ASSOCIATION: Manifestations – Colloque 2013 – Abstracts

DRAGUNOIU, Dana – Carleton University, Canada
The French Duel and Nabokovian Moral Autonomy
   In Speak, Memory, Nabokov asserts that “[a] Russian duel was a much more serious affair than the conventional Parisian variety.” In his annotations to Eugene Onegin, Nabokov traces this lack of seriousness to the 1830s when the French bastardized the dueling code that they had made influential in the late 16^th century and turned it into the farcical “‘back-to-back-march-face-about-fire’ affair popularized in modern times by movies and cartoons.”
   The lovingly detailed description that Nabokov lavishes on “the classical duel à volonté of the French code” may strike us anachronistic. Historians of the duel (Kiernan, Reyfman, Appiah) tell us that dueling met with fierce criticism even at the height of its popularity. Montaigne spoke for many such critics when he noted that the duel’s “laws of honor […] shock and trouble those of reason.” Nabokov’s own father published an influential essay in the liberal juridical weekly Pravo denouncing dueling as a barbaric custom opposed to the principles of justice and the mores of cultured society. And yet, in spite of his public condemnation of dueling, Nabokov’s father did not hesitate to fight a duel when his own honor was impugned. My paper will make a two-pronged argument. First, I will argue that Nabokov was deeply invested in the duel for reasons at once personal, literary, ethical, and metaphysical.  Second, I will argue that Nabokov’s understanding of the duel was inextricably tied to the French cultural landscape.
    “No Russian writer of any repute has failed to describe une rencontre, a hostile meeting,” he writes in Speak, Memory. His choice of language underscores the dual citizenship of what he calls “the Franco-Russian code” that Russian duelists adopted and dutifully upheld in their own battles over personal honor. By focusing on what Nabokov wrote about such famous Russian historical and literary rencontres (Pushkin’s with Georges d’Anthès, Onegin’s with Lenski, Bazarov’s with Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov), I will argue that dueling becomes the ultimate test case of a man’s autonomy and moral virtue in Nabokov’s hierarchy of values.
DE LA DURANTAYE, Leland – Claremont McKenna College, California, USA
Pure Time and Perceptual Time, or The Influence of Henri Bergson on Vladimir Nabokov
    While Henri Bergson was likely not what Maeterlinck suggested he was –“l’homme le plus dangereux du monde”—Bergson’s vision of time and memory, more even perhaps than for the philosophers of his generation and the one that was to follow it, was phenomenally influential for the creative writers of the first part of this century (one would do well to remember the intensity of feelings that Bergson’s writings raised for members of Nabokov’s generation:  Julien Benda remarked that he would have joyfully killed Bergson if he might thus have arrested his influence; T.S. Eliot was at no small pains to denounce the « epidemic » which was « Bergsonism”; William James said of reading Bergson that, « it is like the breath of the morning and the song of the birds”).  For his part, Vladimir Nabokov was charmed enough by Bergson’s matinal song to list him among his preferred authors in the years he was forming his literary vision.
    Bergson was such a phenomenally appealing philosopher to artists of Nabokov’s generation, and the one directly preceding it (which was Bergson’s own, and that of his cousin Proust), for a number of reasons.  One is indeed his style, the rhythms and cadences of his elegant and flowing, his “musical” prose  (Bergson was awarded in 1928 the Nobel Prize for Literature).  What is more, this eloquence, this fluidity and facility of Bergson’s prose is ringed with a sort of désinvolture in that Bergson ceaselessly indicts language for its creation of false problems, its false découpures of rolling, swelling, constantly creative life.  And yet this eloquence and its corresponding dismissal as not essential, and even as an impediment, to the intuitive apperception of durée also appealed (and appeals) to artists for the place it gives precisely to artistic intuition.  Bergson consequently presented art, works of art, and artistic gestures as undivided motions which can only be falsified by the analyzing (that is, the dividing, the segmentarizing) mind.  To wit, the artist need not answer to the critic; the critic can never be commensurate, at least by way of analysis, of division and separation, with the artist and his or her initial, original gesture.
