The World Is A Stage

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), a so-called "extreme literary ontologist" for the bizarrerie and obscurity in the formal qualities of his work, is placed in the postwar-writer group of American Experimentation. Lolita, although claimed as the writer's most "realistic" work, has been considered as the master's most difficult book to write and at the same time remained "a special favorite" of his. The particularly designed structure, the carefully depicted details and the painstakingly selected image patterns create a complicated and confusing novel full of allusions which bestow on it the characteristics of a modern text. This most controversial work renders scholars and critics busy probing into the meaning of its art. Some treat it as a realistic novel to explore its moral and social dilemma; others see its insistent artificiality as a modernist defense of the artist's free creativity in the face of a hostile, indifferent, chaotic, or valueless world; still others regard it as a postmodernist metafiction presenting an elaborate game.The writer of this thesis attempts to analyze the novel by uniting the existing two aspects of criticism emphasizing respectively form and content with the idea of theatricality, so as to discover the value of this book from a new angle.For the purpose of this study, theatricality has been identified with both the Greek idea of mimesis, which endorses "the world of theatre," and the Latin idea of theatrum mundi, which endorses "the world as theatre." The art of theater cannot afford the loss of a proper balance between empathy and aesthetic distance, which is achieved through simultaneously the paradoxical effects of verisimilitude and those of artificiality. Through an overview of Nabokov's thoughts on literature and a rough survey of his unique life experience, the thesis holds that there is a close relationship between the idea of theatricality and Nabokov. Nabokovian subjective "reality" and artificial "nature" do not necessarilygo against the idea of verisimilitude, which is the first and foremost principle of both the writer's artistic creation and his literary criticism.Lolita is a successful and elaborate world of theatre created in words by Nabokov, which attains a perfect balance between empathy and aesthetic distance through the novel's well-wrought seemingly contradictory atmosphere of verisimilude and artificiality. By theatricalizing Lolita in the form of a novel, through emphasizing her spiritual death and her loss of childhood in a way beyond the reach of a real stage, the tragic effects are most ostensible. Humbert on stage reinforces the existence of good and evil and, the man being a representative of all human beings, highlights the eternal mundane predicament: the imprisonment of time and the imprisonment of self. Charlotte, controlled by a mimetic impulse, has lost most of her true identity on the stage of Lolita; her lost selfhood constitutes another kind of tragedy of human beings.Besides being a delicate and multi-layered "imaginary tragedy with real suffering in it," Lolita also reveals the master's "the world as theatre" worldview, which on one hand, presents the analogy of God to the artist, and on the other, implies the existence of a transcendental world manipulating all the players on the stage of this mundane world and providing for their immortality. Besides appearing in the scenes of the stage with the anagram of "Vivian Darkbloom," Nabokov the divine producer haunts all through the artistic work in the guise of Quilty, Charlotte, and Miss Opposite. Disguised as his various characters, Nabokov intrudes into Lolita and is woven into its textual patterns to emerge as imitations of the otherworld's formative role with regard to man and nature.Applying the idea of theatricality to the appreciation of Lolita throws a new light on the thematic and formal unity of the art of the novel. Nabokov's metaphysics are inseparable from his ethics and his aesthetics. Being a writer who believes so passionately in the primacy of the imagination, Nabokov is most conscious and capable of presenting the...