Vladimir Nabokov had requested that his last work, fragments of an unfinished novel The Original of Laura, be destroyed after his death. But it won’t be, as his son Dmitri has (after tortuous deliberation) decided to go against his father’s wishes and publish the work. Via Marginal Revolution, which has several previous discussions.
Tom Stoppard, whose opinion is worth listening to, thinks it should be destroyed:
It’s perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it. There is no superior imperative. The argument about saving it for the “greater good” of the literary world is null, as far as I’m concerned. There are parallel universes, might-have-been worlds, full of lost works, and no doubt some of them would have been masterpieces. But our desire to possess them all is just a neurosis, a completeness complex, as though we must have everything that’s going and it’s a tragedy if we don’t. It’s nonsense, an impossible desire for absoluteness. At best, it’s natural curiosity – personally, I’d love to read Nabokov’s last work, but since he didn’t want me to read it, I won’t – and it’s hardly modest to make one’s own desire more important than his.
Stoppard is right about the neurosis, and ultimately I agree with his conclusion, but I can’t quite buy his reasoning. Hard-nosed, unsentimental materialist that I am, I don’t think that the wishes of dead people should carry much weight in and of themselves. They’re dead, they don’t care any more.
However, live people do count, and they are faced with subtle and competing interests (as various MR commenters have pointed out). On the one hand, sure, we might be curious about Nabokov’s last work. However, there is some degree to which the moral control over the disposition of a manuscript accrues to the family or whoever survives the author. If they felt strongly that they would be happier knowing that the author’s wishes had been respected, that would be a perfectly valid reason for carrying them out. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here; after thinking through the issues very carefully, Dmitri Nabokov came down on the side of letting it become public, even concocting a little story to excuse the apparent contravenance of his father’s instructions:
From his winter home in Palm Beach, Dmitri justified his decision by saying, “I’m a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess – just go ahead and publish!'”
But there is one more set of interests to be accounted for: those of authors and creators who are not yet dead, but someday will be. (Most of us, I imagine.) If I create something right now, I certainly have the right to destroy it. But I might also want to have the confidence that, if I leave instructions that it should be destroyed, they will be carried out. Otherwise I might be tempted to destroy it ahead of time, and regret it later. More generally, if we treat the stated wishes of the deceased as strictly irrelevant in the calculation of social goods, wills and other sorts of legacies will become relatively meaningless. It’s not just about respecting the wishes of the dead; it’s about letting living people live with some confidence that their reasonable requests will be carried out once they’re gone.
I’m glad you touched on that last point, I was worried it would be missing as I read through the post.
You’ve presented all the angles but haven’t claimed an absolute solution. Respectable!
We owe almost all of Kafka’s work – his novels, most of his stories – to the decision of his executor Max Brod to ignore Kafka’s request that they be burned. Brod published Kafka’s unfinished works, including The Castle and The Trial, and the world is better off for it.
I see I was beat to the Kafka punch.
Old truth: “If you want a job done properly, do it yourself.” That goes here as well – don’t want people to read your slashfiction after you’re dead, then encrypt your files. And so on and so forth.
The Hat weighed in on this a while back.
The world thinks they are better off for it, but it never mattered whether or not Kafka’s works were published. The ideas in Kafka’s (or anyone else’s) works are still present in society, and whether or not those are expressed in words, or actions, or paintings, or music is immaterial. The same is true about this. I think if anyone doesn’t want something published, burn it yourself before you croak or don’t write anything to begin with. It all becomes a whole bunch of reverse reverse psychology to satisfy some unconscious desire to actually have it published, and the sheer popularity (and likely undue popularity) ensuing from one’s apparent lack of desire or adamant disapproval for it to be published.
If you want to contribute to society by writing a piece, great. Do so. It will contribute something at the very least and that will advance society in some way. If you write something, and make a big deal about making sure that its “destroyed” after you die, you are taking some measure of creativity that began as inspiration in the bowels of the society you grew up within, and refusing that same society their own ideas (big whoopie). It’s pompous. It’s separatist. It’s delusional.
