“Not Text, but Texture”: Nabokov and the Joycean Momentum

Abstract

This essay focuses on the influence of Joyce’s writing on Nabokov in terms of both style and themes. The first part discusses the impact of Ulysses on Nabokov’s novel The Eye (Soglyadatai, 1930) – his last “European text” – while the second part considers the possible analogies between Finnegans Wake and Pale Fire (1962), and in particular the way both Nabokov and Joyce create a specific idiolect and linguistic universe of its own for their characters. As a result, such a comparison discloses a series of complex and ingenious interconnections for which perhaps the term influence is inappropriate or at least limited. In other words, although may be true that when Nabokov begins to study Joyce systematically he is “definitely formed and immune to any literary influence”, it is quiet apparent that Joyce’s “noble originality and unique lucidity of thought and style” cannot be so easily dismissed. Indeed, as this essay demonstrates, the Irish writer surfaces in Nabokov’s narratives as a sort of textual reverberation from a sophisticated interplay of literary as well as cultural references.