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

- 295
-
Shade does not venture to make any statement about
the nature of death. Sebastian Knight says in The
Doubtful
Asphbdel
that
...
only one half of the notion of
death can be said really to exist: this
side of the question - the wrench, the
parting, the quay of life gently moving
away aflutter with handkerchiefs... 29
The other half remains unknown: "The asphodel on the
other shore is as doubtful as ever. " 30
R. and with him Nabokov, who is, after all the
master mind of the novel and R. 's creator, for once
steps beyond the boundaries which even the artist must
normally respect, and tries to catch a glimpse of what
there is behind the wall that conceals the future.
And at the end R. qualifies his earlier statement about
what he thinks death means: it is not simply a crude
physical annihilation of the human mind. He event-
ually comes to the conclusion that death actually in-
volves the human mind in perhaps the most difficult
activity it has ever yet had to perform:
This is, I believe, it: not the crude
anguish of physical death but the incomparable
pangs of the mysterious
mental maneuver needed to pass from
one state of being to another (104).
Nabokov calls Transparent Things "... a beyond-the-
cypress inquiry into a tangle of random destinies"31,
and for a moment R. does take the reader to "the other
shore": "On the threshold of my novel", Rabokov says,
Hugh Person is
...
welcomed by a ghost -
by his dead father, perhaps, or dead
wife; more probably by the late Monsieur
Kronig, former director of the Ascot Hotel;
s ti13jý more probably by Mr. R. 's
phantom.