Stalking Nabokov (24 page)

Because we have the longest childhood of any species, play is particularly important for us, and because we now can produce food surpluses and live in settlements safe from predation, children have still more scope for play than the young of any other animals. But humans depend not just on physical skills but even more on mental power. Information matters for any species, but for no others is it so decisive as for ours. So for us the problem arises: How can we make more of our information-processing skills?

For animals to process information quickly, to make rich rapid inferences that can guide action, information needs to form patterns that minds can recognize almost automatically. Information falls into patterns, in most cases, when there are regularities in the world, regularities that make it more possible to predict what is about to happen. All animals seem to prefer patterned information (symmetry, for instance, distinct colors and shapes, clear-pitched sounds) over more chaotic information arrays: we therefore perceive as particularly beautiful phenomena like rainbows and sunsets in the world of physics and flowers and butterflies in the biological world. We especially crave information that falls into the kinds of patterns our minds have found most useful and have learned to process especially efficiently, like information about other plants or animals or fellow humans.

We crave information. But because we have a much more open-ended curiosity than other animals, we have a special appetite for pattern. We crave the high yield of novel kinds of pattern. So we not only chase and tussle, we not only play physically, but we also play cognitively, with patterns of the kinds of information that matter most to us: sound, sight, and, in our ultrasocial species, social information. We play with the rhythm and pitch and shape of sounds in music and song; with colors and shapes in drawing and painting and mudpies or sandcastles; and with patterns of social information in pretend play and story. In the social world, we see patterns of identity (who are they?), personality (what are they like?), society (whom are they related to? whom do they team up with? how do they rank?). In the world of events, we see patterns of cause and effect. In the world of social events, we see patterns of intention, action, and outcome.

Art and fiction start here. Because intense repetition and concentrated attention can rewire brains incrementally, the compulsiveness of music, images, and story reshapes human minds. We process aural, visual, and social information more rapidly, accurately, and flexibly through playing in a self-rewarding way with the high-density information, the cognitive play, of art. In this light Nabokov’s hunch that what makes us most human is not competition but “lolling and loafing,” the security of parental care and the
play
of the imagination within it—stressed so beautifully in the first and last chapters of
Speak, Memory—
seems not so wide of the mark.

Our minds are most finely tuned for understanding agents—any creature that can act, animal, human, and even, by extension, unseen agents like spirits. In ancient environments, the agents we evolved to track were other animals as well as people, and even in modern urban environments children have a compulsive desire to learn the names of animals and to play or attend to stories with animals. Our minds want to and easily can track and differentiate agents since other agents, human or not, offer the most complex, volatile, and high-stake information we regularly encounter. We carry that motivation and capacity into pretend play and story. Very young children do not readily think offline, away from the here and now. They do not easily recall their recent past, but they can easily use the present props of toys, whether homemade or manufactured, to conjure up scenarios involving agents that hook their attention. They learn to think in a sustained fashion in ways decoupled from the here and now, first by using physical props as fellow agents, then gradually by raiding the readymade stories and characters of their culture. By building on our sociality, fiction stretches our imaginations, taking us from our immediate present along tracks we can easily follow offline because they are the fresh tracks of agents.

In
On the Origin of Stories
I discuss the other functions that derive from stories as cognitive play with patterns of social information. Not only does their compulsiveness improve our social cognition, but stories also stretch our imagination, our capacity to think away from the here and now, our capacity to see from multiple perspectives in time, place, person, and mode. They offer a series of social thought experiments and ways to share values and understandings, ways to amplify our attunement, motivate our assembly, and therefore improve social cohesion. Like the other arts, fiction becomes a kind of high play that also offers a sense of human mastery, a sense we can shape the world on our own terms. Homer, the greatest of early storytellers, unfolds the world as humanly knowable, from the minds of the gods to the minds of humans, from the panorama of the known world down to a detail like the latch on a door. Homer’s stories, classicists have argued, may even have provided the incentive to develop the first alphabet;
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they certainly promptly provided the core of Greek education and, arguably, the confidence in the mind’s capacity to encompass the world that inspired Greek thought.

In the real world of biological evolution, as opposed to the world of the stories we shape for ourselves, every benefit has a cost. Our capacity to understand other minds so well, which arises especially from our cooperative disposition, allows us to understand false belief: we appreciate clearly that others may not know information relevant to the situation that we happen to know. That also means that we realize
we
may not know what we need to know, and that realization drives human curiosity. But it also drives our unique human anxiety. There may be things we feel we need to know about that we know we do not know. That shapes stories: dramatic irony, what some of us know about a situation that others do not.

