Joyce & Nabokov on Exile
This is an excerpt from the paper...
James Joyce (1882-1941) and Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), two of the twentieth century's greatest English-language writers, were exiles throughout their working lives. The conditions of their exile were entirely different, but some of the effects on their writing were similar. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Nabokov's Lolita (1958) are primarily works of exile. Joyce's heavily autobiographical novel recounts the education and growth of a potential writer, the young Stephen Dedalus, whose increasingly firm goal becomes escape from Ireland and all the complications of religion, politics, and family that hinder him as an artist. Nabokov's Humbert, on the other hand, could only be said to be autobiographical in terms of being an educated European immigrant observing the strange behavior of the people of America. In both cases, however, these deracinT, or rootless, writers' difficulties with being removed from the deepest sources of their inspiration were exacerbated by a certain level of estrangement from the language in which they wrote. Both Nabokov and Joyce spoke, read, and studied in English throughout their lives. But in Ireland the people's own language had been officially replaced by the language of the English oppressors in the 1830s and Irish writers of English long felt a sense of displacement and disloyalty. And for Nabokov Russian, the language of his native culture, was simply unavailable. Since he could not be published in the S
. . .
a" is a "strategy of disclosure" for the character in which more complicated meanings and intentions can be glimpsed (835). But in this disclosure, as Humbert reveals the circumstances of his past and the existence of his first love Annabel, Nabokov establishes a parallel between the two girls as Humbert says, "that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel" (16). There is, therefore, a European girl from Humbert's youthful past who was the only person he ever loved other than the American Lolita. The love of the former was natural and charming as the two children were "madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other" (14). But Humbert's love for Lolita, even when it miraculously, to him, continues after she has grown up, is, as he sometimes admits, a perversion. If, however, one takes Lolita to represent the English language and Annabel as the symbol of Russian (an allegory that hardly exhausts the book's meanings, of course) it becomes clear how Nabokov imagined this novel as an account of his love affair with English.
Humbert forces himself on Lolita, much as Nabokov might be said, by him, to have forced himself upon American English. In turning to a second girl to replace the one he
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
John Hollander, Bourbon Street, Stephen Dedalus, Nabokov's America, Drumcondra Stephen, Artist Lolita, Stephen Dedalus', Humbert Lolita, Roman Catholic, Lolita Humbert, english language, james joyce, portrait artist, cambridge cambridge 1990, ed derek attridge, ed derek, joyce's portrait, cambridge cambridge, derek attridge, cambridge 1990, attridge cambridge, companion james joyce, joyce ed derek, romantic novel, derek attridge cambridge,
Approximate Word count = 3640
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Joyce & Nabokov on Exile
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
