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

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408
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get caught up in the world and become subject. to its
pain and suffering caused by customs, conventions
and general moral standards which come between them
and separate them, and, in their turn, they cannot
avoid causing suffering and even death to others.
Ada's and Van's Ardis resembles Marvell's garden
in that it, too, grants "a vision of bliss beyond the
raging of physical passion. " Van's memoir follows the
poem in yet another respect:
After the garden-dweller's soul, whetting
and combing its silver wings among the
branches, has experienced ecstasy, the poet
glances backward at the first Adam's paradise-and
then retur. ns us to the "real"
world of time, but it is a time now transfigured
by art, nature ordered by "the
skilful Gardner" in a floral sundial to
measure time.
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Van also takes us back to the "real" world of time,
but this time, too,
-'is
transfigured by art. "We can
know the time", says Ada, "we can know a time. We can
never know Time. Our senses are simply not meant to
perceive it. It is like
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(563), and, hesitating
and pausing, she implicitly points back to the novel
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we have just read, to Van's memoir in which, Illustrating
it through their love. story, he has caught
the texture of time.
As the Future does not have the status of time in
Van's system, and as he regards the Present, as commonly
understood, as "the constant building up of the
Past, its smoothly and relentlessly rising level"
(551), it is only possible to come to an understanding
of the texture of time by looking at the Past as
stored in one's memory. Some of Van's basic assumptions
must be recalled before it can be shown how