after writing that last post, i re-visited this lecture by Nabokov - beautifully told:
On Transformation
by Vladimir Nabokov
THERE was a Chinese philosopher who all his life
pondered the problem whether he was a Chinese philosopher dreaming that
he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming that she was a philosopher.
All three stories ["The Carrick," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "The
Metamorphosis"] are concerned with transformation, with metamorphosis.
Who can explain the process in entomological terms?
Transformation ... Transformation is a marvelous thing ... I am thinking
especially of the transformation of butterflies. Though wonderful to
watch, transformation from larva to pupa or from pupa to butterfly is
not a particularly pleasant process for the subject involved. There
comes for every caterpillar a difficult moment when he begins to feel
pervaded by an odd sense of discomfort. It is a tight feeling -- here
about the neck and elsewhere, and then an unbearable itch. Of course he
has moulted a few times before, but
that is nothing in comparison
to the tickle and urge that he feels now. He must shed that tight dry
skin, or die. As you have guessed under that skin, the armor of a pupa
-- and how uncomfortable to wear one's skin over one's armor -- is
already forming: I am especially concerned at the moment with those
butterflies that have carved golden pupa, called also chrysalis, which
hang from some surface in the open air.
Well, the caterpillar must do something about that horrible feeling. He
walks about looking for a suitable place. He finds it. He crawls up a
wall or a tree-trunk. He makes for himself a little pad of silk on the
underside of that perch. He hangs himself by the tip of his tail or last
legs, from the silk patch, so as to dangle head downwards in the
position of an inverted question-mark, and there
is a
question
-- how to get rid now of his skin. One wriggle, another wriggle -- and
zip the skin bursts down the back, and he gradually gets out of it
working with shoulders and hips like a person getting out of a sausage
dress. Then comes the most critical moment. -- You understand that we
are hanging head down by our last pair of legs, and the problem now is
to shed the whole skin -- even the skin of those last legs by which we
hang -- but how to accomplish this without falling?
So what does he do, this courageous and stubborn little animal who is
already partly disrobed. Very carefully he starts working out his hind
legs, dislodging them from the patch of silk from which he is dangling,
head down -- and then with an admirable twist and jerk he sort of jumps
off
the silk pad, sheds the last shred of hose, and immediately, in the
process of the same jerk-and-twist-jump he attaches himself anew by
means of a hook that was under the shed skin on the tip of his body. Now
all the skin has come off, thank God, and the bared surface, now hard
and glistening, is the pupa, a swathed-baby like thing hanging from that
twig -- a very beautiful chrysalis with golden knobs and plate-armor
wingcases. This pupal stage lasts from a few days to a few years. I
remember as a boy keeping a hawkmoth's pupa in a box for something like
seven years, so that I actually finished high school while the thing was
asleep -- and then finally it hatched -- unfortunately it happened
during a journey on the train, -- a nice case of misjudgement after all
those years. But to come back to our butterfly pupa.
After say two or three weeks something begins to happen. The pupa hangs
quite motionless, but you notice one day that through the wingcases,
which are many times smaller than the wings of the future perfect insect
-- you notice that through the horn-like texture of each wingcase you
can see in miniature the pattern of the future wing, the lovely flush of
the groundcolor, a dark margin, a rudimentary eyespot. Another day or
two -- and the final transformation occurs. The pupa splits as the
caterpillar had split -- it is really a last glorified moult, and the
butterfly creeps out -- and in its turn hangs down from the twig to dry.
She is not handsome at first. She is very damp and bedraggled. But
those limp implements of hers that she has disengaged, gradually dry,
distend, the veins branch and harden -- and in twenty minutes or so she
is ready to fly. You have noticed that the caterpillar is a
he, the pupa an
it, and the butterfly a
she.
You will ask -- what is the feeling of hatching? Oh, no doubt, there is
a rush of panic to the head, a thrill of breathless and strange
sensation, but then the eyes see, in a flow of sunshine, the butterfly
sees the world, the large and awful face of the gaping entomologist.
******
found online here:
Atlantic online
In March of 1951, in the first year that Nabokov
taught his Masterpieces of European Fiction course at Cornell, he
included three stories involving transformation: Gogol's "The Overcoat"
(with his habitual hyperprecision he preferred to translate the title as
"The Carrick"), Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and Kafka's "The
Metamorphosis." Here he introduces the subject of transformation for
his students.
-- BRIAN BOYD
[Unpublished.]
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