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

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involves contacts with authors and their works, but
his dealings with art are of a subordinate, purely subservient
nature. He enjoys reading the proofs, it is
true, in fact he reads them twice: "once for the defects
of the type and once for the virtues of the text" (74);
his spine, "(the true reader's main organ)" (75),
collaborates with his eye, but there are limits beyond
which he cannot follow his author's mind and genius.
He is puzzled by exceptional words and phrases, questions
some of R. 's stylistic eccentricities, and is "not sure
he entirely approved of R. 's luxuriant and bastard style"
(75). In his diary he boasts of some beautiful talents:
"I can compose patches of poetry as strange and new
as you are, or as anything a person may write three
hundred years hence... " (27); "Using ink and aquarelle
I can paint a lakescape of unsurpassed translucence
with all the mountains of paradise reflected therein...
" (28), but there is no evidence that he uses
these gifts, or that he even possesses them.
Nor does Hugh distinguish himself in any other respect.
He is neatly summed up as "a rather ordinary
American" (67) by those who cannot understand why
Armande should have married him, and his very name is
indicative of his ordinariness. Although deriving
from Peterson, as he insists (31), it hardly sounds
like an individual or individualizing name. "Here's.
the
person
.1 want. Hullo, person! ", the novel starts
11), and only by capitalizing the word does the author
transform that indifferent "person" into the main
character of his novel. Reversely he sometimes uses