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

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also the only one who can imagine an alternative.
He, as the only one, can imagine the original of the
"clumsy copy", the wonderful reality behind the base
dream images, and the freedom in his "native realm".
Cincinnatus' mother has an astonishing tale
about some crazy objects that were popular when she
was a child. Called nonnons, they were "absolutely
absurd objects, shapeless, mottled, pockmarked,
knobby things" (IB, 123) that "made no sense to the
eye" (IB, 123) until they were placed in front of
equally crazy and incomprehensible mirrors. These
mirrors matched the nonnons to perfection and re-
flected them in such a way that
... a marvellous thing happened; minus
by minus equalled plus, everything
was restored, everything was fine,
and the shapeless speckledness became
in the mirror a wonderful,
sensible image; flowers, a ship,
a person, a landscape" (IB, 123).
Robert Alter sees in the transformation that the
mirrors effect a "model of the astonishing alchemy
that imagination works on formless reality", par-
ticularly an artistic imagination; indeed., he sees
in the mirrors an image of Nabokov's own art.
It is also possible, then, to see in them an
image of Cincinnatus' imagination that transforms
the parodies and senseless visions that surround
him into the real and b'autiful original's of the world
of his own dreams. He himself says quite early in
the novel that it is only imagination that can save
him:
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