    These aspects of Bergson’s writing in all probability contributed to the attention that Nabokov devoted to Bergson—at least during the ‘20’s to the ‘30’s (and again in the mid-60’s during the composition of Ada—as evidenced by the preparatory notes to that novel contained in the Berg Collection).  But more particularly, in questions pertaining to theories of time and memory that Bergson was most important for the development of Nabokov’s thought—and most useful in its understanding today.  It is for this reason all the more surprising that the profound links between the two writers have gone relatively unremarked upon by critics of Nabokov.  One is pleased to note that the editor of The Garland Companion dedicates an entry to their relation, but one is disappointed to find that, given the importance of the connection, that the entry in question fails to take into account the points on which Nabokov and Bergson most powerfully agree and disagree.  The Bergson studied in The Garland Companion is the mystical Bergson, the Bergson who left no visible traces in Nabokov’s work but who, following the author of this entry, shared with Nabokov a belief in another world beyond this one.  Writers who believe in another world beyond this one are not rare in this or any other century and thus the mere presence of this theme in both writers hardly seems important enough to dedicate such attention to it (no case is made in said entry that Nabokov’s belief in immortality, or his manner of evoking it, was directly or even indirectly conditioned or formed by his reading of Bergson). Nabokov repeatedly rejected organized religion and aligned his faith in another world and time-eternal with no system of beliefs; Bergson, on the other hand, was a practicing and openly religious man and wrote openly of his religiosity.  This is disappointing as an exploration of a shared “cosmogony” given that it is conducted to the detriment of the conceptions of time and memory which so link Nabokov and Bergson (and are which accorded a single summary paragraph).  Other critics have studied the relation, such as Michael Glynn, Brian Boyd, and others, and advanced its understanding. That said, I believe a more direct linking of the two men’s views can reveal essential insights into Nabokov’s conceptions of creativity and memory.  I propose, therefore, to align Bergson’s so-called “anti-intellectualism,” his dismissal of Einstein’s relativity, his definitions of image, reality and perception and his theories about the memory and time with Nabokov’s very similar views on those questions.  In doing so I will stress the ways in which Nabokov’s conception of memory sharply differs from Proust’s, and is extraordinarily close to Bergson’s.  The goal is a clearer understanding of the relation between what Nabokov calls in Speak, Memory “the prison of time” and art’s way out of it. 
EELLS, Emily – Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France
Proust, Nabokov and “the language of rainbows”
    A few years after ranking ‘the first half of Proust’s fairy tale, In Search of Lost Time’ as the fourth ‘greatest masterpiece of twentieth-century prose’, Nabokov paid open tribute to Proust in his request that the cover illustration for the Penguin paperback edition of Ada should be a cattleya orchid. His works bear the imprint of his reading of Proust; to cite Lolita, they ‘prolong the Proustian intonations’ of time and memory which have been insightfully analyzed by Robert Alter (1991), John Foster (1995) and Michael Wood (2002), to name but three of Nabokov’s exegetes. The paper proposes to mark a departure from their work by concentrating on the Proustian reflections in the colored language Nabokov uses in Ada and Speak, Memory, including the first version of chapter five, published in French as ‘Mademoiselle O’. As suggested by the rest of the sentence in Ada from which the title of this paper is extracted (it refers to those “colored-chalk pencils whose mere evocation (Dixon Pink Anadel!) makes one’s memory speak in the language of rainbows”), a study of Proust and Nabokov’s literary relationship cannot ignore the question of memory and time. However, the particular focus here will be on the synaesthetic inflection of their language. Nabokov identified Proust as a synaesthesist who, like himself, “saw sounds in color” (cf. Lectures on Literature). This paper will highlight how both Proust and Nabokov filter experience through the prism of the senses. It will consider the importance of mauve in Proust’s novel which Nabokov singled out as ‘the color of time’. It is also the color of affect, from the emblematic cattleya of Swann and Odette’s love-making to the hue of amaranth evoked by the narrator’s infatuated reverie on the name of the Duchess of Guermantes. Nabokov uses that ‘purple passage’ to color Van Veen’s family’s name, and it will serve as the point of departure of a comparative analysis of the chromatics of Proustian and Nabokovian onomastics.
FAYE, Sabine – Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle
Nabokov et Mallarmé
   Des références aux poèmes  du poète symboliste Stéphane Mallarmé  apparaissent dans certains  romans  de la période américaine de Nabokov. Les analogies entre l’œuvre de Nabokov et celle de Mallarmé ne manquent pas tant d’un point de vue esthétique que d’un point de vue métaphysique.
    Nabokov partage avec Mallarmé certains traits stylistiques. L’un et l’autre font usage d’images  et de métaphores qui tendent à déréaliser  le monde représenté.
