Recall one of the great novels of the twentieth-century Anglo-American canon. It was written by an Easterner who came West and settled in the liberal heartland, a Slavic émigré for whom English was a third language. His great mid-career novel features a tall, dark European lodger whose westward migrations repeat the author's own, and who likewise embeds himself in the safe embrace of an expanding liberal democracy known for its commitment to open borders and open expression. The lodger insinuates himself into an ordinary middle-class family, seeking cover for unsavory activities. He trades on his continental origins and urbane exterior to dupe the women and children at home. A false father, he takes advantage of his most vulnerable ward by violent means and with irreversible consequences. This sinister protagonist channels his author's regard for the cultural freedoms of his adopted host nation, but he also condescends to the blithe bourgeoisie who enjoy those freedoms. Things end badly for him. The grotesque denouement features a clumsy murder attempt and further undoes the nuclear family that once rested placidly in the symbolic cocoon of the most powerful nation on earth.
I am describing, of course, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955). I am also describing Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907). Both of these great modernist fictions were written by celebrated stylists who escaped political unrest in eastern Europe. Traversing intimate scenes of sexual politics and the grand theater of geopolitics, The Secret Agent and Lolita have been counted among the most influential novels of the last century. The Modern Library ranks The Secret Agent forty-sixth and Lolita fourth on their list of the best novels ever. Powerful mid-century critics such as F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling embedded them in the Anglo-American tradition. Yet the aesthetic and political reverberations of these two novels keep changing every decade in widening frames of reception.Footnote 1 After 9/11, for example, we saw renewed interest in Conrad's tale of terrorism (Houen). In The Secret Agent, a phony anarchist plans to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, the symbol of global time set to a British mean (Agathocleous; Barrows). No wonder that events of 2001 brought readers back to Conrad after Americans watched the symbol of global trade collapse in New York. Lolita has also demanded renewed attention given the ongoing ramifications of child sex abuse and sexual misconduct by powerful men. Readers and critics of Lolita, which always courted scandal, now have to think about its survival as a curricular mainstay. Can we still teach a novel of sexual predation against a schoolgirl? Students grow wary of Lolita, less willing to suspend ethical considerations for aesthetic ones, especially when importuned by Humbert Humbert to do so (“Gentlewomen of the jury! Bear with me!” [123]). Yet the book still inspires thoughtful critics to parse its ethical tangles (Serpell; Solnit).
Just in the last six years, still newer resonances have been emanating from the suave but violent imaginations of Conrad and Nabokov. Since the 2016 United States presidential election, the threat of “Russian plots” holding sway on Anglo-American native ground has reemerged, challenging the balance between democratic freedom and state security (as 9/11 did). Conrad and Nabokov put the mythology of Western freedom to uncompromising tests. Their signature domestic fictions describe the arc across two phases of Anglo-hegemony in the world system. What can we learn now from the historical relation between The Secret Agent and Lolita taken as nodal texts in the pat and fading metanarrative of global peace that runs from the Victorian Pax Britannica to the so-called American Century?
Reading disparate texts across the longue durée has started to reshape historicist literary research, giving us new ways to compare aesthetic forms and social formations. Scholars have begun to stretch the synchronic predicates of new historicism while maintaining a commitment to contextual and intertextual reading (Dimock; Bronstein). Our discipline's approach to literary history, once mostly period-based, has become open to “wave-based” reading (Eatough 609). Giovanni Arrighi's massive cycles-of-accumulation thesis has given cultural history one salient new scale for historical interpretation. However, like many macrohistorical approaches that have made their way into literary studies from the social sciences (Braudel; Wallerstein; Mattelart; Kittler), Arrighi's narrative of capitalism can exclude textual complexity, aesthetic value, and medium specificity. World-systems approaches to interpretation often display a “fatal disrespect of culture” (Palumbo-Liu, Robbins, and Tanoukhi 5). Matthew Eatough wisely wonders how scholars will “locate the literary text itself within such capacious historical narratives” (609–10). This tandem reading of Conrad and Nabokov responds to that query by attempting a close formal analysis that also reflects on current world-systems methodologies in literary studies. Wave-based models are replotting literary history not just because a few innovative scholars have adjusted their inherited methods, but also because the institutional and global context of our discipline is changing. It is not merely an academic trend. As the Anglo-American cycles of accumulation wind down, the original rationales of English literature and American studies demand revision. Surely it is no coincidence that these two humanistic fields were established in metropolitan anglophone universities, roughly fifty years apart, at the “Conrad moment” and at the “Nabokov moment.”
Since the 1980s, as we have entered the phase that Arrighi calls the “terminal crisis” for United States–led capitalism (215), scholars have been busy decolonizing English literature and de-exceptionalizing American studies. We increasingly view the longue durée of cultural history from the perspective of a multipolar world attuned to the North-South division of labor. Our discipline is correspondingly redefining its object as the history of global media, a history in which English is a major language among many and literature is a major medium among many (Gikandi 651). From our current standpoint within the “terminal crisis” of Anglo-American hegemony, then, we can read afresh two indelible novels that register the attractions of Occidentalism while exposing the imminent and immanent fragility of the West (Arrighi 215). Both novels orbit around a myth of the stable West that they neither disavow nor dismantle completely. In what follows, I explore a double-tracked historical reading of Conrad and Nabokov, focusing on their address to the paradox of the “menaced superpower,” a historical contradiction lived from the inside out by Easterners at the Western edge.
