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

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Shade mentions a famous film: Remorse (11,450),
which he and Sybil watched on TV on the night of
Hazel's death. The long passage about Charles' and
Disa's "calamitous marriage" (207) reads like an outline
of the contents of that film (207ff. ). Charles
has dreams about their unfortunate relation, and
these dreams are of a love "like an endless wringing
of hands, like a blundering of the soul through an
infinite maze of helplessness and remorse" (210).
One is tempted to think that this last word is used
deliberately as a clue. One wonders also whether this
whole passage (half comic and fantastic in the usual
Kinbote style, and half serious) and those dreams,
which "transformed the drab prose of his feelings for
her into strong and strange poetry" (209). do not ac-
tually provide a clue to Kinbote's "drab and unhappy
past", which he deliberately "peels off" and "replaces
with a brilliant invention" (238).
It is not only such commonplace elements that slip
from the poem into the story told in the commentary,
but very personal experiences, too, reappear there
in artistic guise and confirm the theory that this
story, no less than the poem, is a creation of Shade's.
Emotional experiences that Shade has gone through
are given the Zemblan king: like Shade (1,72-73), he
has difficulty in evoking the image of h. s father
(101). "One picks up minor items at such slowdowns of
life" (106), says Kinbote about the king, who, with-
out yet knowing of his mother's death, registers every-
thing around him with exceptional and unconscious