    Dans ses écrits théoriques Mallarmé élabore un véritable Art Poétique. Sa réflexion sur le langage,  sur les sons,  les mots et leur autonomie par rapport au sens annonce l’Art Poétique de Nabokov illustré dans ses romans  les plus novateurs. Le défi lancé au hasard devient l’un des enjeux de l’écriture.
   Le traitement de l’espace et du temps, chez Nabokov comme chez Mallarmé, passent par une vision idéalisante.  A un ailleurs idéal et inaccessible correspondent la mélancolie d’un passé idéalisé et le désir d’un futur idéalisé, mais la vision extatique a pour corollaire une vision ironique.
   Nabokov comme Mallarmé représentent dans leurs œuvres un monde onirique ou un monde platonicien qui remet en question les apparences et suggère la possibilité d’une essence. Cette quête s’exprime par l’évocation obsessionnelle des  figures de l’absolu. Hantés par l’absence et la disparition l’autre défi qu’ils relèvent est de rendre l’essence concrète et  l’invisible visible.

FILIMONOV, Aleksey – Saint-Petersbourg
Le thème français dans la poésie de Nabokov-Sirine
    Pour le prosateur et poète Sirine (le Nabokov russe), la période parisienne fut l’une des plus fécondes. Après avoir quitté Berlin pour Paris à l’automne 1937, Nabokov y resta jusqu’à son départ pour l’Amérique en mai 1940. C’est à cette période qu’est consacré le « Poème parisien » (1943), chef-d’œuvre du Nabokov mûr, où les realia du temps, les personnages historiques, la douleur de la perte de la Russie, le pressentiment qu’il s’agit d’une époque tragique pour l’Europe et la conscience que la littérature de l’émigration va disparaître, sont exprimés de manière particulièrement aigüe, par l’utilisation de procédés artistiques pour lesquels sa prose est si célèbre et qui sont ici transférés sur le terrain de la poésie.
    Dans ce poème la figure de Khodassévitch, vivant dans une mansarde, est significativement décrite par l’auteur comme une créature immatérielle. Khodassévitch était le frère d’armes de Sirine et des échos de la lutte littéraire avec Adamovitch, Hippius et Georgij Ivanovitch apparaissent clairement dans les lignes du « Poème parisien ».
    Les figures romantiques des chevaliers-croisés, du Roi Arthur, de la Belle Dame, apparaissent dans les poèmes de sa jeunesse, pour partie inspirés par la poésie d’Alexandre Blok et de Nikolaï Goumiliov, qu’aimait beaucoup Nabokov. Dans un poème écrit encore plus tôt, « Napoléon en exil », Nabokov consacre une stance, écrite en Crimée, à son propre destin :
       Il s’est arrêté ; il est pitoyable
       Dans ce chapeau à larges bords
Dans tous les vers français de Nabokov-Sirine on peut encore distinguer un thème, qui est le filigrane de toute la poésie russe, le thème du bonheur, de la victoire sur le tragique au travers de la « Joie de vivre », selon le titre en français de l’un de ses poèmes.
    Dans les poèmes intitulés « La bonne Lorraine » et « L’inconnue de la Seine » transparaissent les figures fémines sacrifiées de Jeanne d’Arc et d’une inconnue, retrouvée noyée au 19^ème siècle, dont le masque mortuaire était devenu un attribut de la culture de masse. Dans ces œuvres-là Nabokov exprime la sensation d’un art contemporain qui copie les représentations de tous les jours.
    Le monde artistique de l’auteur, tourné ves l’essence des événements historiques et vers le monde individuel de l’homme résiste au déclin par l’instauration d’un dialogue étroit avec l’héritage de la poésie russe et mondiale. Ce n’est pas un hasard si Nabokov a traduit en russe Pierre Ronsard, Alfred de Musset, Charles Baudelaire et Arthur Rimbaud.
   Dans l’œuvre « Provence » (1923) Sirine écrit sur le sentiment d’harmonie universelle qu’il a éprouvé sur l’antique sol français :
       Comme il est bon dans ce monde résonnant
       De se couler de l’épaule le long de clôtures crayeuses
       D’être un poète russe égaré
       Parmi les murmures de la cigale latine !
C’est cette habileté à retranscrire le monde dans toute sa beauté et son tragique en s’appuyant sur l’expérience vivante de l’homme et le dialogue avec la poésie française qui a fait de cette œuvre poétique une œuvre profonde et à multiples facettes.