But it also shapes our real-world anxieties. We want to understand the causes of things, and we want to understand the consequences. Where do we come from? Where do we go to? Uncertainty and indecision are biologically unproductive. Better at least to think we know and make a move than to stay stalled. Because our imaginations naturally play with agents, we have ways to plug the gaps in our knowledge. We have a natural tendency to over-read rather than underread agency: better to suppose that bush a bear than vice versa. We want to do things, and we do: we see agency as the prototype of cause. We are fascinated by powers different than ours: animals stronger or swifter than us, birds that fly by day, owls or bats that fly by night and “see” in the dark.

Our uncertainty produces anxiety, anxiety that, throughout history, our predisposition to think in terms of agency has allayed. We engage in a kind of social confabulation rather than having to confront our failure to understand.
⁶
We have coped with our anxiety about not knowing enough by inventing stories involving agents who know what we don’t. As research shows, we especially notice and remember creatures with powers that are
minimally
counterintuitive—gods or spirits who can see but be unseen, say, rather than those who exist only on Wednesdays. Such stories pervade all known cultures, and the sense of control they help give human lives means they have been handed down through the generations in compelling stories often reinforced by compelling ritual, music, dance, costume, and architecture. For a long time, much of the power of art has been commandeered by religion. And even someone as little disposed to conventional religion as Nabokov can be prone to overread agency in the unknown and, in his case, to see a cosmic playfulness behind things.

So the species that thrives most on information also generates the acknowledged fictions of story and the apparent explanations in the stories that have congealed into belief, into religion. Although true information can be invaluable biologically—if I want to kill prey, I need to know where it is— information need not invariably be true to be biologically advantageous. So long as it leads to biologically advantageous behavior it can be favored: a belief, say, in an unseen being who would witness and punish my uncooperative conduct, even if no others in my group could see what I was up to, will benefit the cohesiveness of my group and therefore, on average, our capacity to overcome competing groups.

Religion offers explanations beyond what we can see. It allays our anxieties about what we recognize we do not know, and it does so via the inclination to understand in terms of agency so natural for our ultrasocial selves. Eventually our awareness that there are things we do not know and should find out leads to science, to explaining things without agency. Science, too, uses our ultrasociality, although in a different way, through the competitive and cooperative advancing and testing of ideas. But whereas agency comes naturally to us, systematically challenging and testing the ideas that seem to have allowed us to survive so far seems comparatively unnatural. Unlike stories with agents, which we have evolved to be predisposed to, the agentless explanations of scientific stories seem draining both emotionally, in that they require us to put our best explanations to the test, and imaginatively, in that they require us to think about mechanisms not at the level of agency.

Despite Nabokov’s own hunch that natural mimicry could be explained only as the invention “of some waggish artist precisely for the intelligent eyes of man”—a hunch he gives to the lepidopterist Konstantin Godunov-Cherydntsev in
The Gift—
he knew to keep this kind of explanation out of his science. In the fictional addendum to
The Gift
published in English as “Father’s Butterflies,” Godunov-Cherdynstev, though a distinguished scientist, proposes an explanation for evolution that passes beyond material causes. But once Nabokov himself became a research scientist, his own papers remain resolutely within the parameters of science, eschewing any appeals to ultimate agents or metaphysical drives.

I’ve tried to suggest why, from an evolutionary perspective, libraries store fictions and scriptures as well as nonfictions in their stacks. I’ve also suggested that without the capacity we have to understand and imagine other minds, without the capacity to move about in imaginative space that we develop in pretend play and story, without the confidence that we can shape things to please ourselves as we do in art generally and in fiction in particular, we might not have libraries or books to put in them.

Or to put this in Nabokovian rather than Darwinian terms: without freedom from incessant competition, without lolling and loafing in ideas, without the play of the mind, we would not have Nabokov’s
Lolita
or his Lepidoptera papers or his speculations about what might lie behind and beyond life. Room to play matters to us as human beings, even if for those of us who have the privilege of working primarily with information, playing with ideas can become compulsive hard work—ninety hours a week for Nabokov in his prime. The Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, perhaps the most distinguished of those to have learned from Nabokov, writes ten hours a day: “Yes, I’m a hard worker… . I’m in love with what I do. I enjoy sitting at my desk like a child playing with his toys. It’s work, essentially, but it’s fun and games also.”
⁷
Few filmmakers have produced such searing explorations of the human condition as Ingmar Bergman, but he described film-making as like returning to childhood, a game, a kind of play.
⁸
And not just art needs play. Nabokov would have been delighted with the work of Robert Root-Bernstein, who shows that leading scientists in many fields insist on the element of play that they need to be able to invent new ideas and on the element of imaginative identification that makes them able if they are chemists, say, to imagine themselves as one kind of molecule interacting with others.
⁹
Without the unruliness of play we would not have the hush and the order of libraries.