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

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using spoonerisms (one of which he takes the trouble
to point out
[BS, 198-199]); the others, to gain time,
offer Krug a perfectly absurd selection of things,
such as "a shower bath, the assistance of a pretty
masseuse,..., a mouth organ,..., breakfast,..., a shave
(BS, 198). Something goes wrong with the machine, an
inscription appears upside down, which makes a nurse
giggle, which, in its turn, provokes the director to
utter his third spoonerism, the counterpart of the
second.
The comic treatment of this agonizing scene does
not stop even here. When describing those scenes of
the film that Krug is eventually shown, the author
turns them into a parody of scientific silent films,
logically pursuing what he started doing in his account
of the experiment itself. The parodistic effect
is brought about by the legends, which are either
totally superfluous, or seem to stem from the not-soscientific
sort of silent films in which they are
used as "humorous" commentaries on the action, and
they quite openly invite one to misapply them: one is
tempted to read the legend "Watch Those Curves" in connection
with the "statuesque blonde" of the preceding
sentence much rather than in connection with a "curving
line" on the blackboard in the following one
(BS, 200). l
Styan says of Beckett that he "invented a screen
of laughter through which to conceal and filter his
nightmare. "9 However, the image of the screen suggests
that the laughter and the nightmare are kept separate,