GASSIN, Alexia – Université Paris-Sorbonne – Paris IV, France
L’hommage de Serge à Vladimir
    Même si presque trente années les séparent, Vladimir Nabokov et Serge Gainsbourg présentent de nombreuses similitudes. Par exemple, sur le plan biographique, ils sont tous les deux nés de parents russes qui, suite à la Révolution de 1917, sont contraints de quitter la Russie en 1919. Outre les difficultés de l’exil, ils doivent affronter la discrimination et la persécution antisémites. Ensuite, d’un point de vue artistique, les deux hommes, à l’âge adolescent, se destinent à une carrière de peintre mais se tournent finalement vers la littérature ou la musique tout en continuant de développer leur œil d’artiste et d’insérer d’autres arts (le cinéma, par exemple) dans leurs compositions. Ils peuvent alors être considérés comme des artistes complets dont un autre point commun essentiel est le sens du jeu de mots et le goût de la provocation.
    Gainsbourg n’a jamais caché son enthousiasme pour l’œuvre de Nabokov, notamment pour le roman Lolita (1955) qui reste pour lui une révélation, ce qu’il explique clairement dans une interview de 1982 menée par Noël Simsolo et intitulée Une Journée avec Serge Gainsbourg. Lors de cet entretien, Gainsbourg évoque ainsi le poème composé par Humbert Humbert à l’intention de Lolita et débutant par les mots « Perdue : Dolorès Haze » qu’il avait souhaité mettre en musique dès 1962. Pour ce faire, il avait essayé de joindre Nabokov mais en vain, l’auteur étant occupé par le tournage du film Lolita de Stanley Kubrick. Malgré ce « rejet », l’inclination de Gainsbourg pour l’écrivain se retrouve néanmoins tout au long de la carrière du compositeur qui utilise régulièrement le motif de la nymphette, ce que nous pouvons entendre notamment dans son album Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) et plusieurs autres chansons, telles que Cha cha cha du loup (1959), Rocking-Chair (1978), Mister Iceberg (1978), Hey man amen (1988), etc., et que nous pouvons aussi voir dans son film Stan the Flasher (1990) qui raconte l’histoire d’un exhibitionniste.
    Dans notre communication, nous nous proposons d’explorer les œuvres connues et méconnues de Gainsbourg sur le thème de Lolita et d’étudier ses relations avec les principaux textes de Nabokov à ce sujet, à savoir les romans Chambre obscure (1933) et Lolita (1955) et la nouvelle « L’Enchanteur » (1939).
GRANT, Paul Benedict – Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Blessing the Freak : Nabokov contra Bergson
    Nabokov’s fondness for the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson is a matter of record (Strong Opinions, 43), and critics have consequently traced correspondences between the two writers based on Bergson’s theories on time, consciousness, and evolution. A few critics have also studied Nabokov’s fiction in relation to Bergson’s essay on the comic, Le Rire (1900), and almost all find an ideological kinship with respect to their views on laughter. This paper will, by contrast, focus on the differences that exist in their approach to this subject. Bergson locates the source of laughter in ‘something mechanical encrusted on the living’ and sees it as a corrective by which errant individuals are humiliated into returning to the group: ‘it is the business of laughter to repress any separatist tendency. Its function is, to convert rigidity into plasticity, to readapt the individual to the whole’. Nabokov’s fiction contains many mechanically-minded figures who invite laughter: Franz, the molded mannequin of King, Queen, Knave; Paduk, the doll-like dictator of Bend Sinister; Gradus, the clockwork killer of Pale Fire. But laughter is not intended to bring these figures back to the fold: they are beyond redemption because they represent the herd that Nabokov despised. This points to an ideological parting of the ways. While Bergson believes that the group is flexible and innovative and the individual is rigid, Nabokov argues the opposite, and champions the lone eccentric: ‘true art deals not with the genus, and not even with the species, but with an aberrant individual of the species’ (Strong Opinions, 155); ‘let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family’ (Lectures on Literature, 372). Nabokov’s fiction is full of such freaks, and although he’s not averse to laughing at their mishaps, his laughter is laced with pathos. This appeal for pity highlights another crucial difference between Nabokov and Bergson with respect to their approach to laughter, because Bergson thinks that for laughter to be possible we must cultivate an ‘anesthesia of the heart’. Nabokov may chloroform an overly emotional response, but his real concern lies with the residue of guilt and sorrow that’s left when the anesthesia wears off and his readers come round to the realization of what they’ve been laughing at.
