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

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of a comic strip cartoon
[124]),
and his life is
"a mixture of the ready-made and the grotesque" (433).
His Boschean death is the only remarkable thing about
him.
Aqua's sister Marina is described as "essentially
a dummy in human disguise" (252) with a "screen-corrupted
mind" (253). Her thoughts centre on two things
to the exclusion of nearly everything else: her career
on the stage and on the screen, and her affairs. Even
these she tends to see in theatrical terms, such as
her affair with Demon, to which she applies the title
of her cinema hit: A Torrid Affair (253). All its
emotional implications she has discarded as "mere
scenery"; it is all "easily packed, labeled 'Hell'
and freighted away" (253); and such infrequent emotional
reminders as do affect her, remain vague and
are put-: off: "Someday, she mused, one's past must be
put in order. Retouched, retaken" (253). She has no
affection for her family, is in turn ignored by them
most of the time (262-263), and Demon finds it impossible
even "to realize,..., that there was a woman
whom he had intolerably loved... " (251).
There are a few moments at which Demon emerges as
a somewhat more "normal" human character than Aqua
and Dan and Marina. One of them is the moment which
has just been mentioned, at which the "cpmplete collapse
of the past" (251) grieves him and at which he
realizes with something like amazement that, once an
affair is over, "... the human part of one's affection
seemed to be swept away with the dust of the inhuman