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blasphemies and medical logic of Buck, the myths of Pateresque art–
and
in
Joyce making parodies now of one structural organization,
now of another, and discovering in the process that he exults in and
must parody his own fiction-making powers.
Creation follows the discovery of waste in things that once seemed
creative. What was once reality, like God,
has
become, under the
pressure of time, a fiction strong enough only to promote the nostal–
gia out of which, in reaction, new fictions, new excuses for the asser–
tion of life can then issue. Joyce not only initiates a tradition of self–
parody now conspicuously at work in literature; he simultaneously
passes beyond it into something which writers of the present and
future have still to emulate. He is not at
all
satisfied merely with
demonstrating that any effort at the creation of shapes is an exercise
in factitiousness. Instead, he is elated and spurred by this discovery;
he responds not by the contemplation of futility or with ironies about
human invention and its waste, but with wonder at the human
power to create and then to create again under the acknowledged
aegis of death.
A roughly similar substitution of fresh fictions for those lost
"realities" which have themselves been exposed as fictional is at the
center of Nabokov's novelistic and autobiographical writings. But it
is a mistake to say, as most commentators have, that he "believes"
in aesthetic form: he would in the first place have had to believe in
the reality for which aesthetic form is the proposed substitute. Having
dispensed with the idea of any articulated nonfictive reality, why
then tum for reality to fictions? Instead, Nabokov, like Joyce, is led
to parody of the very activities in which they both persist. By no
accident, the hero of one is a would-be artist, while many of Nabo–
kov's heroes are writers, some of whom, like Humbert Humbert in
Lolita,
actually record for us an autobiography which they now
recognize to have been a fiction. Reality, Nabokov once said, is "an
infinite succession of levels, levels of perception, false bottoms and
hence unquenchable, unattainable." Like Joyce, he directly parodies
traditional forms such as melodrama, critical analysis in
Pale Fire,
the mystery story in
La'ughter in the Dark,
the definitive biography in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
-
and all of these parodies are
intended to expose the deadness of characters who express themselves
in obedience to some literary mode, who follow what Nabokov calls
an "adopted method."
