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

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hopeless, but Nabokov does not get caught in an impasse.
Bergson expresses a thought that Nabokov shares,
when he describes the artist as one who can see
through the labels affixed to things and perceive
their inner life:
Art... [. brushes] aside the utilitarian symbols,
the conventional and socially accepted generalities,
in short everything that veils reality
from us, in order to bring us face to face
with reality itself. 77
Nabokov expresses it like this:
Whatever the mind grasps, it does so with
the assistance of creative fancy, that
drop of water on a glass slide which gives
distinctness and relief to the observed
organism. 78
His mind helps the artist in different ways in his
understanding of "true reality". In the "average"
world, in which man finds himself, the artistic mind
may be aware of reflections and echoes of some superior
reality, and through them the artist may be enabled
to overcome the limitations normally set to the human
mind and to apprehend something truly real. This-is
the case in Lolita, where, through Lolita's youthful
beauty, Humbert has an intimation of some infinite
perfection and some pure and eternal and immaterial
beauty. In Transparent Things the process Nabokov
describes seems to be an almost involuntary one. The
artist needs only concentrate on an object, and with-
out any deliberate effort he will sink into its past
and history. By a simple "act of attention"
79
he
breaks
the "thin veneer of immediate reality [that] is
spread over natural and artificial matter"80, and
behind this "thin veneer", the "now" of the object