Vladimirs
The full Conrad-Nabokov story starts before and runs beyond the Cold War. It features a handful of difficult Vladimirs, beginning with “Mr. Vladimir,” prime mover of The Secret Agent and First Secretary of the Russian embassy in London. He sets the plot in motion by asking his mole, Mr. Verloc, to shock the English public: “England lags. This country is absurd with its sentimental regard for individual liberty. … [It] must be brought into line. The imbecile bourgeoisie of this country make themselves the accomplices of the very people whose aim is to drive them out of their houses to starve in ditches” (23–24). The epithet “imbecile bourgeoisie” sounds the keynote of Conrad's depiction of the unwary middle classes. It tags a common notion in the annals of East-West realpolitik going back at least to Friedrich Nietzsche and popularly ascribed to another Vladimir, surname Lenin. Since the Trump era, Lenin's version—“the useful idiots of the West”—has gained new traction as shorthand for the tactical premises of Vladimir Putin.
Like Putin, Conrad's Vladimir wants to sow distrust and push Western democracy rightward. He presses his secret agent, Verloc, to set off a bomb in Greenwich to force a public panic so that the English police will tighten homeland security, forswearing the civil freedoms that have allowed continental revolutionaries to roost in London. Conrad built this plot on real newspaper accounts of late-Victorian anarchist bombings (Cole 85–112), adding the lurid archetype of the infiltrator. Just a decade earlier, Bram Stoker had summoned much the same archetype in introducing his Vladimir, surname Dracula, to English readers. Stoker's sinister Anglophile travels west, taking advantage of open legal-financial systems to expand his bloody franchise in the metropole. Dracula anticipates the Humbert of Vladimir Nabokov; he seduces vulnerable women and preys on children to satisfy his monstrous needs. Stoker's gothic tale of invasion also anticipates Conrad's, wagering, as Mr. Vladimir does, “that Britain's elites need a good scare to revivify their reflex of violence so that they can restart another round of accumulation” (Shapiro 37).
Like the canny Dracula, Putin proved himself a diligent student of the West. His capacity to infiltrate social media systems and to foster divisions along the fault lines of American society made him a formidable oligarchic vampire. The Russianization of American politics around 2016 echoes the familiar plots of The Secret Agent and Lolita, as hackers get inside our most powerful institutions and intimate social circles. Putin understood where to find leverage on questions of race and social inequity, and where to plant conspiratorial and paranoid fantasies.
All five of these Occidentalist Vladimirs—two fictional, three historical—wanted to grasp the mind of the liberal West in order to advance their ambitions: for blood and oil, for revolution and reaction, for the power to control an audience. Emissaries from a backward society exploit an unwary democracy: this xenophobic politics of Eastern threat and Western freedom has deep roots in the preindustrial era. The gothic metanarrative of home invasion lives on across the age of print (Conrad) and visual mass media (Nabokov) to arrive in our own digital present. It spins an evergreen Orientalist fantasy about the wiles and wants of Occidentalist villains. What is strange, though, is how Conrad and Nabokov both frame themselves as veiled dangers to the public trust. Verloc and Humbert offer slant versions of their creators, Eastern emigrés who desire yet doubt Western freedom, modernist mandarins who court English-language readers while nursing Olympian grievances.
Panning back from these twin plotlines, we can follow the tracks of The Secret Agent and Lolita toward a coordinated history of the modernist art novel and the changing contours of anglophone power. Conrad and Nabokov punctuate that narrative, flanking a modernism described by Joe Cleary as the aesthetic of transition between two phases of world capitalism (261). Arrighi's model helps us analyze and articulate the shared features of those two major cycles—one described by Conrad amidst British “signs of autumn,” and one by Nabokov, fifty years later, at the peak of an American summer (162).
Conradicals
These larger historical narratives of country and canon can revivify—and be revivified by—the Conrad-Nabokov comparison. These two crashed the Anglo-American literary establishment with similar success, but we have few synthetic accounts of their work. Of course, there have been good reasons to keep them apart, starting with Nabokov's own mocking aversion to the idea that Conrad was his precursor:
I used to enjoy tremendously the romantic productions—romantic in the large sense—of such people as Conan Doyle, Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, and other authors who are essentially writers for very young people. But as I have well said somewhere before, I differ from Joseph Conradically. First of all, he had not been writing in his native tongue before he became an English writer, and secondly, I cannot stand today his polished clichés and primitive clashes. (Strong Opinions 56–57)
With tart condescension, Nabokov hits on an important point: Conrad's emergence as a writer coincides with his choosing English, while Nabokov kept on writing novels and changing tongues as he moved westward in flight from Russia.
And Nabokov does, indeed, differ radically from Conrad in his national roots and his temperamental branches. Nabokov's disdain for Conrad was fully matched by Conrad's own Russophobia. There are two full generations of historical time between Conrad (1857–1924) and Nabokov (1899–1977). Both were born of noble descent in the greater Slavic world, but Conrad's family were Polish nationalists struggling against tsarist Russia, a cause for which Conrad's father was arrested and exiled. By contrast, the Russian autocracy provided shelter for Nabokov's liberal parents, who later fled the Bolshevik Revolution and settled in Berlin (where the author's father was assassinated in 1922). Literary success allowed Conrad to adopt the manners of an English country gentleman, but Nabokov often assumed the role of a temporary, if ardent, American.Footnote 2 Conrad died in Kent and was buried at Canterbury, the heart of English Christendom, whereas Nabokov repaired in the 1960s to neutral Switzerland, living and dying in luxe homelessness at Montreux's Palace Hotel.
