An Excerpt From My Reading Of James Joyce And Vladimir Nabokov

The figure of the 'out-of-date' artist in Joyce and Nabokov

Despite the many meanings and definitions of Modernism that proliferate within literary criticism, two writers who have been firmly accepted as 'Modernist' are James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. Whilst much of Nabokov's later work has been described as postmodern (indeed even as parody of Modernism), the majority of critical opinion identifies Nabokov as 'a Modernist writer as old as the twentieth century'. Richard Wasson identifies a reflexive nature in Modernist art (something which Post-Modernists actively objected to) in which 'the outer world becomes the hero's inner world . . . the work becomes a projection of the artist's subjectivity'. The subjectivity of the artist (or artist figure) is a very deep concern for Joyce and Nabokov, one which is explored overtly in The Dead (published as the final story in `Dubliners` in 1914) and `Lolita` (1955). Indeed, both writers interrogate the theme to an extent that enters the realm of the absurd, as I will explore.

In `The Dead` and `Lolita` Joyce and Nabokov create a fictional artist-figure embroiled in the task of aestheticizing the 'outer world' to fit their own subjective desires. In the older and shorter work, Joyce presents us with Gabriel, a 'virtual, homebound, Irish artist self-manqué' who is attending an annual gathering at his Aunts' home with his wife, Gretta. In `Lolita` our narrator is the flamboyant Humbert Humbert, a convicted pedophile who is presenting his interpretation of his relations with child, Lolita. Without being professional or successful artists in any respect, both figures imagine themselves as creators navigating various artistic mediums, with an intellectual and creative capacity far exceeding those around them. Gabriel worries that his quotes from poet Robert Browning, which he plans to include in his dinner speech, will be 'above the heads of his hearers [.] he would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand.' Humbert has an even more inflated opinion of himself. Elizabeth Power points out that the protagonist 'believes he covers all grounds possible as an artist and a lover', seeing his child-lust as confirmation of his literary virtuoso, and Poe, Dante and Petrarch as his forebears. For Humbert, his own poetic grace somehow transcends or transforms the vile nature of his crime; he tries to capture his love for Lolita in a Renaissance-style composition, as if the affair was of a nature entirely appropriate for such a thing. 'A poet à mes heures, I composed a madrigal to the soot black lashes of her pale-gray vacant eyes [.] but I tore it up and cannot recall it today.' Literature seems to exist, for him, on a plane distinct from the actuality of ones own actions and the moral consequences attached to them. Humbert, at least for the first half of the novel, manages to convince himself that he is more poet than pedophile - he is a stylist, and 'Lolita has no meaning for him except as a performance of style.'