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

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when all of a sudden "the spanking pace" of the story
slackens. In Part II it seems to stand still altogether.
This part starts with a verbatim rendering of Ada's
letters to Van (Nabokov ridicules the epistolary novel
in Despair24, and Van himself comments ironically on
the "novelistic theme of written communications"
[287]). They are followed by a bit of science fiction:
Van's Letters from Terra; the "Floramor" fantasy of
Eric van Veen; a comic rendering of a classroom lecture
on dreams, with the usual digs at Freud; and the detailed
description of Kim's photographs. And it is at
the most critical point of the chronicle, and therefore
at a moment of great suspense, namely when Ada
"donated her collections to a National Park museum
and traveled by air to Switzerland for an 'exploratory
interview' with fifty-two-year-old Van Veen" (532),
that the flow of the story is wickedly interrupted
again for the most difficult and intellectual bit of
the novel, namely Van's treatise on The Texture of
Time (535ff. ).
From time to time jokes are directed at those
readers who are led by the subject to expect "Casanovanic
situation[s]" (418) and their explicit descriptions.
The use of the code, helpfully explained
(160f. ) after it has just been used (157), suggests
that the action is getting too incendiary to be expressed
in normal print, so that the harmlessness of
what the decoded passage yields: "... this attire was
hardly convenient for making his way through the brush
and crossing a brook to reach Ada in a natural bower