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

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aux caprices de son age. « Van lies near an "immense
elm" when he reads Ada's copy of Atala (89), another of
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Chateaubriand's works with an overtone of incest.
All these allusions combine to evoke associations
with the Romantic mal de siecle which pervades
Chateaubriand's tales, the melancholy of Rene and
Amelie, their feeling of guilt when they become aware
of their passion, and their respective fates. But, as
has already been said, all this is there in the first
instance to provide an ironic foil. Instead of Rene's
longing for death, there is Van's denunciation of it
(297). Never for a moment does guilt enter into Ada's
and Van's feelings. On the contrary, they blissfully
enjoy being together, although they know the nature
of their relationship, and instead of the convent and
the wilds for Amelie and Rene respectively, there is
a triumphant reunion for Ada and Van. (One might however
see a further irony, and a parody of the practice
of traditional love stories, in the fact that Ada and
Van are fifty and fifty-two respectively when they
are eventually united).
The parodies make an emotional involvement diffi-
cult, if not impossible, and two more factors are
fundamental in the creation of this effect: the
strangeness of the world that Van and Ada inhabit,
and their own unpleasantness. John Updike complains
about the world of Ada and says that Nabokov has cre-
ated a "nulliverse", which is in his opinion something
an author should not do because