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

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notice of Clare, and stopped talking to her. He received
letters from some woman he had met at Blauberg,
left England for months, and Clare drifted out of
his life "as quietly as she had come" (104).
All this V has learnt from Miss Pratt and Sheldon,
friends of Clare's, but he is not satisfied with it:
"I wrote it all down
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but it was dead, dead" (72).
He seems to be quite aware of a good biographer's
duties: "I want to be scientifically precise" (62),
he says, meaning to distinguish his book from
Mr Goodman's, and: "... it would be ridiculous to discuss
what no one can definitely assert" (98). Sometimes
he is ridiculously strict about these theories:
"Shall we try to guess what
[Clare] asked Sebastian,
and what he answered, and what she said then? I think
we will not... " (103). His discretion concerning
something so obvious is quite superfluous: it does
not require much imagination to guess what a woman
who suspects that her lover has found another woman
may ask him. But then he neglects his theories sadly.
Feeling that he is not obtaining very satisfactory
results, he steps in and develops some new mannerisms
that make of him a minor Kinbote. He falls victim
to the "temptation... of adding to his narrative
the colour of fiction and romance"26, a touch of the
biographie romancee, which he himself denounces as
"by far the worst kind of literature yet invented"
(19), and parody appears again where the reader was
tempted to feel on safe ground.
He "improves" on the information he gets where it