The Keeper

":World Rescue Project" by Vanda Vieira-Schmidt

Why do people collect? What is the magic of stamps (philately) and coins (numismatics)? What was the drive behind Nabokov’s great taxonomic project of classifying butterfly genitalia? Supposedly it was to distinguish between the seemingly indistinguishable. What drove Vanda Vieira-Schmidt to produce her "World Rescue Project" or Weltrettungsprojeckt composed of 500,000 drawings depicting “demonic messages that had been sent to earth with Uranium and electrocution devices.” The Keeper, the exhibition which is currently completing a run at The New Museum is partially the handiwork of Massimiliano Giorni, the curator of Venice Biennale's 2013 The Encyclopedia Palace. In that exhibition a piece of outsider art by Marino Auriti provided the inspiration for a show that deal with information itself. The Keeper, which sounds a little like the title of a movie (say The Exorcist) purportedly “tells the stories of individuals through the objects they chose to safeguard, exposing the diverse motivations that inspired them to endow both great and mundane things with exceptional significance.” But the mind of the collector itself is what is being collected here and the impulse turns out to be a little like Noah’s Ark, to the extent that the gathering of artifacts is a bulwark against an imagined or impending oblivion. Sadness and loss together with the notion of reconstitution are characteristics of this calling. Collecting is also a form of control. John Fowles wrote a novel called The Collector, which was made into a William Wyler film. In that instance the title character (Terence Stamp) stalks and prays on his beautiful victim who he eventually imprisons (like Nabokov he also collects butterflies). Here is what Nabokov himself wrote about the collecting impulse in his poem, "On Discovering a Butterfly: "I found it and I named it, being versed/in taxonomic Latin; thus became/godfather to an insect and its first/describer--and I want no other fame." Luckily for us Nabokov's humility turned out to be disingenuous.

Another Life

Photo: Carol Shadford

At the very beginning of  “Another Life,” the Paul La Farge short story that appeared in a the July 2nd New Yorker, the author places Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, into his protagonist’s hand. “Nature commands every animal and the beast obeys,” the protagonist (identified only as “the husband”) quotes Rousseau as saying. “Man feels the same impulsion, but knows that he is free to acquiesce or resist.” The husband takes the Rousseau with him down to the bar of the hotel where he and his wife are staying and the volume functions as an ironic leitmotif as La Farge’s character proceeds to cheat on his wife with the comely and literary young bartender. Indeed neither the husband nor his wife, who shows up only to run off with a character described first only as a “sleazebag” (and is then given the name, Jim LaMont), turns out to be free. What we have is an irrational universe of the kind that Nietzsche might have described in Beyond Good And Evil or The Birth of Tragedy. La Farge’s tone is taciturn, resigned, even stoic. His protagonist is revealed to be a writer who is not reading the Rousseau because he wants to but because he has to teach it.  “I’m being compelled to read about freedom!” he muses. He describes himself to the bartender as someone who “writes short stories about the confusion of life and the unknowability of the heart.” When the bartender invokes Chekhov, the protagonist brings up Nabokov “with his unreliable narrators.” After the sex, the husband blacks out on a bench in a nearby square and the young lady who also eventually and significantly is given a name (as if her character unlike that of the husband is still in the process of formation) returns to her room and “starts working on a story.” Rather than Nabokov, La Farge himself is reminiscent of Chekhov. His current offering bears comparison to a sad, sweet Chekhov classic about another evanescent relationship, “The Lady with the Dog.” 

Nabokov Under the Glass

In a review/essay in the February 4 Times Literary Supplement, Thomas Karshan comments about Nabokov, “In his enormous English edition of Eugene Onegin, he unearthed the gargantuan root-system of poetic allusion that feeds Pushkin’s novel in verse. He (Nabokov) mocked and celebrated the elephantine pedantry of that edition in his novel Pale Fire, which is composed of a 999-line poem by imaginary poet John Shade, and a textual apparatus written by a crazed scholar, Kinbote” (“Nabokov in Bed,” TLS, 2/4/11). Karshan goes on to distinguish between two of Nabokov’s characters, Kinbote and his uncle Conmal, who simply enjoys reading, as a way of discussing the antinomies of Nabokov’s own personality and the critical approaches these dualities propose. Eric Naiman, a latter day Kinbote, whose Nabokov, Perversely is reviewed in the Karshan’s piece “believes that Nabokov seeded throughout his major works the syllables of various dirty words so as to express ‘art’s necessary perversity.’” Karshan points to Naiman’s analysis of the words “associate” and “banal” in Bend Sinister as containing the roots “ass” and “anal,” and revealing “clues to a homosexual subtheme in the book.” “Conrad” and “constructed” in Lolita conjure the French “con,” meaning “idiot,” and the Spanish “with,” which one would suppose functions as some sort of double entendre. In Pnin, “chat” is of course “pussy,” and words like “very,” “university” and “discovered” contain a root of “perverse.” Karshan, who goes on to review two other Nabokov critiques in his essay, concludes about Naiman, “There is, then, a fascinating book to be written about the perverse reading that would do justice to Nabokov, but Nabokov, Perversely is not that book.” But it’s fun to think of the writer as creating antibodies like a sufferer of an autoimmune illness, which attacks the organism itself. Was it the nature of Nabokov’s own particular brand of esthetic paraphilia that he set out to ridicule the edifices he so painstakingly created?

Monsieur Butterfly

There is an incredibly touching section in Carl Zimmer’s recent Times piece about a 1945 paper on butterflies by Nabokov (“Nonfiction: Nabokov Theory on Butterfly Evolution is Vindicated,” NYT, 1/25/11). “When his father was imprisoned by the Russian authorities for his political activities,” Zimmer writes, “the 8-year-old Nabokov brought a butterfly to his cell as a gift.” Such was his passion for lepidoptery that Nabokov undertook the 1945 paper about the migratory patterns and evolution of Polyommatus blues. Though largely discountenanced by the scientific community in his time, Zimmer remarks, “Last week in The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.” Most importantly, in order to pursue his research Nabokov “developed forward-thinking ways to classify the butterflies based on differences in their genitalia.” One can’t help but take note of Nabokov’s methodology in the light of the triage he performed in Lolita. Zimmer points out that Nabokov was “the curator of Lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard,” and the still shocking pedophilia of Lolita has always been counterbalanced by the picture of the Russian émigré and exile—the gentle scholar whose real themes had nothing to do with perversion. But Nabokov was ultimately as interested in the genitals of people as he was of his beloved butterflies. Flaubert’s famous line, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” applies to Nabokov’s most infamous character, the aging paraphiliac Humbert Humbert. Nabokov was not an eccentric who happened to write one book with an incidentally sexual theme. He was a dirty old man, in love with the pupa, the pudenda and lost youth, and his writing is all the greater for it.