HAMRIT, Jacqueline – Université de Lille III
Sartre, Lacan, Derrida and Nabokov
    In order to explore the relationship between Nabokov and  French thought, I propose to proceed in two parts. In a first part, I would like to study the contents and significance of what two main leading French modern philosophers, such as Sartre and Lacan, wrote on Nabokov’s works. As regards Sartre, I will prolong D. Barton Johnson’s thorough article entitled « The Nabokov-Sartre controversy  » and published in Nabokov Studies (Volume 1, 1994) where he recalls Sartre’s commentary on Despair and Nabokov’s reaction to and dismissal of Sartre. As for Lacan, I will analyse his commentary on Lolita in the document owned by « L’association freudienne internationale » and which corresponds to Lesson 26 (dated June 24, 1959) of the 1958-1959 seminar entitled « Le désir et son interpretation » where Lacan opposes the neurotic structure of Humbert’s desire to the perverse one of Quilty.
    In a second part of the paper, I would like to prolong my reflexions on the relationship between Nabokov and French philosopher Jacques Derrida that I exposed in an article published in 2003 in The Oxford Literary Review where I analysed the epistemological proximity of Derrida’s and Nabokov’srepresentation of reality. Indeed, although Derrida never wrote on Nabokov – though he told me he had read Lolita and was pleased to be associated to Nabokov- , it is possible to resort to deconstruction and a great number of Derrida’s concepts to indulge in a fruitful literary criticism of Nabokov’s works.
    I will conclude by wondering why French thought and French philosophers have been useful in the interpretation of Nabokov’s works. And last but not least, to what extent can Nabokov be considered himself as a thinker?
LAFONT, Anne-Marie – Lycée Jean Cocteau, Miramas, France
Comment adapter Vladimir Nabokov dans le programme de français au lycée
    Dans le cadre de l’étude d’un roman et ses personnages en classe de 1^ère, nous avons travaillé sur l’adaptation filmique du deuxième roman russe de Vladimir Nabokov, Roi, dame, valet. La volonté première a donc été d’intégrer dans le programme de français une œuvre qu’on inclura également dans la tradition des romans d’apprentissage du XIXe siècle. Pour cela, nous avons pris le parti de faire une parodie en mettant l’accent sur l’intertextualité.
    A partir de quelques scènes choisies, nous montrerons tout d’abord comment nous avons réécrit le roman de Nabokov tout en respectant non seulement la trame du livre, mais aussi l’ « esprit » nabokovien. En effet, partant tout d’abord de pastiches des romans de Flaubert, nous avons ensuite fait le choix d’intégrer des scènes non inscrites dans le roman, issus en revanche d’autres extraits littéraires étudiés en classe, afin de montrer aux élèves ce que représentait l’intertextualité.
    Par ailleurs, nous expliquerons certains choix de réécriture comme par exemple le parti pris de ne faire jouer que des « jeunes filles en fleur », et celui d’avoir délibérément mélangé les années 30 à nos jours, ce qui a permis de parodier l’époque des adolescentes et, de là, de leur faire apprécier davantage la notion de « parodie ».
    Enfin, nous démontrerons, par le témoignage de certaines élèves, que le but de comprendre l’œuvre en question, son inscription dans une époque, l’écho qu’elle a avec d’autres œuvres du patrimoine français, a été possible avec l’aide de cette réalisation filmique sans laquelle le roman de Nabokov aurait pu rester non seulement incompris, mais surtout non apprécié.
Cette intervention nous permettra de montrer comment adapter un auteur russo-américain, souvent perçu comme élitiste, à une classe de 1^ère, dans le cadre du programme de français. Ceci justifiera son appartenance à la tradition littéraire française, mais aussi son étude dans le secondaire.
LEVING, Yuri – Faculty of Art and Social Sciences, Dalhousie University, Canada
French Theory, Russian Legacy: Reading Nabokov with Pierre Bourdieu
    In this paper I will provide a critical context for understanding issues that dominate Nabokov’s art and social discussions of literary fame, politics of bestselling, prize distribution, and posthumous legacies in literature – an activity which Pierre Bourdieu defines as “enterprises with a long production cycle, founded on the acceptance of the risk inherent in cultural investments and above all on submission to the specific laws of the art trade.” Relying on the critical theory of P. Bourdieu, the leading French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, I am going to examine the creation and maintenance of Nabokov’s literary reputation within the Russian literary tradition from the perspective of the economics of culture.
