“Phony” and “Poshlost” : The Ordinary as Moral Concept in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

Abstract

According to philosopher Stanley Cavell, “what philosophy is dissatisfied with is inherently the everyday” (1988: 171). The everyday is also an ambiguous but central concept in Nabokov’s and Salinger’s most famous novels. Their narrators mock and criticize the vulgarity of whatever they associate with everyday life – clichés, stock ideas, routines. This seemingly harmless mindset has serious ethical consequences: Holden and Humbert start associating the concept of the everyday with moral depravity. They become blind to the redeemable qualities of the ordinary, which leads them to consider the Other merely as a product of clichés. Both Nabokov and Salinger imply that one cannot acknowledge the alterity of the Other without making peace with ordinariness of everyday life. However, there is an important difference between the two novels: while Salinger sets out to depict how the everyday can be reclaimed and the Other acknowledged, Lolita employs a narrator who never manages to re-evaluate his approach to the ordinary.