Bodies of High Style: Insight and Form in Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov

Abstract: This paper discusses different but at times converging features in the articulated poetics, the styles, of Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov. The emphasis is on the way they embody their imaginaries, their temperaments, in gambits to outflank mortality and chronological temporality. Their use of lists, for example, and other features by which form manumits their materials, are discussed in some detail. Along with the registering of their various modernist and/or postmodernist temperaments, situating them in their times, I also elicit comparison with other modernists, such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who are equally thinking, if not narrating, in the wake of the ravages of modernity. While also registering, of course, the many differences between these two subjects of study, the hope is that some fresh insight emerges from this discussion, alighting on well-traveled ground from the keyhole of a fresh angle of vision.