One Great Paragraph: Vladimir Nabokov's Democracy of Ghosts
Why OpenAI Ripped Off the Master
Thick and fast, AI comes after the things we love. Sam Altman shared a piece of AI-written fiction that borrowed heavily from Nabokov. Now the internet is awash with Ghibli memes—or so I’ve read. We truly are entering a new Luddite age, in which the world fills with cheap, soulless cotton, while we mill our threads and plot to smash the machines. So let’s smash them. Make the case for humanity, before humanity—or its Ghiblified avatar—gives up on itself.
The telltale phrase in Altman’s AI story was “democracy of ghosts”, a quote from Nabokov’s Pnin, one of my favourite novels. The book makes a portrait of a man out of place and time—from the very beginning, in which Timofey Pnin travels happily to a speaking engagement, blissfully unconscious of the fact he has taken the wrong train. He’s a Russian emigré, made stateless by the revolution and for a long time a wanderer on a Nansen passport, before America saved him from the Nazis—like Nabokov himself. Now in his fifties, Pnin teaches at a college in New England (Nabokov taught at Cornell and Wellesley). But Pnin is not Nabokov—rather, he’s a friend of Nabokov, who narrates the novel.
The passage below comes two-thirds of the way through the book, and is the penultimate paragraph in the fifth chapter. In this chapter, for the first time in the novel, we have seen Pnin in his element: among Russian speakers, old friends who understand each other, who value Timofey’s expertise, who catch each others’ jokes and bring up memories painful and sweet. After dinner, Pnin wanders in the woods away from the house, caught in painful remembrance of absent friends—lost to the revolution, lost to the Nazis. This is where we find him, on page 118 in my copy:
Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. The sky was dying. He did not believe in an autocratic God. He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts. The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continuous session, attended to the destinies of the quick.
There it is, that beautiful formulation, so easily slotted into AI slop. But let’s take a look at what’s going on.
We meet Pnin in the trees, with a sentence that is as much a visual and auditory event as a language one: Pnin slowly walked under the solemn pines. Stop first and notice all those ls that the adverb and adjective add to the sentence, like tree trunks. They add mood and tone, slowly, solemn, but also a susurrating quality, the soundscape of a forest. We have a mirror construction: Pnin slowly [walked under the] solemn pines. He is at home among these trees, which remind him of Russia.
Above him: The sky was dying. Dying—which is the subject of this section, his friends murdered at Buchenwald. Thoughts of death, thoughts of the heavens, turn him towards the divine: He did not believe in an autocratic God. A plain statement, following on from the thoughts of the suffering his loved ones received. But disbelief invites its opposite.
He did believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts.
This sentence, the hinge of the paragraph, invites us to lean in: what does he mean? He hardly knows himself, the belief is only dim, but the phrase itself creates its own meaning, which unfurls for the remainder of the paragraph.
The souls of the dead, perhaps, formed committees, and these, in continous session, attended to the destinies of the quick. That perhaps suggests he’s inventing an answer to the question of what he means. So we have these functional democratic organs (committees), and the comforting idea that the dead—in continuous session, kept alive by their task—are looking over the living. But not just any living, the quick—a biblical reference if ever I saw one,1 completing the rejection of an autocratic God in favour of the hopeful belief in the endurance of those we have lost.
Just as we will reject the tyranny of AI in our hopeful belief in the endurance of human creativity.
This one from the King James seems a good counterpoint: I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom (Timothy 4:1-2).