There's a great irony in the fact that Conrad's assimilation to Englishness was not matched by his literary style; his mannered sentences labor and clank with continental syntax. The urbane Nabokov, on the other hand, developed a silky, purring English shaped to the sound of postwar American idiom. Conrad aches with pessimism, yielding to grotesque black comedy; Nabokov plays lighthearted and witty, despite Humbert's dolorous haze. More to the point, Conrad seems to court serious political allegory, Nabokov to reject it. In the afterword to Lolita, Nabokov disdains one “otherwise intelligent reader” who described the novel as “‘Old Europe debauching young America’” (“On a Book” 314). But that is exactly what puts Lolita into such revealing apposition with The Secret Agent and its plot against English innocence. The two novels are not just parallel Occidentalist visions and coded autobiographies but also sensational variations on a single political theme announced by the title of a book by another émigré intellectual of the Cold War, Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies.
To stack Conrad's fable of Western freedom on top of Nabokov's is to risk compounding the error of naive allegorization. For generations now, careful readers have shown us that Lolita is baiting that trap. When Humbert notes that he has defiled “with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country,” we are to be wary (176). We are to heed Nabokov warning us away from allegory, the exegetical sin of “otherwise intelligent readers”—and of Humbert himself! From Lionel Trilling to Michael Wood to Ellen Pifer to writers of the present, the mainstream of Lolita criticism has respected Nabokov's campaign to disarm allegorical readings of his work. Yet the author's old cat-and-mouse game with critics did not stop the first generation of American readers from discerning the moral and political ballast of the text. Both Trilling and Leslie Fiedler took the novel to say something important about US society, Fiedler declaring famously that “Lolita herself is America” (335). With a light hermeneutic touch, Wood, too, draws our attention to Humbert's rape of Lolita as a cardinal sin in Cold War America, the “theft of another's freedom” (140). Since then, serious historical readings of Lolita have followed, cutting against the grain of the aestheticist tradition licensed by Nabokov himself (Mizruchi; Norman). And this is true even among those who see readers from the United States as too eager to fold Lolita into the allegorical canons of the great American novel (de la Durantaye 95; Naiman 160). The reading I propose here does not emphasize a reified encounter between America's moral Eden and Europe's political morass (totalitarianism, the Holocaust). It focuses instead on Nabokov's searching account of an Anglo-American liberal habit of displacing evil onto European or Eastern politics. Conrad and Nabokov indulge but also explore and explode this habit. They embrace the safe harbor provided by the English-speaking world, even as they look askance at the preening political narcissism underlying the belief that freedom's native habitat is the West.
Westworlds
“Mr. Verloc was going westward through a town without shadows in an atmosphere of powdered old gold” (10). Into this single line near the start of The Secret Agent, Conrad condenses the story of Verloc's insinuations into London, a town of established wealth and political hush. Verloc, the agent provocateur, is on his way to see Mr. Vladimir, who urges him toward the bombing that he (Vladimir) hopes will turn liberal England into a police state. Walking through prosperous London quarters, Verloc feels both the general innocence of the British propertied classes and the relative comfort of his own domestic arrangements: “Such was the house, the household, and the business Mr. Verloc left behind him on his way westward” (9). Twice in the space of a page, Conrad strikes the westerly theme. He even loads that theme into the protagonist's name: in French, vers l'Oc means “toward the West.” Verloc the spy (posing as an anarchist) is part of a network of alien forces that threaten domestic peace, but he has taken an English wife for cover and enjoys her orderly English domesticity.
Verloc finds the heart of the British empire in the powdered old gold of the Victorian metropolis; Nabokov's Humbert finds the heart of America in the postwar suburban town of Ramsdale (old, too, in its New England way: “elms, white church” [35]). But the most salient fact about the American setting of Lolita is the famous westward journey undertaken in the indelible middle section of the novel by stepfather and ward. Humbert and Lolita find endless kitschy signs of American freedom on the open road, though they are themselves haunted and hounded. Like Verloc in the prosperous West End, Humbert reveals to us the dangers lurking in the cozy, smug textures of Eisenhower's America. In one text, we see class revolution and social unrest threatening bourgeois order; in the other, we see a consumerist anarchy woven into the moral fabric of familial and national purity. The two novels thus position their protagonists at analogous crossroads; they are caught between the forces of freedom run amok and the forces of authoritarianism that lie waiting, just outside the notice of the English and American innocents.
The fragile equipoise of Western democracy makes sense as a major theme for these two émigré writers. The Secret Agent and Lolita are both preoccupied by everything that can go awry in a host society. Conrad presents the off-notes as foreign intrusions; his sleazy anarchists frequent an Italian restaurant characterized by “fraudulent cookery” that strips its patrons of “all their national and private characteristics” (118). Nabokov frames the ersatz and tacky as part of America's own deceitful charms. It is a land of “Kumfy Kabins” and “Functional Motels” furnished according to prim American rules of bed partition but affording all manner of sanctioned perversity (117, 145). The cardinal virtues of the West turn into vices at every stage of these two novels. Mobility on London's quiet streets or America's open roads becomes homelessness and alienation. What feels like safe asylum to Verloc and Humbert ends up in domestic incarceration. Privacy yields to secrecy and sordid double-crossing. Freedom of the press devolves into pornography and sensationalism.
Westward momentum organizes these two journeys into the heart of Anglo-American darkness. The West of London in Conrad's story and the West of America in Nabokov's together capture the economic logic of the metropolis-frontier. The meaning of the West—whether for Britain in 1900 or America in 1950—is rooted in the concentration of global capital in a dense metropolis from which expansionist drives radiate to the far frontier. These two Eastern writers grasp the ideological map of Western civilization and see all the way through its now-debunked claims to serve as the geographic cipher for modernity itself (Appiah; Coronil; Hall; Meighoo; Mufti).
