Similar principles are carried into the human social realm by Spencer's deterministic theories of sociology which, especially as represented by nineteenth century Russian literary criticism, by Marxist-Leninist dogma, by Stalinism, and by Hitler's National Socialism, Nabokov rejects utterly. In Nabokov's lepidoptera articles this thesis takes the form of Nabokov's theory of the creative evolution of butterfly genitalia, a hypothesis which rejects Spencerian "survival of the fittest" and the single line of biological development implied by Darwin's theory of "natural selection." Instead, Nabokov argues for the mind-like development of species in novel and plural directions, and the constant need for revolutionary revision in science. In Nabokov's texts, mechanism and determinism are rejected, subverted by reflexive techniques, and parodied as aesthetically and morally empty doctrines. Consequently, any static representation of time, including language, is finally mechanistic, false, and even deterministic in the sense of presenting a single, closed future. For both authors, time is real, and change is basic to human perception. Nabokov's published texts of the 1940s-his lepidoptera articles, Nikolai Gogol, Conclusive Evidence, ten short stories, and Bend Sinister-are read in terms of Henri Bergson's theories of image perception. The politics of perception: Vladimir Nabokov's images of the 1940s
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |