" has no “interest in the ‘psychological’ aspects of the story; he has none whatever. His novel is as far as possible from being a ‘study of’the emotions it presents. The malice which H. H. bears to psychiatry is quite Mr. Nabokov’s own;…” “Psychiatry and the world may join in giving scientific or ugly names to Humbert’s sexual idiosyncrasy; the novel treats it as a condition of love like another.”
and so he takes the book on Nabokov's terms.
Having noted that the subject matter is intentionally outrageous he asks the same question everyone asks when they read the book:
“What, we must ask, is Mr. Nabokov’s purpose in making this occasion for outrage?” That is the question he tries to answer, and he does it splendidly. Perfectly. And, I'll bet, VN agreed with him.
He wrote that the book's subject matter
" makes it unique in my experience of contemporary novels. If our fiction gives accurate testimony, love has disappeared from the western world, just as Denis de Rougement said it should. The contemporary novel can tell us about sex, and about sexual communion, and about mutuality, and about the strong fine relationships that grow up between men and women; and it can tell us about marriage. But about love, which was once one of its chief preoccupations, it can tell us nothing at all.”
And then he proceeds to show how Nabokov has broken through this barrier to create a modern novel about an emotion that has all but become extinct in contemporary fiction.
"If a novelist wanted, for whatever strange reason, to write a novel about the old kind of love, how would he go about it? How would he find or contrive the elements that make love possible?" And shows us Nabokov's literary genius in accomplishing this goal.
He points out a lot of other good stuff too:
"….in recent fiction no lover has thought of his
beloved with somuch tenderness, that no woman has been so charmingly evoked, in
such grace and delicacy, as Lolita; the description of her tennis game, in
which even her racket has an erotic charm, is one of the few examples of rapture in modern writing."
In response to Anthony Stadlen’s semi-prompt: from what I recall of Trilling’s article, he makes a valid point about the appeal for Nabokov of a situation that keeps desire at its steamy peak, as in the hothouse conditions of the courtly love tradition.
On the other hand Trilling missed the fact that in Lolita Nabokov shows what love is, not by showing it in a form that conserves its intensity, but by showing exactly what it is not, in Humbert’s relations with Lolita. This strikes me more vividly than ever after my prolonged recent immersion in Nabokov’s Letters to Véra, which I have just finished editing and translating with Olga Voronina (864 pages, Penguin, September 23; Knopf will not publish it in the US until 2015). Nabokov’s relationship to Véra in the letters reveals exactly what’s missing in Humbert’s relationship to Lolita in the novel, and what Nabokov meant readers to sense was missing: a mutual delight in what their minds can share, a sense of immediate attunement even when the tune is surprising or distant or momentarily jarring; a constant sympathetic awareness of her perspective and concern for her needs; a refusal to manipulate her, while always trying to enchant her. Very different indeed from The Enchanter, or Humbert’s attempted drug-rape of Lolita at the Enchanted Hunters.
Brian Boyd
I have always found Trilling's article deplorable: a paradigm case of psychoanalytically corrupted misunderstanding of, and debasement of, the concept of "love".I didn't find the sound quality of the Nabokov-Trilling conversation prohibitive. It was all too audible. I was deeply disappointed by Nabokov's succumbing to Trilling's flattery and colluding with his psychobabble. The would-be fierce opponent of the "Viennese quack" was seduced without a murmur of protest.I imagine Brian Boyd will understand what I am talking about, if nobody else does.Anthony Stadlen
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In a message dated 03/09/2014 03:43:47 GMT Daylight Time, franassa@HOTMAIL.COM writes:I've just reread Lionel Trilling's "Encounter" piece on Lolita. I was even more impressed than the first time I'd read it. I think it is one of the best things I've ever read on the book. I'm wondering what others might think. Also, I've tried to watch the youtube conversation with Nabokov and Trilling, but the sound quality is prohibitive. Does anyone know of a source with good sound quality? Did the Nabokovs and the Trillings see anything of each other socially?
Fran Assa
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