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

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the others: the rhythm is slightly disturbed. It is
re-established on the morning after Ada's arrival when
Van steps out on his balcony: "One floor below, and
somewhat adjacently, stood Ada engrossed in the view"
(561). "One floor below", and, says Zeller, "one year
below. "91 Van "left the balcony and ran down a short
spiral staircase to the fourth floor" (562). He cor-
rects the rhythm, he re-establishes the regularity,
and although it seems somewhat inconsistent (all of
a sudden a spatial metaphor is allowed to creep in)
he "realigns their schedules of sentiment by retreat-
ing back down the spiral; the seventeen-year separ-
ation is turned into sixteen ...
92
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Van's own comment on his treatment of the texture
of time can now be fully applied to his memoir:
My aim was to compose a kind of novella
in the form of a treatise on the Texture
of Time, an investigation of its veily
substance, with illustrative metaphors
gradually increasing, very gradually
building up a. logical love story, going
from past to present, blossoming as a
concrete story, and just as gradually
reversing analogies and disintegrating
again into bland abstraction (562-563)
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What he calls his "treatise" is in fact the whole novel
the reader is holding in his hand, Van's and Ada's love
story, which "disintegrates into abstraction" for only
a few pages in Part IV where Van draws the theoretical
conclusions from what he has been illustrating through
their story all along. That he should treat the elusive
and difficult question of the nature of time in this
unusual manner is wholly in keeping with his characterization
of himself as "not quite a savant, but completely
an artist" (471) and with his own conception