Frankly, I’d rather not read anything someone wrote just for themselves. Who should read something like that? The person that wrote it. That’s it. Certainly won’t make a huge impact if the person created such work based on the mindset that it isn’t worthy of the public eye. If it’s released anyway, and people say “Look, what a saving grace that this work was published, it’s done so much for society,” is complete ludicrous. The issues or ideas declared in such work is still present in society, and will still impact society, with or without the two cents of a schmoe that wants to make a big deal about whether or not they will “make a difference.” The issues make the difference, the ideas make a difference and what we all do with those ideas or issues, or which of us feel strongly enough about them to stand up and spread them, not cover them up with a psychological game like an attention-starved adolescent. People wish so hard they could personalize changes in society, slap their name on the side and call the revolution their own. It’s not. Change happens anyways.
Literature is significantly important to progress, as is discovery, experimentation, and creative thought. These should be shared, for who provided you with your potential to create? The rest of the universe that isn’t you. Who decides to actually embrace that potential? You. So share it, otherwise don’t piss about it.
Wayne
The world may have been marginally better off if Michael Jordan had been forced to keep playing basketball rather than spend two years as a minor-league baseball player. But I think it’s vastly better off because we allow individuals to make their own creative choices.
Not that it seems to matter; empirically, people seem reluctant to destroy manuscripts by deceased authors, no matter what they may have requested.
To echo Sean, I think most people have trouble destroying all types of created works and records. Digital photos is a case in point. How many billions of crappy digital photos are languishing in flash memory cards and on computer disk that will never ever be of any interest to anyone, probably even the person who took them?
I may be an extreme case, but in all the thousands of photos I’ve taken since I bought my first digital camera, I must have deleted no more than a handful. Hundreds of bad photos still sit around in their original directories as they were downloaded from the camera going unviewed and unmissed for years at a time.
It’s the thought that something, no matter now unimportant in the scheme of things, is irretrievably lost when you destroy it, that makes people reluctant to pull the trigger. It may not be rational, but its human nature.
In the case of manuscripts of deceased people, the effect is magnified. Destroy their work, and you are destroying a piece of their memory, a piece of them, in effect — especially so if there is no such thing as life after death. Once a few decades have passed and first-hand memories of people fade, we are left only with the records they leave behind.
I’m not quite understanding what would motivate someone to want an artistic work that they have created to be destroyed only after they are dead… What are they doing with it until then? Is it incomplete, but actively being worked on? If so, then it leaves behind an understanding of the creative process at the very least.
I think it’s reasonable to argue that, in the world of the living, the needs of the living take precedence. If you really wish to control how your property (intellectual or material) is disposed of, disposed of it while you are still alive. Assume that once you’re dead, any instructions you’ve left behind that can be contested will be contested. Unless, of course, you’ve successfully instilled in your descendents the fear of vengeful ancestors. 😉
One aspect that has not been adressed in this discussion is the sons obligation to uphold his fathers wishes. It would seem to me even if the son felt society would benefit from the work, his personal loyalty to his father would outweigh his supposed social responsibility.
Wow, I thought the academic world was ruthless.
But in the literary world it’s ‘perish, and publish’.
So does this mean that I might as well get rid of the paragraph in my will asking my executor to kill my children?
There are interesting aspects to this question. I think the proper course of action is for living people to behave as they would if the now dead person were living. This is not because I care about the dead, but because I care about a person’s ability to enact their will when they are alive, even if they cannot be present to witness the completion. The problem is, this doesn’t fully address the question.
The analogy I’m trying to draw above is this: we can certainly imagine two scenarios that I think should be equivalent, (1) a dead person wills money to an institution for a certain cause, (2) a live person gives money to an institution for a certain cause, but doesn’t intend to check that the money is used as she stipulates (and the institution knows this). From the institution’s point of view, the living and dead person are equivalent. Normally, we consider it dishonorable to take advantage of the trusting living, so I think the same should apply to the dead.
Let’s try to draw the analogy out. Maybe the institution doesn’t want to accept money for a certain cause. In this case, it seems the honorable thing is to refuse the payment. But, what if the institution first accepts the money for a certain cause, but later changes its mind? Then it seems the honorable thing is to give the remaining money back. These are what one would do if the donor were living. If the donor is dead, then the money goes back to the estate. The estate now belongs to someone else, and that person can do as he likes, perhaps even giving the money to the original institution but for some different cause.
