Message

EDITOR's NOTE. I see that although I pointed to Dieter Zimmer's extremely valuable GUIDE.., I should have also mentioned NABOKOV's BUTTERFLIES, a compendium of all of VN's texts on butterflies, compiled by Boyd and Lepidopterist Robert Pyle. For those readers of NABOKV-L who may wonder about the seemingly marginal relevance of all this to VN's arts take a look at SPEAK, MEMORY's sixth chapter and especially the latter part of section 2, starting just before "The mysteries of mimicry hs=ad a special attraction for me."

----- Original Message -----

From: Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)

To: 'Vladimir Nabokov Forum'

Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 8:25 PM

Subject: RE: Boyd on Zimmer on Mimicry

Dieter and I are very close on this, but since he wants a response:

I can’t see how Dieter thinks he has collected “all (!)” examples of mimicry in VN in the Guide, since he omits the Photinus (firefly) and the Ophrys (orchid) examples in ADA, but he does list all the lepidopterological examples, and there’s no reason why a Guide to Nabokov’s Butterflies and Moths needs to do more. But precisely because his focus was on the Lepidoptera, I think Dieter may not have considered sufficiently what VN’s handling of mimicry outside Lepidoptera adds to our sense of the range of his knowledge.

I don’t claim at all, and nor does VN, that he was an expert in mimicry; simply that he was fascinated by it as a naturalist and a metaphysician and that we can only infer he was well informed about it.

VN had neither artistic nor scientific occasion to discuss mimicry in extenso, except in the one lost MS talk in 1942. If he hadn’t been provoked into writing up his work on The Song of Igor’s Campaign, we’d have had no idea of the depth of his knowledge in THAT area. If his 1942 mimicry talk had been preserved, we would have had an idea of his depth of knowledge there. Given that it wasn’t, but that we know the care with which he studied anything (scansion, Hamlet scholarship, the life of Chernyshevsky, Berlin streets, you name it), and the lifelong nature of his interest in mimicry, we can only infer that he is likely to have had a detailed knowledge of the subject when he drafted that talk.

Nabokov was fascinated by mimicry because he was fascinated by natural variety, by intricacy of pattern, by natural deception, and especially—and I agree entirely with Dieter’s emphasis in the Guide—because he thought that mimicry could be so complex, perfect and beyond predators' powers of perception as to pose a challenge for natural selection and almost an implicit proof that the design in nature could only be accounted for by some form of intelligence.

The very depth of his attraction to this idea, for metaphysical reasons, made him interested in challenging explanations for mimicry through natural selection, but also made him disinclined to think seriously about how science might be able to explain mimicry one day.

His position has proved to be wrong, but as Dieter knows, most of the evidence that shows he was wrong (that whether near-perfect or not, mimicry nevertheless increases survival rates of the mimics; that the perceptual systems of the predators are better than he had assumed; that the time it would take natural selection to shape elaborate mimicry need not be impossibly long, etc.) didn’t start coming in until after he was no longer working as a research scientist.

Dieter discusses the matter with wonderful lucidity in his Guide. All I’d stress is that a) we don’t have evidence that he knew little about mimicry, b) we have reason to infer he knew a good deal, and c) we have reason to infer he didn’t think nearly as seriously or scientifically about naturalistic explanations for mimicry as he might have, had he not had a powerful commitment to a non-naturalistic explanation.

EDITOR's NoTE. The "Guide... 2001" referred to below is Dieter Zimmer's definitive work on VN's references to lepidoptera. Privately printed and handsomely illustrated, it is described (and available through the author's web page at mail@d-e-zimmer.de Zimmer is also the editor of the splendidly annotated Rowohlt VNcollected works.

