Polyglot rhetoric and the construction of subjectivity: The effect of doubling, reflection, and thematic patterning in the fiction of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov

As polyglot authors, Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov have access to the multiple conceptual frameworks, or ideological and representational elements of the Symbolic order, that all linguistic and discursive systems embody. Their texts exhibit patterns that trace the movement from the language of utility to the language of abstraction or epistemology. In the fiction of both authors, there are instances of linguistic ambiguity, a sense of the "relativity of things," and a frequent separation of the signifier from the signified depicted mainly through the use of mirroring and reflection, both optical and psychological, along with other kinds of doubling, as well as the acts of naming. There exists an absence in the centre of the text that is created by subjects unable to speak on their own or reluctant to serve as passive objects for someone else's tale. In both Conrad and Nabokov, narrator-characters often tell their stories as a means of recalling earlier incidents; this split in the temporal position, narrative voice, and the character of the protagonist emphasizes displacement, alienation, and ultimate lack of closure in the narrative. Authorial position in Conrad and Nabokov is situated between the historical subject and the textual subject; there exists a fissure in the text into which the authorial presence slips. The recurrence of such patterns in their fiction lends itself to a reexamination of the current theoretical approach to fictional narrative as independent of the author. Drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Mikhail Bakhtin, and others, my project examines some of the characteristics found in the fiction of Conrad and Nabokov: metalinguistic awareness, an awareness of the inherent separability of sign and referent, and traces of authorial presence in the text.;Key words: Joseph Conrad. Vladimir Nabokov, Jacques Lacan, Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, polyglot, heteroglossia, monoglossia, narratology, referentiality, author, double, minor, naming. Symbolic, Imaginary, Real...