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 actually think there is something slightly unethical about any author destroying any work that would be of interest to the public, even if it’s an editorial decision made while the author is alive–it’s their “right” to do so, but somewhat unethical nonetheless. As an extreme analogy, imagine an inventor who invents some wonderfully beneficial new technology, or a medical researcher discovers a cure for some fatal disease–does the fact that these things are their intellectual property make it ethical for them to hide the discovery from the public, and destroy all their notes on the subject? Obviously art is not the same, but I’d tend to see it as a lesser version of the same thing. I don’t see “intellectual property” as a fundamental right, but rather something that society agrees to uphold because it’s in the public interest to encourage creators. If we lived in a post-scarcity economy where creators could live just fine without making any profit off their work, and it was shown that creators would be just as inclined to create without monetary incentives (aside from the idealistic urge to make art, fame and social status would still be incentives), I would think it would be best to treat all intellectual property as public property (maybe filesharing is a hint of things to come).
As far as we know, Shakespeare didn’t arrange for the publication of any of his plays. Just a thought.
#26 – What?!?
1) You’re two steps away from compelling intellectuals to raid their brains ‘for the public good’.
2) What is ‘beneficial’ eventually may at first be decried as ‘heresy’, ‘lunacy’ or worse. (The way around this is to publish controversial work anonymously, which has it’s own set of drawbacks.) It is in the public interest to encourage creators, but the ‘public’ doesn’t always collectively behave as though they wish to entertain new ideas which challenge their existing beliefs. Where do personal safety considerations come in?
J.C. Of course, I have will – I want to save my kids any legal hassles like having to go through probate. But they have no obligations to me once I am gone. Criminy, I would hate to think the opposite would even be the case! All I ask is a simple equestrian statue dedicated in my honor…
Another aspect of the Kafka case, though not necessarily of the Nabokov issue, is that Kafka was something of a borderline personality, suffering from clinical depression. Did he really want his works destroyed, or was this the result of a bout of depression talking?
1) You’re two steps away from compelling intellectuals to raid their brains ‘for the public good’.
Er, how so? I’m only saying that I don’t think “intellectual property” is an ethical necessity, but just something that society agrees on for the purposes of encouraging creators. And we place limits on this which don’t apply to physical property, like copyright expiring after a certain length of time. There are also certain classes of ideas which creators don’t “own” even today (except in the sense of the ideas being attributed to them), like novel mathematical theorems or theories of physics. Presumably you wouldn’t say we are therefore two steps away from compelling mathematicians and physicists to raid their brains for the public good!
2) What is ‘beneficial’ eventually may at first be decried as ‘heresy’, ‘lunacy’ or worse. (The way around this is to publish controversial work anonymously, which has it’s own set of drawbacks.) It is in the public interest to encourage creators, but the ‘public’ doesn’t always collectively behave as though they wish to entertain new ideas which challenge their existing beliefs. Where do personal safety considerations come in?
Look, if a creator would really be put in danger by expressing certain ideas, I’d sympathize with them if they kept the ideas secret, although publishing anonymously would be an option. But in countries with strong traditions of upholding free speech this sort of thing isn’t all that common, and in any case it doesn’t apply to Nabokov’s work which was under discussion here.
Tom Stoppard is wrong. In a parallel universe Nabokov could have destroyed his manuscript before dying; in this Universe he didn’t. He could also have changed his mind. The manuscript is there, Nabokov is not. It is no longer his n-years-old frozen will that should determine the outcome of this story. In fact, strictly speaking, it cannot do it directly.
The last paragraph of Sean’s post says it all.
By suggesting the possibility that requests made while one is living can be disregarded after one’s death, we create a moral hazard.
Forget about “respect” for the time being and realize that precisely because our actions toward the dead affect the actions and fears of the now-living, we cannot afford to cavalierly disregard the wishes of the dead whenever it suits us.
In the past it was certainly commoner to consider it a matter of honor to burn a dead friend’s letters unread (unless he asked them to be preserved). At times unwritten social contracts existed that we would protect one another’s wishes and each other’s privacy. It is perhaps not a surprise that today we have created an atmosphere in which mutual trust is at historically low levels.
If you, personally, feel that your wishes ought not matter after your death, then you have every freedom to allow that principle to guide your actions. But it saddens me to think that my own preferences will be stripped away by people who purport to speak for me after I am fed to the worms.
I am twenty-four years old. I probably won’t die soon. Nabokov’s manuscript should have been burnt. Should I die tonight, I hope that those in whom I place my utmost trust will do for me as I once would have done for myself.
It seems to me that the solution here is pretty simple, and doesn’t require much discussion. If Nabokov wanted his manuscript destroyed, but was not bothered by the possibility that his son might decide otherwise, he should simply ask his son to destroy it after his death. But, if he wanted it destroyed no matter what, he should have left it in his will to someone else for the sole purpose of destroying it. He could also sign a legally binding contract with this other person that requires the manuscript be destroyed upon his death. This third party might be paid up front, in return. But it appears that Nabokov made his wishes known, but ultimately, he left the decision up to his son. If he really, really wanted it destroyed, he could have taken stronger measures to ensure that it was.
Dave: Yes. Exactly.
I think it is important here to distinguish between two kinds of “should”. For instance, that everyone “should” follow the golden rule is a fine point of view to take, and we are free to pile moral condemnation on those who don’t follow it. On the other hand, I think we all agree that it’s not true that the state “should” force people to follow the golden rule. There’s a huge gap between what people ought to do and what they can be forced to do. The same principle applies with what people ought not to say and what they can be forced not to say. In this case of Nabokov, there is only one interested party, the son, so it would be very scary to force him to do something because some other people far away think good sons ought to follow their fathers’ wishes.
