What a Butterfly Might Mean
Marianne Janack
“[T]he highest enjoyment of timelessness—in a landscape selected at random—is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which I cannot explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love, a sense of oneness with sun and stone, a thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern, perhaps to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to the tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.”
From Speak, Memory
When Vladimir Nabokov talks about the ecstasy and mania he feels about butterfly collecting, I am reminded of Humbert Humbert’s mania for what he calls “nymphets”: he connects them to an enchanted way of seeing the ordinary. “Nymph” is a term used to refer to an immature insect as well as to female nature deities. Delores—whom Humbert Humbert baptizes for his own reveries Lolita—is, he admits, a common and unremarkable American teenager. And yet, his mania leads him to ignore this commonness and see in her something divine and worth pursuing.
No one who has thought much about butterfly collecting can ignore the killing part: when I saw the butterflies in the American Museum of Natural History--some of which Nabokov collected and donated to the Museum—I saw blues, sulphurs, and dusty-looking moths mounted with pins. They laid there with wings opened and pinned and there was a card next to each with its Latin name and where it was collected. I imagined the process by which the butterflies and moths were prepared for display—the ether, the killing jar—and wondered what it meant to love something so much that one was willing to kill it so that others might see it, too. Nabokov connects the smell of ether to his fond memory of being taught by his mother how to mount butterflies for display:
“I found a spectacular moth, and my mother killed it with ether. In later years, I used many killing agents, but the least contact with the initial stuff would always cause the door of the past to fly open. Once, as a grown man, I was under ether during an operation, and with the vividness of a decalcomania picture I saw my own self in a sailor suit mounting a freshly emerged Emperor moth under the guidance of my smiling mother. It was all there, brilliantly reproduced in my dreams, while my own vitals were being exposed: the soaking, ice-cold absorbent cotton pressed to the lemurian head of the moth; the subsiding spasm of its body; the satisfying crackle produced by the pin penetrating the chitinous crust of its thorax; the careful insertion of the pin in the cork-bottomed groove of the spreading board; the symmetrical adjustment of the strong-veined, “windowed” wings under neatly affixed strips of paper.” (“Butterflies: The Childhood of a Lepidopterist,” V. Nabokov, New Yorker, June 3, 1945.)
Nabokov was very proud of his lepidopterist work even though he was often dismissed as a dilettante by practicing scientists in the field. Yet, he published several articles about taxonomy and is credited with discovering a species of butterfly: the Arctic Blue. He also developed a theory about the way that butterfly populations might have settled in different geographical areas: this theory was confirmed 70 years later on the basis of DNA analysis. If the Russian Revolution had not happened, Nabokov said, he would not have written novels but would have dedicated his life to the study of butterflies.
Is there a connection between Nabokov’s scientific interests and his novels? We could, of course, read the novels looking for such autobiographical connections. Butterflies appear in many scenes in Lolita; people have connected the names of some of the characters in the novel to butterfly names. Lolita’s change from nymphet to married woman has been compared to the process of metamorphosis.
Perhaps the close observation that allowed Nabokov to find and draw butterflies was a skill that he exercised in the process of novel-writing. Or is it that the cruelty of butterfly dissection and display are emblematic of the kind of cruelty that artistic creation might hide?
Maybe we should examine the connection more closely. Or maybe this time, a butterfly is just a butterfly.