''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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ture in this life. As one critic expresses it: "It
is an immaterial, pure, eternal, unchanging beauty...
Man cannot possess this loveliness for it is infi-
nite... "82 The only way to get anywhere near that
beauty seems to be for Poe, as for Albinus and
Humbert, through the love of a woman, or child-woman,
in whom they see it caught. As somebody who knew him
says about Poe: "His love for his wife was a sort of
rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty which he
felt was fading before his eyes. "83
Both Albinus and Humbert, then,
have
... received a true intuition that the
route to the infinite is through attachment
to an adorable image or eidolon, yet both
blunder, perversely and fatally, by haplessly
confounding the image with its illusory
reflection or echo in the flesh of a childwoman.
Their common blunder must have different consequences
because Margot and Lolita are so different.
Lolita is a little girl, and very much alive, and
very human, so that "there is... the possibility of
love. "85 Margot, as she has emerged from the analysis,
has none of Lolita's qualities and has turned out
to be "entirely a creature of the camera-obscura
world. " It is very apt, then, that Albinus' involve-
ment with her should be presented in terms of the
cinema. Albinus is not aware of it, but his melodrama
is that of the film of which he watches the end in
the very cinema where he first meets Margot, and
where, therefore, his own melodrama begins. It is
apt that Axel Rex, the film maker, should see his
place at "the programme of [this]
roaring comedy, -
in the private box of the stage manager (LD, 118),