Nabokov's Cold Pudding

The Stylistic and Structural Impact of Finnegans Wakeon Lolita, Pale Fire, and Bend Sinister

Abstract

Vladimir Nabokov was noted for his barbed criticisms on any number of the major 19th and 20th-century writers and their celebrated works. James Joyce is one of the few elect who escapes being tipped into Nabokov's disposal by dint of his extravagant stylistic accomplishment in Ulysses, while Finnegans Wake is wittily described as "a formless and dull mass of phony folklore, a cold pudding." In spite of Nabokov's disdainful comments on Finnegans Wake, this paper attempts to demonstrate the stylistic and structural influences Joyce's work exerted on Lolita, Pale Fire, and Bend Sinister.