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

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rience "paradise" and reality. These terms seem
rather too chaste when applied to what looks simply
like Van's and Ada's indefatigable and incestuous
love-making, especially, to quote Alter, as "there
is a much higher degree of descriptive specification
about sexual matters here than anywhere else in
Nabokov's fiction. 1145 In fact, their love has been
much commented on and has caused critics to speak of
46,
Van's and Ada's "sinister" love of their "guilt"
from which they seek "redemption" through their work
of art47, and of their "upside down (or abnormal)
form of sexuality", of which Van's Mascodagama act is
"a striking emblem. "48
Their love may seem "abnormal" and "unnatural",
though hardly "sinister", but what they experience
from early onwards is not simply the sexual act for
its own sake as might appear, but perfect love, its
"happiness", "tenderness", "gentleness", and its "fantastic
joy" (123-124). Ada may be unfaithful to Van,
but she knows that he is "her only true love" and
"all her life" (192), and if van, during times of sep-
aration, frequents brothels, it is "to seek, with
what tenacious anguish, traces and tokens of my un-
forgettable love" (104), who is "my whole life"
(440), as he says to Demon, echoing Ada. Although mo-
ments of physical love figure prominently in their
memoir and crowd out others, they are not the only
ones that they remember. Van experiences a "moment
of total happiness", which he recalls many years later,
just being aware of Ada by his side, of his love for