E.O. Wilson and Pale Fire

Running through my notes from this year, I discovered notes on E.O. Wilson's lecture. In it he stated more than once his belief that America is a nation of Peter Pans. For a long time after the lecture I continued to contemplate those words and their meaning. Wilson berated the world of fantasy yet called for a union between the worlds of art and science. It was not imagination that he opposed, it was the existence of fantasy without reality that he found fault with. Yet similarly, he advocated the need for fantasy to complement and complete reality. In his view, if one was found without the other, it resulted in a failure to meet the full potential. 


Prior to E.O. Wilson, our class had split itself between those who fell on the side of truth and those who fell on the side of lies. Essentially, reality vs. fantasy. Perhaps due to an overabundance of morality, the majority of the class chose truth. Another way to say this is that in the dichotomy of Shade vs. Kinbote, the class chose Shade. Additionally, Wilson chose Shade. Contemplating this, I am reminded of "The Idea of Order at Key West" in which reality was lifeless without imagination. Certainly, at least in practical terms, Wilson is correct in stating that one cannot stand solely upon a world of fantasy, there must be some amount of reality to ground it. Kinbote would not have a story without Shade. Yet, once again,  I have to side with the world of fantasy despite E.O. Wilson's recommendations to the contrary. Just as Maria concluded in her class presentation, it is within Kinbote that we find the truth and it is within Shade that there lies the world of fantasy. Although Shade presents a solid story about the factual death of his daughter and the emotions that surrounded it, Nabokov was fully aware that Shade was an entirely fictional character, and thus any story detailing his life must, by definition be based in fantasy. Kinbote, whose tale, (even at the most basic level of reading) is clearly fictional, hides allusions to myth, mathematics, and history. 


Perhaps the best message to take away from E.O. Wilson is that fantasy is only a lie if you claim that it holds its truth on the surface. Fantasy, when coupled with reality (just like Pale Fire when subjected to the scrutiny of a researcher) holds a deeper and stronger truth than what truth alone is able to hold.