Conrad, a writer of both tropical empires and trans-European politics, was unusually positioned to grasp the changing geopolitics of Westernness (GoGwilt). If we look back at Conrad through the mediating figure of Nabokov, we see even more clearly that both writers reckoned with the noble pretensions of their host empires. They witnessed the English-speaking hegemons who sold the world a rhetoric of universal freedom backed by an expansionist and militarized state (Gopal). How do hegemon cultures define and defend their claims for freedom against the falsity of their own myths and the threats of their true enemies? Those questions define the point of intersection between Conrad and Nabokov. Both sought answers in perverse and powerful Occidentalist fantasies, where the violated bodies of innocent youths become the proving ground. It is as if the decisions made by Conrad and Nabokov to settle their life stories in peaceable Anglo-American havens, after years of exile and struggle, demanded a counterplot of home invasion.
Nuclear Families
To back up to the botched plot of The Secret Agent: Mr. Verloc, having been dispatched to bomb the Greenwich Observatory, foists the job onto his defenseless brother-in-law, Stevie, an emotionally volatile and intellectually disabled dependent. Like Lolita, Stevie is a functional stepchild, a moral nymphet. When Verloc realizes he must do his Russian masters’ bidding, he quickly lights on the idea that Stevie will make a perfect puppet terrorist, bearing all the risks of the bomb plot. Stevie vibrates with tender mercy for the English poor. And Verloc easily weaponizes Stevie's social conscience, grooming him as a mule for the bomb. But in the fatal scene at Greenwich—as we learn belatedly from a police postmortem—the excitable youth stumbles and blows himself to bits. In Conrad's political tragicomedy, public terror becomes private error.
Stevie's flights of working-class pity mirror the soft liberalism of the “imbecile bourgeoisie.” Before he dies, Stevie gives voice to a shopworn Dickensian slogan of industrial-age melodrama: “Bad world for poor people” (136). The only genuine political sentiment in The Secret Agent belongs to a character framed, in the cruel parlance of the day, as an idiot. Joseph Valente offers a brilliantly subtle reading of Stevie's disability, arguing that Stevie embodies and manifests social disorder yet also asserts an intellectual counterreaction, attempting to impose order on unassimilable stimuli (29–30). In Conrad's London, disorder and law collapse into each other, so that actions are fused to their reactions in a society hardwired for equipoise.
Conrad—never one to forgo a long metaphor stacked with its own explanation—gives us the perfect account of Stevie's role in the plot, and perhaps a figure for the plot tout court. We see
innocent Stevie, seated very good and quiet at a deal table, drawing circles, circles, circles; innumerable circles, concentric, eccentric; a coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of repeated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable. (36)
Stevie symbolizes both “the ostracized artist” and “the degraded reading public” (Amleshi 209). He is charged by Conrad with the double duty of discrediting pity for the poor and casting as “mad art” any attempt to change the game. Revolutionary action is for fools and knaves.
Conrad's bomb thus destroys one young man and two cherished concepts: the idea of meaningful political transformation and the sanctity of the nuclear family. Here the overlapping narrative of Lolita provides additional insight and cinches Conrad to Nabokov in ways that specialist scholarship has not yet identified. Young Stevie embodies, according to Valente, a dialectic of anarchic energy and legal authority, standing at once for the forces that disrupt liberal order and those that contain the disruption. This gyroscopic logic aligns with a striking fact about Lolita: Humbert's desire for her turns on her capacity to desire things. This is no defense of Humbert (or Nabokov). Humbert admits his crime: “Had I come before myself, I would have given Humbert thirty-five years for rape” (Nabokov, Lolita 308). Cutting through the flippant and stylized faces of Humbert's unreliable narration, readers can see that Lolita is a victim, not a seducer. At the level of theme, though, Nabokov's address to the lawless desire of consumer society takes in both aggressor and victim.
Nabokov aims to compel readerly identification with Humbert's wants, toggling between the base and the ethereal, between gilded autoeroticism and guilty postcoital tristesse. But the novel makes us think about Lolita's wanting; she is the pinned object and the hedonistic subject of American mass culture. “Sweet hot jazz, square dancing, gooey fudge sundaes, musicals, movie magazines and so forth,” Humbert reflects—“these were the obvious items in her list of beloved things” (148). What Lolita wants is the vehicle for what Humbert wants; he maneuvers her onto his lap as she guzzles sweets and tabloids (59). Conrad and Nabokov each detail a fatal grooming process. Stevie's clumsy idealism leads the plot to a national weak spot: the rationality that cannot cure social inequity. Lolita's frank tastes lead us to America's corresponding weak spot: the commitment to market freedom that produces not just an amoral leveling of values but also an abiding social contradiction between the pornographic and the puritanical.
Nabokov's brilliant depiction of that hypocritical strain in American culture pushes the novel beyond mere truisms about sex in the staid fifties. Even now, readers can see in Lolita America's struggle with the absolutization of freedom, with the perverse results bred by an openly licentious market society. Demoralized economic struggle sets the keynote for Conrad, too. The Secret Agent introduces a spy who sells “shady wares” from the continent (5). The sensationalized violence against children at the center of these two plots defines a single through line on their unlikely path to enshrinement in the Anglo-American canon. We come to know all about Stevie's blasted bodily remains and about Lolita's dulled and jaded psyche, her eventual death. But responsibility for these broken children radiates outward from the novel's core characters. It implicates English and American readers as witnesses, taking us far away from the formula plot of the villainous Easterner who menaces the pristine West.
