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

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lines of play 11120 will in the end be rewarded by a
"synthesis of poignant artistic delight. " 121
This intellectual enjoyment, in its turn, prevents
the reader from getting too emotionally involved,
and it frees his mind for the experience-of the philosophical
contents and' content-. Thus, he will, for
example, penetrate to the real content of Ada, because
the artistry will effectively prevent him from reading
Van's and Ada's story as literally one about incest,
and from getting trapped into an emotional involvement
with them. He will no longer read The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight as a biography once he has realized
that the old methods of biographical research are not
used as ways to knowledge about a person, but are
parodied and called into question.
He will also be discouraged from reading Invitation
to a Beheading as literally a novel about imprisonment
and death by beheading; he will not be allowed either
to react emotionally to the horrors of any one specific
political system, but he will be led on to the realization
that the concern of the novel is, again, a
quest for knowledge, knowledge of some superior reality,
in this case.
the
The old and traditional forms of fiction
- this is
implication
- have become stale; they are among
Nabokov's (or Sebastian Knight's) "dead things
shamming life". They no longer surprise the reader and
therefore provoke always the same stock responses from
him. By getting rid of - in fact, through parody
annihilating - these old conventional forms, the