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

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butchered, a shot of the butcher, a shot of the shepherd,
a shot of the shepherd's father, a Mexican" (7).
It is tempting to look at the people who produced it,
and their histories might in turn provoke fascinating
"side trip[s] of inspection" (7). Its history takes
one away in space and back in time. One might go back
as far as "Shakespeare's birth year when pencil lead
was discovered" (7).
This looks like a logical development of the
method pursued in Pale Fire, where it was shown how,
over the period of a few weeks, the lives of Shade
and Gradus followed two lines that gradually converged
and finally met at the moment of Shade's death. The
pattern evolved here is infinitely more complex because
of the many lines that are at least tentatively
followed, and the innumerable lines that might be
followed and traced until they all met at the precise
moment at which the pencil is being considered. If
the method were. consistently pursued, if one were
really tempted, for example, to look into the histories
of the butcher, the shepherd, the cutter; to
follow the development of the power saw; to follow,
as the author suggests, the "complicated fate of the
shavings", which are by now "reduced to atoms" and
widely dispersed; if, in short, one were to follow
all the complicated and complex interrelationships
that are visible on all sides, then the result would
indeed be "panic catching its breath" (7).
To produce this result is not the author's intention.
And, if one believes Nabokov, it is not his