Stalking Nabokov (58 page)

In Nabokov’s world, murder matters because other people exist. A murderer acts as if another were only other, not a self in his or her own right. A lover, per contra, can treat the other as a self that matters at least as much as one’s own. Nabokov structures
Lolita
around the contrasts and the comparisons between the girl Humbert loves and the man he hates, the one he tries to immortalize and the one he tries to obliterate, the one he at last realizes has a life of her own and the one he realizes, damn him, had such a life, was just as alive as himself, in fact far too like himself—and whom all the same he is still happy to have killed. Humbert at last loves Lolita, even though she has won free of him; he hates Quilty all the more, the more he finds him freer than himself. To reduce to Humbert’s solipsistic fancies Lolita in her final proud but abashed independence and Quilty in his strutting irrepressibility is to gain nothing and lose almost everything—and all for the sake of one revisable digit.

23. Literature, Pattern,
Lolita

Or, Art, Literature, Science

Brett Cooke, a Slavist at Texas A&M who has published on Nabokov, was also one of the earliest scholars to link evolution and literature and wrote the first monograph reading a literary work through evolutionary lenses, on Evgeny Zamyatin’s science-fiction novel
We
, the inspiration for Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World
. He invited me to link my evolutionary interests and my Nabokovian ones at the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Washington, D.C. I agreed, since I had realized that connecting my long-established interest in Nabokov and my newer interest in evolutionary approaches to literature offered a challenge and a test: if they worked for any literature, they should add new insights even for works I knew as well as Nabokov’s.

But evolutionary criticism offers no readymade answers. I do not think I made much of Nabokov and evolution in my 2006 talk, but this expanded version offers one possible link, through pattern—which, in
On the Origin of Stories
, I take to be central to the evolution of cognition and of the arts. Here I focus on the patterns we notice in life, in art, and in science, then on the difference that some of the patterns concealed within patterns in
Lolita
can make to our sense of the novel.

I also discuss the greater importance in art, including storytelling, of attention over meaning—something appreciated, as I write in the essay, by artists and audiences, but not necessarily by academics, who habitually prioritize meanings that can be expressed in terms of generalizations. Nabokov has addressed this in his own inimitable way: “There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes
after
the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected” (
LL
1). Despite having many of my attitudes to literature and life shaped by Nabokov, I needed to take an evolutionary perspective on literature to understand fully that there was more to Nabokov’s statement than a bias and a bon mot.

Stories can offer so much pleasure that studying them hardly seems like work. Literary scholars have often atoned for enjoying the frissons of fiction by investigating literature as a form of history or moral education. And since the late 1960s, academic literature departments have tried especially to stress criticism as critique, as an agent of social transformation.

For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have often been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained. No wonder academic literary scholarship now describes itself as “a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence.”
¹

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science but also, like others in the humanities and social sciences, have denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence. And indeed the publishing marketplace suggests that literary studies have begun to shift from a decidedly antiscientific and antinaturalistic ethos, long dominant but now exhausted, toward one that seeks to incorporate the discoveries and the methodological strengths of science.
²

There are many ways in which science can return us to and enrich the art of literature. We could consider human natures and minds as understood by science and as represented in literature, not just as seen through the approved lenses of race, gender, and class but in terms, for instance, of the human life-history cycle or social cognition or cooperation versus competition. Or we could develop multileveled explanations that allow room for the universals of human nature, for the local in culture and history, for individuality in authors and audiences, and for the particular problem situations faced in this or that stint of composition or comprehension.

One way to use science to approach literature (and art in general) is to view it as a behavior in evolutionary terms. Why do art in general and storytelling in particular exist as species-wide behaviors? Asking the question in these terms makes possible a genuinely theoretical literary theory, one that depends not on the citation of purportedly antiauthoritarian authorities, but on the presence of evidence and the absence of counterevidence, on examining human behavior across time and space and in the context of many cultures and even many species.

The humanities have always accepted the maxim that biologist D’Arcy Thompson stated with sublime simplicity: “Everything is what it is because it got that way.” How it got that way starts not with the
Epic of Gilgamesh
but much further back: with our evolving into art-making and storytelling animals. How did our capacities for art and story build and become ingrained in us over time? How do we now produce and process stories so effortlessly? What aspects of the mind do we engage, and how?

To consider art and story in evolutionary terms we have to decide whether they are biological adaptations: are they features that natural selection has designed into humans over time because they led to higher rates of survival and reproduction? I argue in my recent book
On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction
that art and storytelling
are
adaptations. These behaviors are species-wide, engaged in spontaneously by all normal individuals and spontaneously encouraged in infants by their parents.

