As McFate Would Have It

The Author's Joycean Cameo in Lolita

Abstract

Establishing multiple instances of intertextuality between Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and James Joyce's Ulysses, this article seeks more significant analogies between the two works than some curious but easily demonstrated instances of gender and ethnic related motivic echoing. Thus it is shown that Nabokov believed himself to be emulating Joyce's example of breaking the narrative frame of his novel to make room for his own authorial self. The essay asks, but declines to answer, whether the authorial hide-and-seek observed in the two novels provides evidence of Joyce and Nabokov having both been proto-postmodernists of sorts, or else the very ease with which their self-referential riddles can be solved locates them in an earlier tradition of the novel.