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

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and it is also appropriate and logical that he and
Margot should feel mutually attracted and that Margot
should stay with him.
"Love is blind" remarks the postman (LD, 119) - again
talking to the hall-porter as on the occasion when
Albinus tried to intercept Margot's letter. Albinus'
blindness consists, in conventional terms, in not
seeing what everybody else does see "this little
slut is going to be the ruin of him" (LD, 105). On
another level it consists in mistaking Margot for something
superior, namely for one of those creatures
in which rest elements of that "pure, eternal, unchanging
beauty" towards which man aspires.
Through her he wants to penetrate to the infinite
and elusive realm of beauty, that is, to some reality
that is superior to the "average reality" which man
normally experiences. Instead he gets caught up in
the camera obscura world which is Margot's and Rex's
and of which they are part, and thus loses all chance
and hope of ever experiencing what he is yearning for.
Instead of getting any nearer that superior realm,
he has moved away from it, for the camera obscura
world is inferior even to the average world of man
and completely removed from "true reality". It does
not even share the "average reality" our world possesses.
Its so-called "reality" consists only of fleeting
shadow images of our world, those "degrading images"
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which film makers produce and in terms of which
Margot has been described throughout. It is obvious
that Albinus' attachment to one of those images can