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

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Northrop Frye describes as underlying Shakespeare's
comedies. These, he says, are concerned with
...
the efforts of a young man who tries
to get possession of a young woman who
is kept from him by various social
barriers... These are gradually circumvented,
and the comedy ends at a point
when a new society is crystallized, usually
by the marriage or betrothal of hero and
heroine, ill
Ada follows this formula as far as the circumvention
of social barriers is concerned, which do, in fact,
keep Van and Ada separated for a considerable time.
But even here the similarities end, for even though
there is a reunion at the end, the festive ending,
so typical of Shakespeare's comedies, is ironized
and marred. Whereas with Shakespeare the couples are
normally united in their bloom of youth, it is "fat
old
Veen"
112
and Ada, "a dark glittering stranger
with the high hair-do in fashion"
113,
aged
fifty-two
and fifty respectively, who eventually find them-
selves
re-united.
It is not only the typical comedy structure that
is absent from Nabokov's novels, but also what, again,
Frye describes as the"predominating mood
[of
comedies]
which is festive. ', 114 Nor can Nabokov's novels be
said to be comic in the sense that Tom Jones, say,
is comic, or The Pickwick Papers, most of the comic
quality of which derives from an almost uninterrupted
series of burlesque incidents.
In fact, from the analysis of the central concern
of the novels it will have emerged that it is not
their subject matter that justifies the use of the
term "comic" in connection with them. It is rather