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

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Ada also appear in it: somewhat like Van and Ada, the
lovers "were to live to the combined age of 170 in
absolute bliss" (194). The most amusing and most elaborate
twist occurs in connection with See under Real
which combines the basic situation of The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight with the mechanics of Pale Fire.
The "uninformed" and mediocre biography of "an English
novelist, a brilliant and unique performer" is edited
"by the indignant brother of the dead novelist", and
in his edition "fraternal footnotes, half-a-dozen lines
per page, then more, then much more, which started to
question, then refute, then demolish by ridicule the
would-be biographer's doctored anecdotes and vulgar
inventions" (121) assume by and by the same prominence
as Kinbote's critical apparatus in Pale Fire. Vadim's
Ardis sounds similar enough to Ada to be identified
with it: "a stylized memoir dealing with the arbored
boyhood and ardent youth of a great thinker who by the
end of the book tackles the itchiest of all noumenal
mysteries" (231). They are, however, not quite identical,
for the mystery tackled in Vadim's Ardis is
"the Specter of Space" (231), whereas Van Veen is of
course preoccupied with the Texture of Time.
But parody soon leaves this somewhat superficial
and obvious level and assumes profounder implications.
Somewhat surprisingly for a Nabokov character, Vadim
states that "the present memoir derives much of its
value from its being a catalogue raisonne of the roots
and origins and amusing birth canals of many images
in my Russian and especially English fiction" (8),