Art is a form of cognitive play with pattern. Just as communication exists in many species, even in bacteria, and human language derives from but redirects animal communication along many unforeseen new routes, so play exists in many species, but the unique cognitive play of human art redirects it in new ways and to new functions.

Play exists even in the brightest invertebrates, like octopi, and in all mammals in which it has been investigated. Its self-rewarding nature means that animals with flexible behavior—behavior not genetically programmed—willingly engage in it again and again in circumstances of relative security and thereby, over time, can master complex, context-sensitive skills. The sheer pleasure of play motivates animals to repeat intense activities that strengthen and speed up neural connections. The exuberance of play enlarges the boundaries of ordinary behavior, in unusual and extreme movements, in ways that enable animals to cope better with the unexpected.

Humans uniquely inhabit “the cognitive niche.”
³
We have an appetite for information and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. We have uniquely long childhoods, and even beyond childhood we continue to play more than other species. Our predilection for the patterned cognitive play of art begins with what developmental psychologists call
protoconversation
, exchanges between infants and caregivers of rhythmic, responsive behavior, involving sound and movement, in playful patterns described as “more like a song than a sentence” and as “interactive multimedia performances.”
⁴
Without being taught, children engage in music, dance, design, and, especially, pretend play.

Our adult compulsion for the cognitive play of art—from tribal work songs to tradesmen’s transistors to urbanites’ iPods—allows us to extend and refine the neural pathways that produce and process pattern in sonic, visual, and kinetic modes. Humans have not only a unique predilection for open-ended pattern but also a unique propensity to share attention (long before we learn language) and for that reason a unique capacity for learning from others. Our inclination for sharing attention and for social learning ensures that we readily master the rudiments of local artistic traditions. Participating in these traditions amplifies the pleasure we gain from social living. By helping to reduce the costs in tension and raise the rewards of sociality, art helps us to cooperate on a scale far beyond that of any other highly individualized animal.

The
Oxford English Dictionary
defines pattern as “an arrangement or order of things or activity… order or form discernible in things, actions, ideas, situations, etc.” Pattern usually signals regularities in the world rather than mere chance: the pattern that my head and my feet turn up not far from one another is not coincidence but part of the regularity that is me.

Until recently computers have fared dismally at pattern recognition, but living organisms have long been expert at it. Pattern turns the data of the senses into information that can guide behavior. The more an organism depends on intelligence, the more it seeks pattern of multiple kinds at multiple levels. Frogs respond to the pattern of small objects flying across their field of vision by flicking out their tongues. That makes them more efficient than you or me at catching insects, but frogs cannot respond to new kinds of patterns. Humans can. In addition to the patterns evolution has programmed us to track, like the shapes or locations of objects, we search for patterns of many kinds. The chemical patterns of insecticides can, for instance, make us more efficient killers of insects than even frogs have evolved to be.

Because the world swarms with patterns, animal minds evolved as pattern extractors, able to detect the information meaningful to their kind of organism in their kind of environment and therefore to predict and act accordingly. Pattern occurs at multiple levels, from the stable information of spatial conditions and physical processes to highly volatile information about individuals and their moods, actions, and intentions. Pattern recognition allows us to distinguish animate from inanimate, human from nonhuman, this individual from any others, this attitude or expression from another. Identifying not only individuals but also the higher-order patterns in their behavior, personality, and powers allows for far more accurate social prediction.

If information is chaotic, it lacks meaningful pattern and can’t be understood. If, on the other hand, it is completely patterned, we need not continue to pay attention, since the information is redundant: indeed, the psychological process of habituation switches attention off if a stimulus remains, if the pattern of information can be predicted. The most patterned novel possible would repeat one letter, say,
q
, over and over again—a queue no reader would want to wait in. But an unpredictable combination of patterns repays intense attention and can yield rich inferences, although finding how to ascertain what forms a meaningful pattern and what meaning the pattern implies may not be easy.

Committed to the cognitive niche, humans crave pattern because it can tell us so much. The more our minds can handle multiple patterns at multiple levels, the more successfully we can predict and act. We therefore have what physicist Edward Purcell calls an “avidity for pattern.” As Stephen Jay Gould notes: “The human mind delights in finding pattern.…No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it.”
⁵
Extreme informational chaos, the absence of pattern, as in whiteout or dense fog, can even cause distress and loss of sensory function.
⁶