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 Since he could not be published in the Soviet Union he was forced to forge an English-language literary style in order to pursue his desire to write fiction. In Joyce's case, however, the writer desired exile as an entanglement-free vantage point from which to look back on his culture while in Nabokov's case, the writer looked around him at the culture into which fate had thrown him and, in looking, expressed the difficulty of exile.
Joyce determined at an early age that conditions in Ireland and th...