To appreciate these radiating circles of guilt, it is helpful to recall the economic logic underlying the violence. Both texts show pecuniary conditions displacing personal and political motives. In The Secret Agent, Verloc consents to bomb the Observatory because his salary is threatened by the Russian Embassy. Conrad emphasizes not the bombing but its aftermath, the fate of Verloc's wife, Winnie. Winnie has married Verloc to secure a safe home for her brother, the defenseless Stevie. When Verloc callously risks Stevie's life, and when Winnie realizes that Stevie is dead, she comes undone. Her organizing mission, the wifely contract with Verloc, shatters when she learns that he is a casual monster. She sees herself exposed as a sexually indentured servant whose sacrifice has been nullified. Stabbing Verloc to death in the novel's climactic scene, Winnie becomes the protagonist. Her actions reveal the marriage-property bond as the ultimate instance of fake freedom in liberal, patriarchal Britain.
Verloc, much like Humbert, rationalizes his own ethical transgressions to the end. Both men operate in a fog of masculine presumption, imagining that their victims will condone or excuse them. The most vivid link between The Secret Agent and Lolita is the sight of two vulnerable women—Winnie Verloc and Charlotte Haze, both married to duplicitous men—dashing out of their own houses on their way to certain doom. Those images of reverse domestication explode the genre framework of family melodrama (Rives; Zimring). The callous acts of the bad fathers lay bare the family's long-standing implication in amoral bonds of property and propriety. Lolita and Humbert end up as creatures of self-gratification, one a candy-coated automaton of consumer desire and the other a “jingly and wholly demented machine vomiting riches” (Nabokov, Lolita 184). In both novels, romantic and familial bonds dissolve into the cash nexus that corrupts Anglo-American freedom.
Resident Aliens
Conrad and Nabokov thus deliver memorable stories of a failed contract between patriarchal authority and the subjects of its care. As émigré artists, the two had a special grasp on the fragile peace struck by desire and propriety in the name of the nuclear family during the Edwardian and Eisenhower eras. Their twisted domestic melodramas reveal societies that are too free yet too repressive—democratic paragons that are also global hegemons, old-fashioned patriarchies becoming newly feminized mass cultures. And when the moral arithmetic of family melodrama and spy plot ascend into the aesthetic calculus of the art novel, the circle of guilt expands once more. Conrad and Nabokov repatriate depravity to English and American soil. Their back stories shift agency from father to child, infiltrator to native, diffusing disorder throughout the character set.Footnote 3 The spoiled innocence plots are themselves spoiled because neither Stevie nor Lolita—nor, more importantly, the societies they allegorize—are stable plot elements. Good invasion plots like these always require a trenchant fantasy about existing fault lines at home, not just evil seeds from abroad (Matin). In The Secret Agent, the propertied elites fear an uprising; they are goaded by the scare-mongering London print media. And in Lolita, the pornographic logic of mass visual media ensnares both the characters in the text and its readers, who are consuming a high-gloss version of sexual shock.
Conrad and Nabokov thus absorb a number of East-West geopolitical themes into subsidiary allegories of gendered power and cultural condescension.Footnote 4 Invasion motifs locate these art novels within a wider genre system encompassing spy, detective, horror, and science fiction. In the late Victorian genre system, as in the Hollywood genre system of the mid-twentieth century, invasion scenarios loom large, framing the hegemon culture as “armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society” (Conrad 67). Criminals, secret agents, mega-armies, vampires, juggernauts, irradiated animals, deep-sea creatures, aliens, terrorists, monsters—they all populate the tortured imagination of the “menaced society.” They all sell books (or movies). The menaced-society plot crystallized into a full-blown literary genre system during the autumnal phase of British power. It carried right over the Atlantic into the apex phase of the celluloid American summer, a time of bomb shelters and potboiling invasion fictions, of threats lurking just outside the picket fences of the nuclear family's sanctum. Bookending the modernist canon, Conrad and Nabokov created ironic and iconic literary art from just this mythical contest between hegemon anxiety and placid domesticity.
Discontinuities
These parallels between Conrad's and Nabokov's Western fictions are historically significant and critically underexplored. But there is much that separates the two cases, including general historical conditions that distinguish the era of British imperial twilight from America's mid-century zenith. The goal of wave-based literary history is not to force the analogies, but to frame productive new comparisons. Nathan Hensley and Stephen Shapiro have, for example, proposed that the British 1880s may be haunting the American 1990s—two analogous decades reflecting what Arrighi calls signal crises in the world system (215). Their compelling arguments follow Arrighi's time line. But we can adapt the Arrighi model for other purposes, especially if we stipulate the relative autonomy of cultural history. After all, the literary institutions, movements, and market forces that helped shape alien-invasion narratives in the late Victorian and Edwardian epoch carried directly over the Atlantic into mid-century US culture. Those narrative forms did not have to wait until the post-1970s declinist phase of American history to attain popularity here. Superstructure does not follow base in lockstep. Indeed, the pop genres of late Victorian print culture already had autonomous aesthetic and commercial value for diverse producers and consumers in the United States by the 1920s, when American hegemony was rising, not falling. Modern gothic and invasion fictions sold well in Britain and in the United States as those societies were on the way into—and out of—imperial dominance (Cannon Schmitt 12). Once Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Hyde, and the Invisible Man are alive in the anglophone genre system, they cannot be killed, only endlessly adapted. Refining the Arrighian metanarrative, we can see one long imperial relay of phobic national narratives as they move and mutate from the autumn of the British system into a mid-century American summer.
