Dislocations: Migrancy in Nabokov and Rushdie

Abstract

Paradigmatically for twentieth Century writing, authors like Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie share a preoccupation with the theme and literary textures of migrancy. Critical views about the role of the migrant in their fiction ränge from the ascription of a mouthpiece mission to attacks on an alleged elitist alienation. The current debate about the possible functions of displacement, highlighted in the criticism of Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, can usefully be focussed on Nabokov and Rushdie äs writers between cultures whose narrative codes they share. A comparison of their major novels Lolita and The Moor's Last Sigh reveals common themes and structures äs well äs a basic dissimilarity in the overall treatment of individual dislocation. While Nabokov's literary politics in Lolita reassert a self-reflexive aestheticist stance, Rushdie attempts to transcend this position by developing an aesthetics of hybridity that spatializes migrancy in a postmodern literary discourse.