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

-
340
-
to have names (IB, 11).
The same intimate connection between comedy and
horror can be traced in those scenes which so curiously
blend and change without previous warning. On one
level they produce the same comic dream effect that
has just been described, and they produce it through
their apparent absurdity and lack of logic. The horror
behind their comic surface emerges when it becomes
clear that in a certain sense the circus director is
also the director of the prison, the laboratory assistant
is also the jailer, the clown is also
the executioner, and the circus and the laboratory
are also the prison.
It is all a reflection of the state of affairs
round Cincinnatus: In this world, where people are
transparent to each other, where they are so much alike
as to be interchangeable, and where Cincinnatus is the
only one to be different, everyone is his enemy. "His
jailers, who in fact were everyone" (IB, 65-66), are
everywhere.
One of the most comic and most agonizing scenes is
the family gathering in Cincinnatus' prison cell. It
reads exactly like the account of a nightmare, and
also like a scene from an absurd play; in fact, it
could quite easily be staged as one.
Cincinnatus expects his wife Marthe, tut she does
not come alone. In what is in itself an effective comedy
situation - one expects one person and in walk no
end of people - the whole family arrive. They are a
grotesque lot, slightly funny, slightly repulsive