Within that genre system, The Secret Agent and Lolita provide high-canonical points of reference, tracking the movement of capital westward across the Atlantic. These two upmarket infiltration novels make legible the world-historical function of two successive dream factories serving the two major English-speaking superpowers. They belong in the same analytic frame as their middle-brow doppelgängers such as Dracula (1897) and The Manchurian Candidate (1959) and the entire network of popular alien-invasion plots circa 1900 (in Britain) and 1950 (in America). Reading them at two levels—that is, through close textual details and through broad genre systems—gives us a way to describe hegemon culture that is both granular and synthetic. It allows us to see common ideological ground between modernist fiction and genre fiction. Popular invasion plots sensationalize what Raymond Williams once described as the “metropolitan perception” of high modernism (44). They give their readers access to the frisson generated by magnetic cultural force when it is tied to underlying national fragility. They deliver a homeopathic dose of anxiety, even panic, about the vulnerabilities of a society that nonetheless has the power to assimilate goods, ideas, and labor from across the globe. The resulting books and films, framed as thrillers or science fiction with their patented “subversion-containment” devices, tend to offer metropolitan readers irresistible plots of invasions foiled and innocence spoiled (Sontag).
Modernism too has its partially buried thriller logic: épater le bourgeois! We can align The Secret Agent and Lolita as modernist invasion allegories embedded in a British-American genre system that expresses what I would call phobic hegemony. This longue durée view underwrites a tandem interpretation of the texts. It also throws into historical relief some significant points of divergence. In our Arrighian model, capitalist cycles of accumulation loosely repeat each other, from the Genoese-Spanish to the Dutch to the British to the American, with a pattern of financial expansion marking the end phase of each. But each cycle changes in duration and intensity from the last, responding to new macropolitical and technological conditions. The cycles accelerate over time, so that the American phase of hegemony is more compact and more steeply curved than the British (Arrighi 377). Britain had hundreds of years to develop the political and societal resources it needed to make sense of its global power. Despite its inveterate “manifest destiny,” America, by contrast, had to learn the responsibilities and rhetorics of overseas rule in just a few generations. Many fifties and sixties intellectuals understood the sudden reorientation from settler colony to global superpower as a significant challenge (Niebuhr).
Nabokov's America, we might then say, embodies contradictions already present in Conrad's Britain, but in an intensified and accelerated form. Liberal Britain saw itself as a politically rational system designed to guarantee democracy at home and free trade abroad. Conrad's Mr. Vladimir understands the secular ideals of good government and rational order as central to Victorian Britain's national mission. In Lolita, Humbert cannily understands that America's self-conception as a free and open society depends on a peculiar combination of raw capitalism and moralized puritanism. Conrad's plotters see science as the proxy for an enlightened form of rule that justifies British hegemony; Nabokov sees culture as the proxy for a free-market ideology that justifies American hegemony.
This signal difference—between British governmentality (liberalism) and American growth mentality (neoliberalism) is dramatized in a paired reading of Conrad and Nabokov. Their juxtaposition underscores the accelerating challenges of mid-century American power, as bourgeois ideals of self-determination diffused themselves into a mass-scale, multiracial democracy. Britain, by contrast, was a more settled country with its social stability held in place by a distinctive amalgam of bourgeois and aristocratic values (Anderson 57). Conrad's Burkean orientation to political restraint made him inclined to be more lenient with the British empire than with any other European colonial power. Conrad believed that the slow, disciplined development of a ruling-class moral code might offset the rapacity of imperial capitalism. The Marlow fictions that came just before The Secret Agent established a working integration of English liberty and English mastery that gave Conrad his artistic mission. His attraction to English liberalism as a mode of social stability reflects his counterrevolutionary impulses, and, by the early 1900s, he came to embody the intersecting professional, gentry, and bourgeois values that defined British gentlemanliness (Gopinath). Nabokov—in both Pnin and Lolita—lampooned the possibilities of American masculinity and its elite adaptations. Conrad's Englishmen are subjects of the crown; Nabokov's Americans belong mostly to a media-consumer system; they are an audience more than a Habermasian citizenry.Footnote 5
Conrad's plot turns on the possibility of class insurgency in an unequal society. The threat to freedom and property is from “below” and can be met with Russian-style repression or English-style liberal co-optation. Nabokov faces a much more contradictory situation in which the problem is no longer political insurgency but consumer passivity—that is, the displacement of political action by economic concerns. One way to describe what changes between 1900 and 1950 is this: Conrad's novel was about an outrage; Nabokov's was an outrage. It was, by the 1950s, much more difficult for an artist to imagine an Archimedean position outside the commodified media, a perch from which renegade intellectuals might offer reality testing back to the numbed public. Nabokov's plea for radical artistic freedom in Lolita comes suffused with irony, understanding itself as a last vestige of the modernist project rather than—as for Conrad—a fresh start on Gustave Flaubert's modernist mission.
