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

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of aspens; they embraced,... " (157) is a very comic
anti-climax and surely a letdown for "a certain type
of tourist" (419).
Nabokov must have had the same tourist in mind
when he turned the scene which brings Ada and Lucette
and Van together on Ada's and Van's "tremendous bed"
(417), and which would of course have lent itself to
a "Casanovanic" description, into a somewhat pedantic
and detached description of an "unsigned and unframed"
(420) painting.
One suspects that this time a trap has even been
planted for the "specialist", who, having learnt that
in a Nabokov novel practically everything matters and
adds to the significance of the whole, tends to pause
and puzzle over things to make them yield their
"meaning". "How odd", Marina muses, bewildered by "a
dozen elderly townsmen, in dark clothes, shabby and
uncouth", who settle down for a "modest collazione"
quite near the picnickers who are celebrating Ada's
sixteenth birthday, refuse to be chased away by Van
although he tries half a dozen languages on them,
mutter "in a totally incomprehensible jargon", are
identified by Dan as a "collation of shepherds" and
finally disappear without much ado, leaving only a
"stiff collar and reptilian tie... hanging from a locust
branch" (268-277). "How odd", the reader muses
with Marina, but for once there is something that
rea11y does not seem to have any significance,
and Nabokov (or Van) has foreseen the reader's bewilderment
and mocks at it: "a most melancholy and