Formal consolations: Parody, figure, and modernity in the work of Vladimir Nabokov

This dissertation seeks to explain Nabokov's parodic enterprise as an exemplary instance of twentieth-century literature's uneasiness with its own representational reliability. For Nabokov the unavailability of what I call semiotic allegory is a given, and belief in language's unimpeded referential capacities is at best an act of literary nai vete--thus his unceasing polemics against nineteenth-century high realism. My thesis details the various ways in which Nabokov methodically undermines the props of any such "allegorical" enterprise: the exposure of memoir as performance in Lolita, the rereading of domestic tragedy as aesthetic play in Pale Fire, and the use of figure to undermine the realist illusion of sustained and seamless narrative in Ada. This insistent undermining of the traditional realist apparatus has led many critics--unthinkingly, in my opinion--to classify his work as postmodern. My final chapter, which concentrates on the interplay of historical and spatial acts of literary attention in Transparent Things, attempts to reclaim Nabokov for modernism and explore the shape of his modernity. For example: Nabokov, despite his emphasis on the materiality of the sign (what he more felicitously calls "the surface of things"), never abandons the critical modernist predicates of depth and temporality. Rather, he insists, the "surface" of any serious work of art is temporal as well as spatial. In fact, temporality, he argues in Transparent Things, is most properly conceived of as a trope and, as such, inescapably a part of a novel's extended synchronic arrangements. This recognition of the subtle geometric interplay of depth and surface and, even more importantly, the consolation that recognition affords in Nabokov's work (particularly to the grieving John Shade in Pale Fire) differentiates it definitively from the postmodern enterprise. To read Nabokov attentively, I argue throughout this dissertation, is not to observe the unrelenting dismantling of history and affect, but rather to oscillate between a reading that recognizes, even applauds, a subversive and dandified formalism and an equally valid and unavoidable reading which reveals authenticity--and pathos--as necessary ingredients of that formalism.