    Literature is not only about aesthetics, but almost equally about economics. The successful marketing of an author and his literary works is more dependent on the activities of cultural merchants than on the particular words and phrases found in the author’s prose. While alive, the author must work with these cultural merchants in order to sustain his place within the literary market. Once the author is dead, the real work of maintaining a posthumous legacy begins for friends, family, scholars and publishers, in order to continue to profit from the deceased’s creative works, becoming a literary industry of its own.
    Bourdieu’s critical theory and his French academic adepts put forth an argument that cultural interactions are understood as transactions of tangible and intangible products within an economic framework of markets, exchange value, price and other such concepts. These economic exchanges of culture result in what Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital, bestowing individual artist’s with the reputation for competence and an image of respectability. Nabokov’s symbolic capital is transmitted to writers by agents and institutions possessing the economic and cultural capital necessary to confer relative value for the creative gesture. Economics, therefore, play an underlying role in this mutually advantageous relationship.

 
LOISON-CHARLES, Julie –  Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France
French xenisms  in Look at the Harlequins! : Are these French words symptomatic?  
    This paper will focus on Nabokov’s last complete novel, Look at the Harlequins!, from the perspective of its self-referential and metaliterary dimension with the hope that our conclusions could be broadened to apply to Nabokov’s other works. We will try and see whether the use of French words is merely a consequence of Nabokov’s multilingualism and if it serves a diegetic purpose. In Look at the Harlequins!, three general trends can be found in the use of French words and references to France.
   First of all, many are circumstantial and illustrative; they reflect the narrator’s francophilia but also Nabokov’s cosmopolitan world: France was an unavoidable place of transition and exile for Russian émigré writers, and French was widely spoken by the Russian aristocracy to which Nabokov belonged.
   Secondly, French often enables Nabokov a great deal of linguistic play, as ornamentation, but also with the aim of arresting and drawing the reader’s attention to specific humoristic or verbal prowess.
The third, and probably more interesting, use of French is the revelation of the plot to the reader. French is often used to point either to the problematic relationships the narrator has with his wives, or to his madness; French can therefore be seen as “symptomatic” of the narrator’s schizophrenia. 
    The link between madness and multilingualism has often been made by psycholinguists or by critics such as Todorov, and in the novel under study, it is hinted at by the use of italics. We will question why French specifically, and not Russian, is the privileged language to indicate the polyglot’s schizophrenia. We’ll end with a reflection on whether this symptomatic aspect of French is an involuntary aspect of Nabokov’s writing or whether it is one of his numerous literary strategies.
NORMAN, Will – University of Kent, UK
A Taste for Freedom: Lolita and the Existentialist Road-Trip
    This paper reads Nabokov’s Lolita alongside a lesser-known road-trip, undertaken by the French writer and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Through the 1940s and early 1950s Nabokov undertook almost annual summer tours of the United States, travelling west first in search of butterflies and later taking notes for and eventually composing Lolita. De Beauvoir travelled to the United States in 1947, visiting her friend Richard Wright in New York before touring the West and South by car and Greyhound. Her journey is described in the extraordinary travelogue L’Amérique au jour le jour, a phenomenology of the intellectual road-trip which shares many of the concerns of Lolita, including questions about freedom, authenticity and responsibility, against the backdrop of the rise of domestic mass tourism in the United States. My interest here will be first in the way both Humbert Humbert and Beauvoir use their position as European aliens to subvert and interrogate the ideological assumptions behind the American road narrative and the discourses of freedom associated with it, but I will also address intriguing moments in their work when American mass culture and the commodified landscape they pass through fall into strange harmony with the French cultural traditions they have come from. Comparing their treatment of tourist attractions, neon lights and Hollywood movies, I will argue that Lolita and L’Amérique au jour le jour emerge as unexpected companions, offering an estranged and ambivalent transatlantic vision of the US at the high point of its culture industry.
OLSEN, Lance – University of Utah, USA
Not-Knowings: Debord’s Influence on Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
« Every writer creates his own precursors, » Jorge-Luis Borges once reminded us.  « His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. »  In the spirit of Borges’s mischievous and productive observation, my presentation will listen for the not-knowings present in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and its resonances with Debord’s politics of the spectacle, especially in terms of Nabokov’s novel’s (his first in English, written between 1938 and 1939 in Paris) disruptive onto-epistemology and its strategies for derailing capitalist notions of temporality, where time is money, and so is quantified, mechanized, stabilized, made to run in a beeline that disavows mystery, complexity, and subjectivity.

PERHONEN, Mikko – Helsinki, Finlande