Genre

Limon, John

doi: 10.1215/00166928-11995232pmid: N/A

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and “Spring in Fialta” are perfectionist love stories that feature car accidents. What is the relationship of the aesthetic bliss that replaces romantic bliss, on the one hand, to a plot that depends on random violence, on the other? This essay argues that Fitzgerald is Nabokov's precursor in reconciling the age of randomness, as noted and theorized by Victorian novelists, to modernist technical perfectionism by considering accidents in the Aristotelian‐Thomistic way, as the inessential disguise and deliverer of substantial change, the transubstantiation of God. Nabokov is Fitzgerald's antitype: a canonical linkage that reveals the synchronicity of time. The essay puts Fitzgerald's ambition to write a novel better than he can write in relation to John Freccero's argument about The Divine Comedy: that it is the record of Dante's attempt to write a poem better than he can write — at least at first, before his conversion by way of Inferno. The problem for Fitzgerald and Nabokov is that language itself cannot play the role of the transubstantiated God, the substance that hides behind the accidents of their books. The essay is a tribute to the failed attempt, which, as opposed to Victorian art, does not live within modernity but seeks, impossibly, to forestall it.