such preeminent figures as Charles Lyell and Sigmund Freud advanced their causes by employing an uncommon gift for writing powerful and stylish prose—a “tactic” that many scientists would regard as “stealth,” or at least as irrelevant to conventional standards of rigor in data and logic of argument. (Needless to say, I do not claim either that all scholars in the humanities write skillfully, or that scientists don’t favor well-wrought over disorganized prose. I only point out that humanists explicitly value good writing as a primary desideratum of their enterprise, whereas most scientists tend to dismiss stylistic matters as essentially irrelevant to their work.)

  My favorite example in this second category of unum cites the fascinating case of a great literary figure of the twentieth century (and also a more than merely competent biologist) who followed an important norm of science in his literary work, in full knowledge of what he did, why he so proceeded, and how his writing would be enhanced thereby. Nonetheless, nearly all literary critics have failed to understand either the strategy or the reasons (even though the author stated his aims, explicitly and often), and have maintained their stubborn allegiance to a conventional “literary” explanation that the author himself loathed and rejected. An ironic tale indeed, well fit for the full range of lessons, from moral to political.

  Vladimir Nabokov13 worked from 1942 to 1948 as curator of lepidoptery (butterflies and moths) in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, three floors above the office that I have occupied in the same building for thirty-five years. He was a skilled and fully professional specialist on the taxonomy and natural history of the Polyommatini, popularly known as “blues,” and he published several respected technical monographs on this large group of Latin American butterflies. In fact, as his biographers often remark, before 1948, when he began to teach literature at Cornell, Nabokov earned his primary living, and spent most of his time, as a biologist—and would justly have been labeled a professional scientist and amateur author.

  We can scarcely doubt Nabokov’s love for his first profession, as eloquently expressed in a 1945 letter to his sister:My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding cases of butterflies. I am custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world. . . . Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes, acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens sent by collectors. I work on my personal research . . . a study of the classification of American “blues” based on the structure of their genitalia (minuscule sculpturesque hooks, teeth, spurs, etc., visible only under the microscope), which I sketch in with the aid of various marvelous devices, variants of the magic lantern. . . . My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me. . . . To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena—all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.

  Following the fate of many scientists who spent years in ceaseless scrutiny and drawing of delicate anatomical features under the microscope, Nabokov’s vision became so impaired that he could no longer pursue the detailed work he loved. Yet, and poignantly, he stated in a 1975 interview, long after he had ceased his biological research, that the lure and passion remained as strong as ever:Since my years at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard, I have not touched a microscope, knowing that if I did, I would drown again in its bright well. Thus I have not, and probably never shall, accomplish the greater part of the entrancing research work I had imagined in my young mirages.

  Because Nabokov ranks among the aesthetic gods of our time, critics and scholars have sifted every word of his writing for clues about sources and influences, and a veritable “industry” of Nabokovian interpretation has constructed elaborate and implausible literary “theories” about the meaning of his work. In reading through this material for an essay on Nabokov’s lepidoptery in literature (published in I Have Landed, Harmony Books, 2002), I became both amused and a bit disturbed by the inability of most literary scholars to think outside their own “box” and to proceed beyond their conventional modes of interpretation. All critics recognize, of course, that Nabokov’s writing includes copious references to butterflies and moths, and all scholars know the sources of Nabokov’s expertise in this biological arena.

  Faced with a consequent need to examine the relationship between Nabokov’s science and his writing, scholars in the humanities have, almost invariably, taken refuge in the conventional claim of their craft, despite Nabokov’s own clear rejection of this hypothesis. They argue that, as a literary man, Nabokov used his knowledge of butterflies primarily as a source for metaphors and symbols. Joann Karges, for example (in Nabokov’s Lepidoptera: Genres and Genera, Ardis Press, 1985) writes: “Many of Nabokov’s butterflies, particularly pale and white ones, carry the traditional ageless symbol of the anima, psyche or soul . . . and suggest the evanescence of a spirit departed or departing from the body.”

  But Nabokov himself vehemently insisted that he not only maintained no interest in butterflies as literary symbols, but also that he would regard such usage as a perversion and desecration of his true concerns. (Artists, and all of us, of course, have been known to dissemble, but I see no reason to suspect Nabokov’s explicit comments on this subject.) For example, he stated in an interview: “That in some cases the butterfly symbolizes something (e.g., Psyche) lies utterly outside my area of interest.”

