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

-
418 -
LOOKATTHEHARLEQUINS!
"Look at the harlequins! "
"What harlequins? Where? "
"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees
are harlequins, words are harlequins.
So are situations and sums. Put two
things together -
jokes, images
- and
you get a triple harlequin. Come on!
Play! Invent the world! Invent reality! "
Some such advice might have been given by some (in-
vented) "extraordinary grand-aunt" (8) to Nabokov,
for this is precisely what he does in all his novels:
he plays, he invents the world, he invents reality.
As he demands of the artist, he knows the world, he
looks at it, he takes it in, he takes it apart; he
re-combines its elements and shapes out of them a new
and wholly artistic reality.
quins!
He does so for the last time in Look at the Harle-
1
in which he creates a fanciful version of
himself, and which conveys the impression as if he
were looking back on his oeuvre, deliberately taking
stock of what he has done and said.
Throughout this novel the narrator, Vadim, is haunted
by a strange sensation:
I was bothered... by a dream feeling that
my life was the non-identical twin, a parody,
an inferior variant of another man's life,
somewhere on this or another earth (89).
He has reasons for this uncertainty. His novels keep
getting mixed up with those of somebody else. He has
to insist, somewhat irritably, that the title of his
novel is Camera Lucida, not Camera Obscura (92);
his Tamara is mistaken for that somebody else's Mary
(94), and he has the suspicion
...
that even Ardis, my most private book,