“Art has never been their fetish,” says Conrad's Mr. Vladimir about the British public, urging Verloc to go after the seat of science (26). But in fifties America, art does end up as a fetish. Despite or because of its absorption into the “culture industry” (so named by the émigré intellectuals Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer during the years that Nabokov was composing Lolita), art becomes the sign of absolutized freedom. Nabokov finds his way to an art of scandal in Lolita by playing the radically free aesthete in a philistine market society. This gadfly/butterfly pose is no doubt what attracted the regard of Trilling and other crafters of the fifties canon. Even before totalitarianism arose in thirties Europe, the liberal West was known for fostering a sacrosanct relationship between economic and aesthetic freedom:
Outside of the political, liberalism not only recognizes with self-evident logic the autonomy of different human realms but drives them toward specialization and even toward complete separation. That art is a daughter of freedom, that aesthetic value judgment is absolutely autonomous, that artistic genius is sovereign—all this is axiomatic of liberalism. … The most important example of such an autonomy is the validity of norms and laws of economics. (Carl Schmitt 72)
Writing in 1932, Carl Schmitt describes the devolution of political into nonpolitical discourse, anticipating the world Nabokov found when he landed in liberal America. This remarkable passage sounds eerily like the prelude to Clement Greenberg's statements on formal autonomy as the hallmark of modernism, in which each art elaborates the rules of its medium. Greenberg's aesthetic discourse positioned New York as the new capital of the art world. In the Cold War cultural milieu of critics like Trilling and Greenberg, Nabokov thrived and became a highbrow talisman for elites in the United States: America's own Euro-modernist. Despite the challenges his work presented to the discourse of freedom, Nabokov, hailed as the “good Russian,” could inoculate US culture against the totalitarian afflictions of Europe, from revolution on the left to fascism on the right.
Delusions of Permanence
How did Nabokov come to stand for Western freedom while delivering such a scathing takedown of its myths? Here again the comparison with Conrad offers helpful clues. Fifty years of history divide these two writers, but antipolitical thinking unites them. Their ideological skepticism and attraction to masculine individualism made them both ripe for assimilation to a mid-century canon set by male critics who were largely existentialist in temper and disillusioned with mass politics. Leavis's anointment of Conrad in the Great Tradition anticipates the kind of welcome extended by Trilling to Lolita. Leavis singles out The Secret Agent among Conrad's work for its consummate art. His favorite part of the novel, which he calls “one of the most astonishing triumphs of genius in fiction,” is the scene where Winnie plunges a knife into her husband's heart (214). Leavis's admiration for this bloody scene is, in its way, even more disturbing than Trilling's urbane affirmation of outlaw erotics in Lolita (364). Both celebrate the violent undoing of the marriage plot. There may be some antiheteronormative energy behind these critical judgments, but there is also a misogynist aversion to the domestic and a powerful wish to rescue the free agency of the (male) individual from the webs of home.
Two fundamental values converge in the Leavis-Trilling critical posture: lack of reproduction and freedom of mobility. Trilling: “Lolita gives us no chance to settle and sink roots. Perhaps it is the curious moral mobility it urges on us that accounts for its remarkable ability to represent certain aspects of American life” (371). In both novels, the wives are killed in transit, making the open society feel, even at the level of plot, like an airless system. These novels of motion and migration are notable for how many bodies end up in boxes: cells, cabins, coffins, offices, houses, traps. Most of the women die childless. This census includes not just Winnie Verloc and Charlotte Haze, but also Humbert's first love (Annabel), his first wife (Valeria), and Lolita herself, “Mrs. Dick Schiller,” who underscores the point by dying—in childbirth—on Christmas Eve!
The plot of the destroyed child (Stevie)—and, in Nabokov's case, the destroyed child (baby) of the destroyed child (Lolita)—represents what Lee Edelman has described as a profound threat “not only to the organization of a given social order but also … to social order as such” (11). To adapt Edelman's insight to the Western liberal empires, with their decisive rhetoric of national innocence and boundless growth, the figure of the child becomes even more “the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics” (Edelman 3). The broken children of The Secret Agent and Lolita operate as symbolic antitypes to figures of national destiny such as Charles Dickens's Pip, Mark Twain's Huck, and Rudyard Kipling's Kim. As if to drive the point home, Nabokov points the Schillers—Lolita's last American family—toward America's westernmost frontier, Alaska (not yet a state). But before it can reach the northwest edge of the continent, where America almost touches Russia, the story ends. The chain of reproduction breaks, and the plot of westward motion finds its limit, the threshold meridian where West converts back to East. Turning on its head Huck Finn's classic projection of unresolved conflict onto the recessive horizon of new American territories, Nabokov arrests the novel's westward drift into the future.Footnote 6
What to make of antireproductive stories centered on movement without progress? The answer surely turns on the fact that Stevie and Lolita, pinned to their youth, embody the logic of frozen time. The allegorical genius of these texts is that they contrive equally to tell the story of the West as a site of advanced modernity—nonstop modernization—and as a site of stabilized, or at least slow-moving, social life. This paradox of national innocence and imperial guilt was common to the ideological matrices of Victorian Britain and Cold War America. It retails the story of progress domesticated into stability, of historical time cooled and stilled at the center while the rest of the world falls behind or catches up. The generic modern nation-state, one might observe, tends to assimilate perpetual capitalist growth into finite, organic, and human-scaled habitation. Nationalism (especially ethnonationalism) provides the tent pegs of origin and end. But the hegemonic or imperial nation-state—say, Britain in 1900 and America in 1950—is an especially salient case of the tension between industrial-imperial dynamism and the counternarrative of cozy, familiar national identity. Expansive in their planetary reach, apex hegemons seem all the more urgently to require vivid stabilizing myths of family, town, origin, and homeland. The tension between national core and imperial entropy cannot be resolved logically, politically, or discursively. It is a besetting social contradiction of modern liberal empires, and it provokes and rewards imaginary resolutions of the kind supplied by The Secret Agent and Lolita.
