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

-
19
-
(formed by its present qualities and its present
context), opens the vast spectrum of things and
incidents and persons with which or with whom it
has been in any way connected. More than that, a
dense pattern of interrelations between these things
and incidents and-people is also disclosed. One simple
object can take the artist away in space and back in
time, and if he traced and followed all the connecting
lines, this one object might grant him insights that
would in the end comprehend the whole "world that Jack
built. "81 Nabokov's implication is that 'the ordinary,
average mind never steps beyond the "now" or the "thin
veneer of immediate reality" of things and thus obtains
no knowledge-'cif what is concealed behind them.
It seems that this breaking through the "thin
veneer" is also the basis of the artistic process of
creation that Kinbote describes. He says that "'reality'
is neither the subject nor the object of true art"82,
meaning, of course, that art is not concerned with
"average reality" as defined above:
[Art] creates its own special reality having
nothing to do with the average 'reality'
perceived by the communal eye.
83
This does not mean that the artist takes no notice of
the world around him. On the contrary, Nabökov is
wide awake to every trifle and takes in, and uses
in his novels, thousands of daily trivia: "The artist
should know the given world", he says; "Imagination
without knowledge leads no farther than the back yard
of primitive art... "84, and the same thought, namely
that daily life is a constant source of inspiration