Nabokov’s book situation is interesting because, the ‘contract’ to destroy the book was apparently made with his son, who presumably is also his heir. So, the son may change his mind about destroying the book (as he is free to do, if you disagree, consider if Nabokov’s demand was for something the son came to find morally objectionable), in which case by ‘breach of contract’ the son should no longer be in charge of the book. But then the book returns to the ‘estate’, and now the son inherits it and is free to do what he likes.
This is the way I view this, assuming the facts are straight (about who’s the beneficiary etc). It certainly doesn’t fit with Nabokov’s original wishes, but I would say the problem here is that Nabokov did not plan carefully. He should have charged someone other than an heir to destroy the book (like a lawyer) or done a better job convincing his son of the importance of destroying the book. I view this as like if I gave money to an institution, with no (or few) stipulations, and later learned that the money was being used for something I found objectionable. I don’t think that I then have a right to demand the money back, or to ask that it not be used as such. This is unfortunate for me, but it’s my fault for not being more careful in drawing up the contract.
Does anyone know if Dimitri is keeping the rights and potential royalties from this book? Because if he inherited the estate, he has 75 years from the death of the author to profit from the works before copyright lapses. So there is a potential conflict of interest there. It could be solved by an entrepreneur setting up a company whose sole purpose is to burn books; authors wishing to have their works destroyed could bequeath their material (plus the handling fee) to said company in their wills.
I reckon that barring instant premature death, an author who doesn’t have the balls to destroy his own work while he can has no right to complain that others are unwilling to do his dirty work. Such folks seem to be the literary equivalents of people who commit suicide by cop.
And Lee, I see your Kafka and raise you an Emily Dickinson.
1. Sure makes one suspect a failed fatherhood though. Didn’t raise a boy with much of a sense of ethics, did he?
2. “…my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess – just go ahead and publish!’”. Just like the Virgin Mary appears before priests to say it’s OK to butt-foop the altar boys, God told George Bush it was OK to occupy Iraq, and Katrina was God’s punishment of New Orleans for scheduling a gay-support march.
3. I believe we should publish whatever equation Sean has begun to write on the whiteboard at the time of his fatal heart attack. We can call it his explanation of the Big Bang origin, or his refutation of string theory. Then we can all laugh about how stupid it is, and write reviews about how stupid his cosmology was because, boy, he really screwed up on that equation, didn’t he? After all, he’ll be dead, and it doesn’t matter to him any more what people think about him or his ideas.
I think that following the wishes of a person who is now dead is a matter of respect. (If there’s some urgency to do it anyway, OK, but they shouldn’t matter less for that than the wishes of a now living person.) That “They’re dead, they don’t care any more” is beside the point of this key ethical notion, I guess you either get it or you don’t.
I dig this quote: “There are parallel universes, might-have-been worlds, full of lost works, and no doubt some of them would have been masterpieces.”
Wow, let’s start wrangling over “modal realism” and the reality of Platonic model universes again!
What if Nabokov briefly reappears as a Boltzmann Brain and sees what has happened? 🙂
Suppose the son publishes the manuscript. Who exactly would seek redress in court? No one.
If Nabokov really wanted the manuscript to be burned, he could have willed it to someone who he would have had great confidence would have followed his wishes, like a law firm. The law firm, had he picked wisely, would have a reputation to uphold and would have a strong incentive to do what it was told. The son apparently thinks any damage to his reputation is worth it, which is a choice the state should not prevent him from making. I mean, we are all free to judge him, but I do not want to live in a world where other people’s judgments on trivial matters like this can cause the state to intervene in what is really just a family matter.
Many great artists have destroyed works both complete and incomplete as they neared death. (Beethoven, on the other hand, deliberately left his piano sonata op. 111 incomplete to simulate his mortal incompletion.) Having pride in their oeuvre, they do not want to dilute its value with accompanying work deemed imperfect. Was Nabokov merely being coy, as Max Brod, Kafka’s pal, unilaterally decided the celestrial Czech had been with his dying insntructions, undertaking, in a perhaps self-serving way as his deviant executor and literary amanuensis, to publish the entire remaining material, including love letters to and from various women, as only a few stories had been published till then? To his credit he was one of a few associates who recognized K.’s genius. (Is there a soul who has read these works who does not believe humanity is immeasurably better for Brod’s perfidious action? The profundity of K’s tortured theism may be replicated elsewhere but I’ve yet to discover it. I imagine K. would be deeply pissed and self-lacerating for making a poor choice of posthumous surrogates.) The titanic Nabokov approaches diametric opposition to Milquetoast Franz but I suspect he might contemplate Biblical filicide, but perhaps only fictively as vis-a-vis eroticism in Lolita; who else but Joyce in recent centuries chiseled prose to the exquisite perfection of N.