Conrad and Nabokov were sharp critics of liberalism who managed to become culture heroes in England and America. Their novels allegorize an encounter with a mythically stable and politically innocent West while demystifying both stability and innocence. Plots of paternal betrayal register a profound ambivalence about their authors’ flight from autocratic masculine authority into democratizing, domesticating (and feminized) mass culture. The pairing of the two sheds light on common features of Edwardian Britain and Eisenhower America and on the transfer of hegemonic imperatives from one to the other. The main themes in such allegories—depraved innocence, phobic hegemony, sentimental imperialism—all point, from oblique angles, at a desire to disavow change itself, the essence of history. They are contradictions in terms that avow without wanting to that rising powers fall and stable societies fall apart.
Thus The Secret Agent and Lolita do not merely narrate the core paradox of Western freedom; they embody it in their form. Because the myth of the stable West is an antihistorical concept, and because narratives are made of time, the novels encode an intractable problem. A novel that enshrines the myth of its civilization removes the deeper conflicts necessary to generate plot; it mutates into propaganda. But a novel that dismantles such a myth completely may also lose touch with the conflicts animating the social world of its time; it risks becoming a dry satirical exercise, what Northrop Frye called an anatomy. Novels designed to address a national-imperial myth have to capture that myth's tortured existence somewhere in the gray lands between truth and lie, where it is endlessly discredited, then resurrected again. In such fictions, Gatsby's green light of Western innocence flashes on and off again, across the centuries, from contact and settlement to hegemonic apex to slow retreat: it is the signal flare of a New World civilizational project going down under the weight of its hypertrophied idealism.
Conrad and Nabokov identify with England and America not as parochial nations with exclusive cultural traditions, but as bearers (in the imperial state form) of a more universal concept—Western civilization, let us say. Liberal hegemons incorporate but exceed their own core national myths in ways that make possible precisely this model of identification. Conrad and Nabokov traded up from bounded or broken nations to inhabit expansive or cosmopolitan empires.Footnote 7 Their Occidentalist storytelling can be productively embedded, I think, in a longer historical narrative in two cycles, two epochs of illusory peace or cold détente guaranteed by British and American economic dominance. The fictions examined in this essay became modern classics because at every level, from diction and syntax to plot and theme, they address themselves to what Francis Hutchins memorably dubbed “the illusion of permanence.” For Hutchins, the words describe the mentality of the British ruling elites in colonial India. But Hutchins's ringing phrase captures the fantasy of long rule / slow power more generally. It identifies a wish to arrest in time the very material historical processes that supplied a given hegemonic power with its economic and political advantage. It names the desire to stop or detain a certain phase of national ascendancy, a certain cycle of accumulation, in its historical tracks.
The secret that explains the success of The Secret Agent and Lolita is that they enact the fundamentally frozen historical desire or magic homeostasis of late-empire Britain and high-empire America. This is the frozen historical desire that still shapes the interpretive protocols of academic English, and of this essay, even as I attempt to embed a sympathetic close reading into a new metanarrative that can somehow exceed our canons of judgment, somehow travel outside the New Critical beacons lit in the prestige chambers of the last Western empire. The novels of Conrad and Nabokov administer the sting of social criticism. But they also trade in powerful fantasies of Anglo-American stability. Those fantasies in some form or another animate the paranoid genre systems of late Victorian Britain and of mid-century America—including modernism itself. In the end, they almost always convert the thrilling fears of invasion and collapse into a familiar formula of “liberal didactics” and “safe circularity” (Suvin 338).
Conrad and Nabokov emerged within that historical matrix alongside popular invasion and infiltration narratives that dotted the trail from British to American hegemony. They are also major writers of the modernist canon enshrined in New Critical practice and university curricula. Once we read the long critical histories of The Secret Agent and Lolita together, we can see that they manage to combine vaulting modernist ambition with sly sensationalist appeal. Together they remind us that genre shock (sex, violence, melodrama, fantasy) operates in tandem with aesthetic shock (avant-garde technique, impressionism, delayed decoding, cognitive dissonance). More to the point: The Secret Agent and Lolita are “classics” because they assimilate into their narrative frame the larger problematic of stopped time: the world clock exploded, the nymphet exploited. Their master plots resolve to inertia and homeostasis; their forms square off and encircle themselves. Put more concretely, we might say that the manifest satire of English and American hypocrisy is balanced by a latent commitment to embrace the West as a liberal safe haven and metropolitan core.
The doublings and symmetries that organize The Secret Agent and Lolita thus underscore something more important than any specific allegorical correspondence between this or that character and this or that social referent. The outcomes, signifying nothing in the way of political progress or social decline, signify everything. Here is the final point of intersection between the literary language of the texts, read closely, and the historical significance of their ambient genre systems, shaped by the epic curve of imperial succession. The logic of hegemon culture is condensed into the delusions of permanence that define The Secret Agent and Lolita. Conrad's fiction is built on a vision of history suspended between rapid modernization and English traditionalism. Nabokov's fiction is also built on a paradigm of false innocence and stilled time—the impossible, improper drive of nympholeptic desire, romantic longing, and American consumerism.
The myth of the stable West had undeniable power for Conrad and for Nabokov, but their novels show us that neither subjects nor states can avoid the tidal force of history. If we are dwelling now in the long dusk between America's signal crisis and its terminal crisis, we can see from our vantage point the old concept of the West and its tattered banners of universal liberty sinking into genuine decline. Looking back at The Secret Agent and Lolita, two masterpieces of Occidentalist modernism, we can also sense the new limits attached to what once looked like a permanent revolution in production, an eternal “great game” played by hegemons and counterhegemons: a long cold war with no end in sight. The fantasy of the translatio imperii that brought all the world to America, with its seemingly boundless horizons of growth and invention, has now lost much of its mid-century and Occidentalist gleam. It is moving off into a future elsewhere, harboring other exiles and artists still searching for a free world.
