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

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but the group of academics with whom he is contrasted:
"a lot of sterile and pretentious people... whose academic
ambitions vastly exceed their intellectual capabilities.
"28 Rejecting Pnin, they expose themselves
and their narrowmindedness. Their inability to appreciate
what is alive and original in the sphere of scholarship,
and the methods of their own academic pursuits
make it obvious that they have even in their academic
fields become victims of the comic automatism that is
characteristic of life as a whole. In the very sanctuary
of the live human mind their minds have lost
life and spontaneity and are suspicious of these qualities
in others. Pretending to superiority and being
in fact vastly inferior, they clearly qualify to be
classed among the ridiculous.
So, of course, do Liza and Eric Wind, in whose psychoanalytical
efforts and practices the general mania
for grouping and labelling and pigeonholing things
and people finds its absurd culmination. Nabokov has
in many places expressed his abhorrence of psychoanalysis
and has in ironic and sarcastic passages dismissed
its father as "the Viennese Quack"29 and itself
as "voodooism".
30
He has declared it to be "one
of the vilest deceits practised by people on themselves
and on others" that can be tolerated only "by
the ignorant, the conventional, or the very sick. " 31
But seldom has he allowed it quite so much room as
in Chapter IV of Pnin.
The passage about the Wind parents worriedly ana-
lysing their little boy seems at first reading oddly