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

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and that one has first to penetrate the screen in
order to discover what it conceals. But Nabokov does
not conceal anything. One perceives the laughter and
the nightmare simultaneously because they are inextricably
linked. With Nabokov (and perhaps even with
Beckett) it might be more to the point to speak of a
woven fabric in which laughter and nightmare are
combined in a complex pattern, in which they partake
of each other's qualities and set-each other off.
The technique of linking the comic with something
not comic has in the chapter on Lolita been described
as characteristic of the grotesque. One of the effects
of the grotesque is to evoke simultaneously two incompatible
emotions. In many scenes, as in the one
just described, anything comic seems totally inappropriate,
its introduction seems outrageous. But apart
from evoking contradictory emotions, the combination
of the comic with its opposites has also the effect
of "sharpening the awareness of the onlooker".
10
Just
as colours assume more brilliancy when seen in combination
with other colours, and just as their brilliancy
may come out best when-. they appear in unusual combinations,
the qualities of the comic and those of the
elements with which it is linked, appear more sharply
through their juxtaposition. The unbearable scene of
Krug watching the suffering of his little boy becomes
more unbearable because it is related in a comic manner.
The same applies to a great number of other scenes
in both novels.
However, both in Bend Sinister and in Invitation to