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

-
193
-
The passages betray not only an awareness of things
generally, but an acute awareness of opposites, of
the cheerful and the sad, of the colourful and the drab,
of funny things and of serious things. The two pictures
in his flat show how very much aware he is of the side-
by-side existence of extreme opposites: the impressions
of cruelty and innocence could not be conveyed any better
than through the two photographs, which V describes in
curiously ill-chosen and incongruous terms:
One was an enlarged snapshot of a Chinese
stripped to the waist, in the act of being
vigorously beheaded, the other was a banal
photographic study of a curly child playing
with a pup (38).
Mysticism has been called "integrated thought"
in that it brings things together in a new
pattern, i. e. integrates them instead of,
as in analytical thought, breaking them into
parts. It thus relates them into a meaningful
whole.
56
Sebastian sees no contradiction in the existence of
opposites. Everything has meaning: Just as humble
things, the raindrops on the wires, the brown leaves,
the coloured chalks, or, in V's interpretation of
The Doubtful Asphodel, "a cherry stone and its tiny
shadow which lay on the painted wood of a tired bench"
(168) have meaning and significance for those aware
of them - the same significance as the "shining giants
of our brain" (168; from The Doubtful Asphodel)
-
so, equally, sadness, ugliness, and cruelty belong
into the pattern of existence. They all go together
"to form a definite harmony, where I, too, had the
shadow of a place" (65; from Lost Property). There
may not even be a contradiction there. In Lost Property