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

-
229
-
using imitation as his basic device, he exposes
through exaggeration of the characteristic traits
of the genre imitated the dangers inherent in it.
He exploits the comic effects of a scholarly work
becoming a parody of itself when undertaken by someone
like Kinbote who falls victim to all these dangers,
uses the normal techniques indiscriminately,
misapplies them, carries them to ridiculous extremes,
and fills the form with incongruous contents or no
contents at all. And in Kinbote of course, he ridicules
the inept and luckless scholar, who, by bungling
his task completely, becomes a parody of what
he wants to be and of what he assumes he is.
Nor does Nabokov stop here. The parody becomes
even fiercer with regard to Kinbote's person. There
are other weaknesses besides that of bad scholarship
that Nabokov cannot forgive in an editor, and he
gives them all to Kinbote, so as to show them at
their worst and to ridicule them. As he by and by
emerges from the foreword, Kinbote turns out to be
self-centred, obtrusive, conceited and presumptuous,
besides being a bad scholar. He writes the foreword
and, as will be seen later, the commentary, basically
about himself. In a strangely disconnected sequence
of chatty digressions from his real subject he talks
about things that concern only himself, things so
ridiculously remote from the poem as the heating sys-
tem in the house into which he moved (19), his own
personal idiosyncrasies, his likes and dislikes
(20-21), the unpleasantness of certain persons he met