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

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ture of the author, one may well end up with the "macabre
doll" that Nabokov sees as the product of such
an undertaking, or with a parody such as Vadim, whom
Nabokov seems to have invented for the very purpose
of discouraging the reader from any such enterprise.
From behind the playful f agade of the novel emerges
as serious warning addressed to the reader not to do
what Vadim seems to be suggesting at the beginning,
and a definite refutation of any attempt to search
the works of an author for any authentic information
about him. His "reality" and identity cannot be "ferreted
out". They are his own and ought to be left
alone. At the end of one's preoccupation with Nabokov's
novels, and however well one may know them, one is
therefore left with an author whose own reality
escapes one and whom one does not know. Once more,
and as in all the other novels, parody - this time
the parodistic treatment of the author's own life and
person - serves a serious purpose.
In many respects Look at the Harlequins: looks like
a conscious and deliberate summing-up on the part of
the author of what he has done and said in all his
earlier novels.. This goes well beyond the playful and
parodistic recapitulation of their titles and plots.
Throughout the novel Vadim is preoccupied with
time, in the guise of space. His affliction, which he
has given to a character in Ardis, consists in an
inability to "cope with the abstraction of direction
in space" (85).
In actual, physical life I can turn as