''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses
''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses ''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses
- 15 - person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You.: can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you can never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing, but you can never know everything about one thing: it's hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less objects. 72 ghostly What is true of things applies in an even higher degree to persons. If it is next to impossible to know even things, as. they are in themselves, if they remain "ghosts" to us, how much more hopeless must any attempt be to try and understand what a person really is behind what he appears to be, to see and understand all the complexities of his soul and character:: The subjectivity and relativity of what we know about others is proved in Pnin, The Eye, and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Pnin's most obvious character- istics being his tendency to fall into quandaries over simple matters, the curious workings of his mind, and an apparent absent-mindedness, he is irrevocably put down as a freak and nobody cares to look behind the convenient label and find the real person. The Eye and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight both illustrate how our impression o f another person is determined by our attitude to him, our preoccupations, interests and emotions. One person - Smurov in The Eye and Sebastian in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - is seen to evoke highly divergent, even contradictory pictures in the minds of other persons, each of whom
- 16 - is convinced to really know Smurov or Sebastian, while none of the pictures has probably anything to do with the real Smurov or the real Sebastian. Nabokov extends his quest into another sphere, hinted at above, in The Defence, Pale Fire, Transparent Things, and Despair. Here he is concerned not so much with individual things or persons and the question what they are in themselves, but with the complexities of human life. To the ordinary person, of whom Hugh Person in Transparent Things is a kind of incarnation, life may appear to be a mere haphazard sequence of incidents and coincidences which do not seem to be in any way logically and purposefully connected. Nabokov is concerned with the question that Dillard describes as central to Russian literature, namely whether a coincidence is not in fact a "controlled event"73, and whether life has not an underlying pattern which escapes the attention of those who, like Hugh Person, perceive only its "average reality". To discover some such pattern would be another step on the way to the knowledge of "true reality". Nabokov's quest is at its most profound when it touches on the reality of life. This theme is first tentatively introduced in The Eye, where life seems to Smurov to be no more than "a shimmer on a screen"74 and where he himself gets caught up in an unreal world of mirror images. Transparent Things at one point poses the question whether life is not a mere dream. 75 The problem of life's reality is most poig- nantly treated in Ada and Invitation to a Beheading,
- Page 1 and 2: ''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest fo
- Page 3 and 4: Abstract Nabokov once said that "re
- Page 5 and 6: Introduction
- Page 7 and 8: -2- granting that the Bolshevist an
- Page 9 and 10: -4- consent, was motivated by the a
- Page 11 and 12: -6- on the aspects of life that int
- Page 13 and 14: -8- importance but its art, only it
- Page 15 and 16: - 10 - of. the novels, consist in t
- Page 17 and 18: - 12 - life with its hazards and in
- Page 19: - 14 - lives of individual persons,
- Page 23 and 24: - 18 - hopeless, but Nabokov does n
- Page 25 and 26: - 20 - for the artist, is expressed
- Page 27 and 28: - 22 - a new, wholly artistic reali
- Page 29 and 30: - 24 - way, and this knowledge and
- Page 31 and 32: - 26 - internal evidence of Invitat
- Page 33 and 34: - 28 - Admittedly not all of Naboko
- Page 35 and 36: - 30 - "tr. ue reality" in that it
- Page 37 and 38: - 32 - the manner in which the subj
- Page 39 and 40: - 34 - The case is quite similar in
- Page 41 and 42: - 36 - lines of play 11120 will in
- Page 43 and 44: - 38 - him knowledge surpassing tha
- Page 45 and 46: - 40 - the present. This act of rec
- Page 47 and 48: - 42 - design in the life of Martin
- Page 49 and 50: - 44 - Martin's mother of her son's
- Page 51 and 52: - 46 - is blind where his wife and
- Page 53 and 54: - 48 - serious and profound experie
- Page 55 and 56: I. The Eye Pnin Lolita; Laughter*in
- Page 57 and 58: - 51 - novel. They illustrate how p
- Page 59 and 60: - 53 - tearing the banknote into li
- Page 61 and 62: - 55 - have before: after the suici
- Page 63 and 64: - 57 - imagination of Gretchen best
- Page 65 and 66: - 59 - deed been through an experie
- Page 67 and 68: - 61 - there must be some "model" a
- Page 69 and 70: - 63 - P NI N In their appreciation
-<br />
16 -<br />
is convinced to really know Smurov or Sebastian, while<br />
none of the pictures has probably anything to do with<br />
the real Smurov or the real Sebastian.<br />
Nabokov extends his quest into another sphere,<br />
hinted at above, in The Defence, Pale Fire, Transparent<br />
Things, and Despair. Here he is concerned not so much<br />
with individual things or persons and the question<br />
what they are in themselves, but with the complexities<br />
of human life. To the ordinary person, of whom Hugh<br />
Person in Transparent Things is a kind of incarnation,<br />
life may appear to be a mere haphazard sequence of<br />
incidents and coincidences which do not seem to be<br />
in any way logically and purposefully connected.<br />
Nabokov is concerned with the question that Dillard<br />
describes as central to Russian literature, namely<br />
whether a coincidence is not in fact a "controlled<br />
event"73, and whether life has not an underlying<br />
pattern which escapes the attention of those who,<br />
like Hugh Person, perceive only its "average reality".<br />
To discover some such pattern would be another step<br />
on the way to the knowledge of "true reality".<br />
<strong>Nabokov's</strong> quest is at its most profound when it<br />
touches on the reality of life. This theme is first<br />
tentatively introduced in The Eye, where life seems<br />
to Smurov to be no more than "a shimmer on a screen"74<br />
and where he himself gets caught up in an unreal<br />
world of mirror images. Transparent Things at one<br />
point poses the question whether life is not a mere<br />
dream.<br />
75<br />
The problem of life's reality is most poig-<br />
nantly treated in Ada and Invitation to a Beheading,
Change language