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

- 14 -
lives of individual persons, and in fact to our
whole existence. With regard to each of these he
assumes that there is something more truly 'real behind
the "average reality" we perceive and that we
generally mistake for the only, and implicitly true,
reality: he assumes that there is the "real person"
behind the "phantom"71 we see; some meaningful pattern
behind the seeming jumble of incidents and coincidences
of which individual lives seem to be formed,
but which constitute in fact only their "average
reality"; and he assumes that there is some absolute
reality, something noumenal behind the" average reality"
of our existence.
It is "true reality" that Nabokov wants to know,
Kant's "things as they are in themselves" (now used
in the wider meaning explained above) but he is aware
of all the difficulties connected with this. It seems
to be impossible to know even things. One may strive
and struggle to know a thing, one may collect as
many facts and data related to it as possible, one
may add them all up, and one will still have to admit
in the end that they do not seem to form more than
a haphazard collection of information about
the thing and that something is still missing and
escaping one. The thing itself, or that -which
what it essentially is, refuses to be discovered.
Nabokov puts it like this:
takes
it
Reality is a very subjective affair. I can
only define it as a kind of accumulation of
information; and as specialization. If we
take a lily, for instance, or any other
kind of natural object, a lily is more real
to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary