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

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As Huxley
says:
This metaphor of waking from dreams recurs
again and again in the various expositions
of the Perennial Philosophy. In this context
liberation might be defined as waking out
of the nonsense, nightmares and illusory
pleasures of what is ordinarily called real
life into the awareness of eternity.
The idea of death as liberation and entrance into
some absolute reality behind the world and life into
which we find ourselves cast is an idea that is also
common with German Romantic philosophers and poets.
With them, as with Nabokov, this absolute reality
has lost its religious associations. Schelling, for
example, describes death as the transition from some
"relative Non-Esse" into what he calls "pure Esse. "" 107
The poet Novalis could be named as another exponent
of this thought.
German Romanticism also gave rise to an idea which
recurs in Ada. Schlegel developed what might be called
a philosophy of love: it is through love of another
person that man can break the boundaries set to his
own self and find fulfilment. This motif is modified
in Novalis into some kind of love-mysticism, in
that physical love becomes with him a--means of escap-
ing from the limitations of our "reality" and of
gaining access to something true and absolute behind
it.
108
This is precisely what happens in Ada, Van
and Ada feeling liberated, reality losing its quotes,
only during moments of physical love.
4b
Nabokov is not the first to entertain the notion
that art plays a decisive part in man's quest for