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

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35 -
about Sebastian's use of parody, he stresses that
one of his intentions was
[to hunt]
...
out the things which had
once been fresh and bright but which
were now worn to a thread, dead things
among living ones; dead things shamming
life, painted and repainted, continuing
to be accepted by lazy minds serenely
unaware of the fraud. l 17
This can certainly also be put down as one of Nabokov's
intentions. However, it is perhaps not enough to see
in it only the artistic purpose of exposing worn-out
literary forms. It also directly serves the quest
with which all the novels are concerned, and makes
the reader receptive for the novels' import.
What was described above forms an intricate surface
of artistry and deception. The reader is often temporari-
ly trapped into feeling that he is reading something
very familiar, like the mystery story, say, or a
biography, or else that he is dealing with the scholar-
ly edition of a poem. He is trapped into this particu-
larly because the characteristic of parody is "analytic
mimicry"
118,
so that a parody may at first sight look
like the thing it is in fact parodying. But parody
is also a form of "mimicry that is just off the note"119
so that the reader will realize by and by that he
is reading something quite different from what he
thought he was reading, and that it has quite a dif-
ferent import from what it seemed at first to suggest.
This, for one thing, is the source of pure intel-
lectual enjoyment and of the pleasure that Nabokov
wants true art to give. The reader who manages to avoid
"the delusive opening moves, false scents, specious