  Over and over again, Nabokov debunks symbolic readings in the name of respect for factual accuracy. For example, he criticizes Poe’s metaphorical invocation of the death’s-head moth because Poe didn’t describe the animal and, even worse, because he placed the species outside its true geographic range: “Not only did he [Poe] not visualize the death’s-head moth, but he was also under the completely erroneous impression that it occurs in America.” Most tellingly, in a typical Nabokovian passage in Ada, he playfully excoriates Hieronymus Bosch for including a butterfly as a symbol in his Garden of Earthly Delights, but then depicting the wings in reverse by painting the gaudy top surface on an insect whose folded wings should be displaying the underside!A tortoiseshell in the middle panel, placed there as if settled on a flower—mark the “
as if,” for here we have an example of exact knowledge of the two admirable girls, because they say that actually the wrong side of the bug is shown, it should have been the underside, if seen, as it is, in profile, but Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of his time, I’m allergic to allegory.

  Finally, when Nabokov does cite a butterfly in the midst of a metaphor, he attributes no symbolic meaning to the insect, but only describes an accurate fact to carry his more general image. For example, he writes in an early story, titled “Mary”: “Their letters managed to pass across the terrible Russia of that time—like a cabbage white butterfly flying over the trenches.”

  I think that we should accept Nabokov at his own word, and honor his different interpretation of how his scientific sensibilities played out within his literature—or rather, and more accurately, how a crucial aspect of his temperament, and a central component of his convictions, served him so well, and in the same manner, in both his fiction and his science. Nabokov, as one of literature’s consummate craftsmen, upheld the sacredness of accurate factuality—an obvious requirement in science, but also a boon to certain genres of literature. Interestingly, and befitting his deservedly greater reputation as a writer than as a biologist (for Nabokov ranks as one of the great novelists of all time, and as an accomplished technician, but not as a brilliant theorist, in science), Nabokov frequently asserted—thus placing his story within this section on the fusions of unum—that literature and science meet in mutual respect for detailed factuality, with the highest virtue of accuracy residing in the evident beauty of such material truth.

  Thus no one grasped the extent of underlying unity between science and literature better than Vladimir Nabokov, who worked with different excellences as a full professional in both domains. Nabokov often insisted that his literary and entomological pursuits shared a common mental and psychological ground. In Ada, while invoking a common anagram for “insect,” one of Nabokov’s characters states: “ ‘If I could write’ mused Demon, ‘I would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how incandescently, how incestuously—c’est le mot—art and science meet in an insect.’”

  Returning to his central theme of aesthetic beauty in both the external existence and our internal knowledge of scientific detail, Nabokov wrote in 1959: “I cannot separate the aesthetic pleasure of seeing a butterfly and the scientific pleasure of knowing what it is.” When Nabokov spoke of “the precision of poetry in taxonomic description”—no doubt with conscious intent to dissipate a paradox that leads most people to regard art and science as inexorably distinct and opposed—he used his literary skills in the service of unity. Thus in a 1966 interview Nabokov broke the boundaries of art and science by stating that the highest ideal of each domain must also characterize true excellence in the other:The tactile delights of precise delineation, the silent paradise of the camera lucida, and the precision of poetry in taxonomic description represent the artistic side of the thrill which accumulation of new knowledge, absolutely useless to the layman, gives its first begetter. . . . There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.

  THE BENEFITS OF PLURIBUS

  The foregoing stories of Haeckel and Nabokov illustrate how foolishly we can waste our time, and how erroneously we may formulate our conclusions, when we fail to perceive the unified intent of creative acts, and insist upon categorizing them as either “art” or “science,” under the fallacy that proper placement will clarify a true intention implicit in one field but actively abjured by the other (artistic license versus natural fidelity for Haeckel, or taxonomic factuality versus literary symbolism for Nabokov). In this section I will tell two stories of apparently opposite form, but of actually identical meaning. For, in both these cases, a persistent puzzle or an erroneous and uncomfortable interpretation (explicitly so identified) has pervaded our conventional literature about an important figure, because we have classified him into one of the two domains (the arts in both cases), whereas the simple solution to the long-standing error requires access to a little item of knowledge conventionally housed in the other domain (the sciences in both stories). In each case, the man himself operated as an unum who worked in both science and the humanities (and did not impose upon himself the dichotomy of “never the twain shall meet”); whereas the solution to the persistent scholarly puzzle requires that we bring together the pluribus of both his true concerns.

  The two stories also present an interesting contrast in the opposite forms of their particular narratives. In the first tale—the valuable scientific work of the maligned artist Abbott Handerson Thayer—we learn about a man who solved a long-standing problem in natural history because, as an artist, the simple solution lay within his realm of learning and discourse, and simply hadn’t been encountered by a professional naturalist. In the second tale—the disarmingly simple solution to an old conundrum about Edgar Allan Poe, including a novel affirmation of real value in his only scientific work—we learn that the solution to an issue that has bothered generations of literary scholars lies in a basic fact about the history of molluscan taxonomy, an item known to every practicing systematist of clams and snails, but never applied to Poe’s problem because these scientists (who would have recognized the solution in a flash) had never encountered the problem (which had resided exclusively in the technical writings of literary critics). Thus, in the first case a visual artist uses his special tool to solve an old puzzle in science; in the second case, a particular fact of science solves an old puzzle about a literary artist.

