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

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cribed by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium.
According to rabbinic legend, Adam in the
Garden before the creation of Eve was androgynous,
and it is clear that Nabokov, like
the rabbis, has conjoined the Greek and the
Hebrew myths, creating in his deliciously
intertwined sister and brother an image of
prelapsarian, unfragmented man. 56
Bobbie Ann Mason's view of Ardis Park is diagonally
opposed to that of Alter. Van Veen's very name, she
says, is significant, for "In Russian, Veen means
guilt (vina, that is, means 'fault' or 'guilt')"57, and
his paradise is "a perverse Eden. "58 His nature imagery
seems to create a perfect Edenic garden, but on second
sight it appears that he uses (or abuses) natural
objects, trees and flowers and butterflies, to describe
a basically unnatural story.
59
Incestuousness is un-
natural and Van's guilt consists not only in breaking
the rules of nature himself but also in making Ada,
who has a genuine love of nature, a partner in his
crime, thus "drawing [her]
away from her natural gar-
den... " 60 Mason argues that Van admits his guilt by
making use of so many references to nature, and calls
them "Van Veen's attempt to legitimize what he fears
is an unnatural story by narrating it in natural
terms. "61 Sometimes, ironically, his nature images
turn back on him, such as, when all of a sudden, he
applies a butterfly metaphor (used so far only for
Ada) to both Ada and himself62, or when he gets his
orchid metaphor confused and when Ada and himself both
63
resemble an orchid. At such moments, Mason says,
their incest becomes synonymous with solipsism: "Each
sees himself in the other and adores his own image"
641,