#brian boyd

reading ada is like having paranoid delusions that the government is spying on you

"It's pouring, the trees are getting greener before my eyes, I love you. I'm almost afraid of the intensity of this happiness."

Of social trends in his late years, the one directly relevant to Nabokov and his work was the increase in sexual freedom. He had benefited from an earlier phase of this change in the four years between completing “Lolita” (when no American press would touch it) and his trying again to release it in America (when several publishers vied hard for the book). He took advantage of the new freedoms of the 1960s in the hectic sexual frankness of “Ada” and, albeit less centrally, in later work. He protested, though, against the sexualisation of the young, and against ‘the copulation of clichés’ in pornography and in recent film and fiction. He even parodied the success of “Playboy” – which from 1964 published much of his work, including “Ada,” in its flagship magazine – in the worldwide sexual fantasy of “Ada”’s Villa Venus. “Ada” itself was more critique than celebration of oversexualisation.

Humans uniquely inhabit ‘the cognitive niche’: we gain most of our advantages from intelligence. We therefore have an appetite for information, and especially for pattern, information that falls into meaningful arrays from which we can make rich inferences. Information can be costly to obtain and analyze, but because it offers an invaluable basis for action, nature evolves senses and minds to gather and process information appropriate to particular modes of life. Like other species, humans can assimilate information through the rapid processing that specialized pattern recognition allows, but unlike other species we also seek, shape, and share information in an open-ended way. Since pattern makes data swiftly intelligible, we actively pursue patterns, especially those that yield the richest inferences to our minds, in our most valuable information systems, the senses of sight and sound, and in our most crucial domain, social information. We can define art as cognitive play with pattern. Just as play refines behavioral options over time by being self-rewarding, so art increases cognitive skills, repertoires, and sensitivities. A work of art acts like a playground for the mind, a swing or a slide or a merry-go-round of visual or aural or social pattern. Like play, art succeeds by engaging and rewarding attention, since the more frequent and intense our response, the more powerful the neural consequences. Art’s appeal to our preferences for pattern ensures that we expose ourselves to high concentrations of humanly appropriate information eagerly enough that over time we strengthen the neural pathways that process key patterns in open-ended ways.

Errors of memory, especially when they involve dates, may, like casual slips of the tongue or the pen, seem of a different order from apparent inconsistencies in fictional worlds whose details Nabokov entirely controlled himself. But even there, although he was meticulous in the extreme in correcting his work for the smallest imprecisions of phrasing or fact, errors still persisted. Véra Nabokov, never one to denigrate her husband, told me he was very ‘absent-minded.’ When I asked her about resolving editorial problems by consulting the manuscripts, she told me the ‘manuscripts should not be trusted’ as copy texts since ‘he would often write one word when he meant another’ and ‘might not catch it until the galleys.’

As experience makes us more familiar with situations, we can respond to them in ways that require less of the effortful processing of conscious attention operating within working memory. With increasing familiarity, situations can be processed in older, more posterior regions of the brain in faster, parallel, and less effortful ways, leaving more room in working memory to handle real novelty. I will suggest that this is one function of storytelling: that it makes us more expert in social situations, speeding up our capacity to process patterns of social information, to make inferences from other minds and from situations fraught with difficult or subtle choices or to run complex scenarios. Childhood play and storytelling for all ages engage our attention so compulsively through our interest in event comprehension and social monitoring that over time their concentrated information patterns develop our facility for complex situational thought.