Kafka also asked that his works be destroyed.
What if the authors of the dead sea scrolls didn’t want them dug up and handled by infidels?
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/lostgospel/timeline_19.html
Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the poem The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, 1859:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
If the manuscript is not to be consigned to the pale fire of the incinerator, we should hope that Dmitri can find a Kinbote to Nabokov’s Shade to provide us with the requisite enlightening commentary.
Tacitus wrote:
I think you’re right. But maybe it’s not so bad to keep some junk, as long as it doesn’t crowd out the stuff we really need. After all, time will destroy everything we cherish regardless of whether we do it.
Even if I had a strong personal “squick” response to this situation, I doubt I’d be willing to impose it upon a couple trying to have children.
It takes seven to ten days after the fertilization of a human egg for the egg to implant; until that point, hormonal measurements cannot detect a pregnancy, and the body which will be hosting the cute li’l parasite can’t tell a fertilized egg from an unfertilized one either. If the father dies in a freak accident during this interval, should the mother dose herself with emergency contraceptives to prevent implantation?
What would actually be the problem with any of those? A clone is as much a person as is an identical twin; raising a cloned child wouldn’t drain the world’s resources or worsen the overpopulation problem any more than raising a child conceived by unskilled labor. If the cloning procedure were not sound — say, if the child had a considerable likelihood of congenital abnormalities due to damaged DNA — then I could see a moral objection: we’d be bringing a conscious entity into the world and subjecting it to suffering. Even in some far-fetched, Boys from Brazil scenario, it’s the nefarious scheme to flood the world with Hitler clones which is immoral; without Mengele’s efforts to shape their minds, the clones are innocent.
Re #39, interesting points Blake (although we’re drifting from the original topic, and I don’t think Sean likes that). But briefly, with regard to your first point, obviously there’s a grey area, and the very situation you describe must happen often, during wartime for example. I was referring to insemination using sperm of someone known to have died already, perhaps a long time ago.
Aside from a general creepiness factor, hard to rationalize, one could argue that this deprives some living man of the opportunity of fatherhood at least for the duration of the pregnancy. I mean already in peacetime societies, there are more men than women; so the last thing we need is competition from those no longer with us, even if they could have been but for a premature death. I’d agree that’s a rather tenuous objection though; but it’s more substantial where quotas are introduced to curb population growth (as in China today and elsewhere soon, the way things are going).
Cloning shares this drawback in a capped population, and for an individual known to be cloned it raises to new heights the age-old problem of someone being compared with illustrious or successful relatives (or notorious villains come to that). One day in the 1840s, the 2nd Duke of Wellington was asked why he was looking a bit glum. “I was thinking”, he replied “how people will react, after my father dies, when ‘The Duke of Wellington’ is announced, and *I* walk into the room.” Whatever one thinks of nature versus nurture, a clone of someone known will face the same dilemma tenfold.
Re # 4
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.
So have you not bothered to read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditation?
Marcus Aurelius has been lauded for his capacity ‘to write down what was in his heart just as it was, not obscured by any consciousness of the presence of listeners or any striving after effect’.
A direct, original source of the stoic mind. It’s a perl left to mankind.
Virgil requested that the uncorrected manuscript of the Aeneid be burned, but it wasn’t, and it went on to become one of the most influential works in European literature. There’s a very long tradition of ignoring authors’ wishes on this. Are authors necessarily the best people to make this call, anyway.
The dead should be wise enough not to trust their wishes to the living.
You can hear Dmitri Nabokov explain his decision here. The unfinished novel will be published in the form of 138 notecards (that’s how his father wrote), the first ones transcribed, the last ones presented in their original handwritten form.
James wrote:
Apparently he was writing until almost the last moment on his deathbed; his original title was Dying Is Fun. So, he probably wasn’t focused on legal issues.
The plot of the novel is actually slightly relevant to the issues we’re discussing here: according to Dmitri Nabokov it’s about a neurologist who designs (for himself) a reversible form of suicide.
Reading Lolita someone said was like going to bed with a pervert and waking up with a college professor –
If you can forgive me repeating what everybody has said already, I’d like to state my view here that:
a will is solely about distributing your property after you’re gone. Demanding someone else to do something, be it whatever, running a marathon or destroying a work of art by a famous author, is beyond what can be reasonably demanded by a one-sided agreement. You can ask your work to be destroyed, but you can’t ask ANY person to destroy it. That’s something you’ll have to make further arrangements for by yourself.
You can’t transfer a burden of responsibility over intellectual property to your descendents without also passing on the tools that come with responsibility, the freedom of decision. If an artist is considered free to destroy hiw own art (generally we allow them that) it is because he is the beholder of all freedom and responsibility over it. As I see it, you cannot unilaterally impose on someone the responsibility to destroy the art without that freedom to do otherwise.
Beyond that it is a question of what is the nicest or most useful thing to do, and as we can see from this discussion, that can be a very multi-layered question.
The last point is key.
From an economic point of view, the cost of people generally not honoring wishes or contracts after a party has died would be that the parties would then take all sorts of economically wasteful actions to make sure those wishes were carried out.
For instance, in this case, Nabokov might have hired a sort of “book hitman” to steal and destroy his work should he die with it unfinished. That might seem silly, but that’s because we live in a world where legal standards generally respect contractual agreements even if one party to the contract dies, and wishes are generally carried out.