  THE LOWERED DIMENSIONALITY OF THAYER’S HIGHER INSIGHT

  Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921) does not rank as a household name these days, even among folks reasonably well versed in the history of American art. But, at the acme of his success, around the turn of the twentieth century, before the winds of modernism swept his ethereal paintings of angels and innocent children into oblivion, Thayer occupied the pinnacle of his profession. In fact, Thayer resides among the four contemporary artists (with James McNeill Whistler as the best remembered today), so favored by the industrialist Charles Lang Freer that this wealthy patron established his Freer Gallery, now a major museum within the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C., specifically to house the work of this quartet along with his spectacular collection of oriental art. (Of course, worms turn and winds of fashion reverse. Thayer may never regain his former renown, but angels are certainly back in style these days, and the December 27, 1993, issue of Time magazine featured one of Thayer’s best on its cover.)

  Strangely enough, most evolutionary biologists also know something about Thayer, but in an entirely different context, and almost never by name. In my world, he has survived as a footnote of derision for a standard classroom lecture on the adaptive value of animal coloration, and on the dangers of carrying a pet theory too far. Thayer, who lived in rural New Hampshire, pursued his hobby of birdwatching with sufficient zeal and study to become a respected amateur naturalist and author of several technical articles in professional journals of ornithology. He also, as my story now begins to unfold, followed an all-too-common path in human conviction by developing a good idea about animal coloration, but then elevating his insight, first into a dominant theme, then into a pervasive phenomenon, and finally into an exclusive truth that tolerated not a single exception in the entire domain of nature.

  Naturalists argue—no doubt correctly—that color patterns serve a variety of adaptive ends throughout the animal kingdom. In particular, many patterns conceal creatures from potential enemies, whereas other configurations of form and color serve the opposite function of announcing an animal’s presence, perhaps to court a mate or to scare off other suitors. Thayer, in short, discovered several genuine examples of concealment, based on principles that
had not been sufficiently recognized or understood by previous naturalists. Scientists generally gave warm credit to this initial work (mostly from the 1890s), sometimes with a touch of bemusement, or even begrudgement, because an artist had beat them at their own game—but still with praise and fair acknowledgment.

  Unfortunately, Thayer then followed the Lorelei’s beckoning song of an idée fixe, or one true way. He decided that, in principle and no matter how apparently to the contrary, all colors on the hides and hairs of animals, each and every last one, must have evolved for purposes of concealment, never to reveal or advertise. Thayer applied this exclusive principle throughout nature, from the ever-so-obvious stripes of the zebra (invisible, Thayer showed [see figure 27], in reeds where zebras do not in fact live, but so notable on the open plains, where they do reside), to the gaudy colors of the peacock’s tail (which the bird, when courting, so evidently displays with panache to the peahen, whatever else he might do with the apparatus at other times). In any case, Thayer showcased his uncompromising and controversial views in an elaborate 1909 book, largely authored by his son Gerald: Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (New York, Macmillan).

  Thayer owes his continuing biological sound bite of derision to an argument that he himself acknowledged as his farthest stretch, but also recognized as necessary to imbue his theory with the full generality he so devoutly sought. Blotches and stripes, however prominent, could always be interpreted as efforts to conceal an animal by breaking its integrity into separate pieces (a common device of human camouflage). But Thayer recognized that monochromatic patterns, especially bright colors, posed special problems for interpretation as concealing devices. Hence, Thayer’s conventional downfall in his gutsy, if improbable, attempt to explain the bright and monochromatic redness of flamingos. This color, Thayer argued in all seriousness, evolved to conceal the animals as they feed and blend into the ruddy colors of the rising or setting sun. And this gorgeously ridiculous application of a good theory, pushed maximally beyond its legitimate domain, has served generations of university lecturers as a paradigm for decent intentions unsuppressed by proper skepticism and application of the scientific method. But, to cite Thayer’s own words:These birds are largely nocturnal, so that the only sky bright enough to show any color upon them is the more or less rosy and golden one that surrounds them from sunset till dark and from dawn until soon after sunrise. They commonly feed in immense, open lagoons, wading in vast phalanxes, while the entire real sky above them and its reflected duplicate below them constitute either one vast hollow sphere of gold, rose, and salmon, or at least glow, on one side or the other, with these tones. Their whole plumage is a most exquisite duplicate of these scenes. . . . This flamingo, having at his feeding time so nearly only sunrise colors to match, wears, as he does, a wonderful imitation of them.