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

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both of which deliberately undercut our confidence
in the reality of our very world and life and try to
open ways out of their "average reality" and to come
to some insight into some ultimate "true reality"
beyond our existence.
Again, Nabokov is only too conscious of the dif-
ficulties involved in his quest and he knows that he
can expect no help from anywhere. The common, "average"
approach, as has been seen, prevents knowledge rather
than furthers it because it stops at the most super-
ficial appearance of things, and of persons and life
as well. Nor does Nabokov feel that science and
philosophy have provided any satisfactory answers to
his questions. They have tried to provide them and
have taken us a few steps on the way to. knowledge,
but have not really solved any problem. The mysteries
remain, provoking and disquieting, and paradoxically
they become the more disquieting the more we know:
In
...
point of fact, the greater one's
science, the deeper one's sense of mystery.
Moreover, I don't believe that any science
today has pierced any mystery. We, as newspaper
readers, are inclined to call 'science'
the cleverness of an electrician or a
psychiatrist's mumbo jumbo. This, at best,
is applied science, and one of the characteristics
of applied science is that
yesterday's neutron or today's truth dies
tomorrow. But even in a better sense of
'science' - as the study of visible or
palpable nature, or the poetry of pure
mathematics and pure philosophy - the
situation remains as hopeless as ever. We
, shall never know the origin of life, ` or
the meaning of life, or the nature of
space and time, or the nature of nature,
or the nature of thought.
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If even science and philosophy are excluded as sources
of real knowledge, the situation does--indeed seem