Would Leonardo wish to have Mona Lisa exhibited if he had completed all save the mouth?
I believe Vera Nabokov once dramatically intervened to prevent Vladimir from burning the manuscript of Lolita. As someone who has spent almost as much time re-reading Nabokov as all other authors combined, I am glad she did, and I don’t think taking the burning request at face value is necessarily the way to approach this. Also, the manuscript was left to Dmitri by Vera, not VN, and she could have burned the thing, too, but thankfully had a nice habit of saving the masterpieces of her husband.
Nabokov’s final jottings may not be much concern to a literary phillistine like me, and I dare say to many reading this. But suppose it had been a stack of notes and embryonic papers of famous scientist or mathematician, like Poincare or Einstein (at the time of their death)? Hmm, then the moral dilemma gets rather trickier, although no different in principle.
I’d say keep the papers, regardless of their creators’ former wishes. There must be some chance these may advance knowledge, even if only slightly, and the possibility of major insights being gleaned. I mean suppose someone had burned Ramanujan’s notebooks after his death, even though most of these were not in systematic form?
Also, the dead have no rights in common law, and no means of retribution unless you believe in ghosts!
A related moral question arose recently in the UK. A woman whose husband had been killed in Iraq wished to be inseminated by his preserved sperm. Although that seems a deserving case (and I’m not sure what the courts decided in the event) it seems intrinsically wrong to me – For the purpose of reproduction, a person’s DNA should die with them. Otherwise whatever next? A clone of Tutankamen, or more offspring of William the Conqueror, using DNA winkled from his thigh bone in Caen? Or hordes of new descendents of Nobel prize winners, born long after their death?
Of course moral issues are relative, and the opposite might be true of this use of post-mortem DNA after a nuclear war, say.
Everyone who says that Dmitri is failing in his filial and ethical duty should also recognize that Vladimir bequeathed Vera and thence Dmitri a dilemma, by putting them in this position of making this decision. One cannot lay heavy, ambiguous ethical choices on persons and then be horrified if they make choices different from yours. Nabokov the elder, notoriously a perfectionist, might have wished his final book burnt if it had been in anything other than its final state. I wonder what he would have ordered if had it been set in type but he had been unable to review the galley proofs before his death.
Dmitri is under no obligation to preserve the work for the good of the world. However, neither is he under an obligation to destroy it to reassure Sean, Tom Stoppard or anyone else that every person’s posthumous orders must be respected. Nabokov’s reputation is secure; if the work is a shambles no one will think the worse of Vladimir, and probably not even of Dmitri.
I want every painting – print – watercolor – drawing – I still have destroyed at my death.
Never mind the toxic lead paint – or the income tax deductions I have claimed for supplies.
Hey Daisy Rose, no way will we burn that lot! Some of those paintings belong in a gallery, or we could sell them on ebay, or at worst I could find room for a few on my walls 😉
I’m not a big fan of watercolour, preferring acrylic or oil as the results are rather more vivid (if less subtle); but most of your portraits really bring out the sitter’s character, which is the main thing.
For my taste some could so with a little more crispness and sharper detail. But time is money I guess, and anyway at least all the bits and pieces are in the right places, unlike ghastly modern “art”!
For a science blog with a lot of good atheist/agnostic readers, there is a surprising amount of concern for the wishes of decomposing corpses. The dead don’t matter, the living do. The only sensible reply to this thread has been from the poster who said “If you want the job done right, do it yourself”. Otherwise the living have no obligation from someone who simply is no longer in the conversation.
Lee Sawyer, can we presume then you won’t be leaving a will?
Just as no promise can survive the tricks of time – No artist can say what of there works has value for future generations –
John, Thankyou but I am a modern artist!