----- Original Message -----

From: Dieter E. Zimmer

To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum

Sent: Wednesday, September 04, 2002 1:29 AM

Subject: Re: Mimicry thread

It's a great pleasure and relief to see Brian disentangling some of the knots in this rocketing Boyd/Alexander thread. I knew he would jump at my casual remark that I do not consider Nabokov an expert on mimicry. Of course, in a way Brian is right: there is no positive evidence that Nabokov wasn't. There just is a lack of evidence that he was. Even if my alien English may again put me at the risk of being dreadfully misunderstood I will venture on this dangerous ground for the question is important, and Nabokovians must address these touchy issues.

In my "Guide... 2001," I collected and listed all (!) cases of mimicry mentioned in Nabokov's published works. When I started out, I was expecting to find quite a bit, given the importance Nabokov himself attributed to mimicry as a proof that the theory of natural selection was wrong or unsufficient. As a matter of fact, I was very much hoping I would find ample evidence that would underscore Nabokov's point. When I was finished, I was disappointed with the paucity of this material.

There are only five cases of true mimicry (one insect seemingly imitating the looks or ways of another one) in all of Nabokov's writings. Two are purely imaginary, one is just a nice offhand joke to an interviewer. There are just two real cases. One is the well-known and much discussed case of the African swallowtail _Papilio dardanus_, the other the uraniid _Alcides agathyrsus_. The last one, however, Nabokov got wrong when he wrote that it is "a tropical geometrid colored in perfect imitation of a species of butterfly infinitely removed from it in nature's system, the illusion of the orange abdomen possessed by one being homorously reproduced in the other by the orange-colored inner margins of the secondaries." The latter remark allows to clearly pinpoint the bug. Actually it is the well-known case of a New Guinea papilionid (_Chilaza laglaizei_) imitating a uraniid (_Alcides agathyrsus_).

There also are eight cases of crypsis (imitative form or color of other objects) and five cases of warning patterns that Nabokov also called mimicry, a thing not unusual in those days. In the crypsis section, one is a plain misunerstanding of his source (the rhubarb root caterpillar) and one most likely is imaginary (_Pseudodemas tschumarae_). The other six are extremely well-known and have always been interpreted as protective devices, like the catocalid larva resembling the twig it lives on.

Of the five cases of warning patterns, one probably is an offhand misinterpretation of his source (W.H. Bates), three are a matter of looking at the insects with human eyes, with no evidence that potential predators also see those snakes and bubbles of poison, and one is an echo of Yo.A. Porchinski's outdated "oozing poison" theory that to my knowledge no entomologist has ever taken seriously.

That leaves us with two well-known cases of true mimicry and seven equally well-known cases of mimicry in an extended sense. For none of them even he himself denied that the imitation serves as a protective device. Now he certainly may have known about many more cases. As a matter of fact, I am positive he did, for I have gone through much of the old literature from which he may have taken his examples (some of it Darwinian, some anti-Darwinian), so I know he must have come across many more if he read only one of those books. Perhaps there were more in his 194x lecture paper which unfortunately is lost, and perhaps some of those presented more convincing cases for his doubts about Darwinism. I would hope so. But as things stand, I regret to say he didn't give one single convincing or at least plausible case to prove his anti-Darwinian stand, and the few he gave were imaginary and in addition very weak. So if he had more and better evidence, why did he keep it back? Why didn't he triumphantly brandish those instances? Why did he instead content himself with a few weak imaginary cases? Of course, there may be several answers to this question, and I am curious to know what Brian would say. As for myself, I cannot help supposing that Nabokov was not the expert on mimicry many of us (including myself) have believed him to be.

PS. As for Kurt Johnson's remark that a butterfly does not "decide" but just presents a "released behavior". Well, we all know anthropomorphic language is bad, but we all know also that it is irresistably attractive, so we all use it, sometimes even in peer-reviewed literature, and as long as we are aware that it is just a shorthand way of speaking about the absolutely unknown (the subjective experience of a living being other than oneself) I think it is all right, for it makes for better reading.

Berlin, September 4, 2002 -- 10:30am