Jed Esty’s Occidentalism Revisited: Conrad, Nabokov, and the Pornography of the West

Despite Nabokov’s root-and-branch rejection of any serious comparison between himself and Conrad (“I differ from Joseph Conradically”), the two writers share an unusual distinction as modern masters of English style for whom English was a third language. More to the point, both left the absolutist political worlds of greater Russia in order to discover the democratic West — Conrad as a mariner-gentleman drydocked in the heart of the British empire, Nabokov as a puckish Old World aesthete marooned in Eisenhower’s America. In this paper, I read The Secret Agent (1907) and Lolita (1955) as resonant parables of a continental agent burrowing into the folds of the so-called open society and exposing its points of ideological vulnerability. Conrad’s Verloc and Nabokov’s Humbert prey on and parody the domestic security of the English/American family, victimizing women and children, but also exposing the fetish of youth as it perversely defines the political, commercial, and sexual freedoms of two twentieth-century liberal superpowers.