Subject:
[NABOKV-L] Nabokov and L. Trilling
Brian Boyd, as I expected, understands
that "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."
Fran Assa writes that my memory of
Trilling's review is inaccurate. Actually, I have the complete set of
Encounter from No. 1 (October 1953) to the final issue No. 427
(September 1990). I used to buy it when I was still at school in the 1950s,
and read Trilling's article "The Last Lover: Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita" in No. 61 (October 1958), the month I started at
Cambridge. This was before I read
Lolita, which had not yet been
published in Britain. I have read read and pondreed Trilling's piece many
times over the years, and have
Encounter No. 61 before me now. I do
not think my characterisation is inaccurate.
My objection to Trilling and to what, as I see it,
Nabokov was colluding with in what I regard as their
failed "encounter" was too perfunctorily expressed. But the following two
passages that Fran Assa quotes from Trilling may suggest what I
was alluding to.
<<
He correctly points out the difference between Humbert's passion and the kind
of love Brian is talking about:
“The condition towards which such a marriage aspires is health—a
marriage is praised by being called a healthy marriage. This will
suggest how far the modern ideal of love is from passion-love.
The literal meaning of the word passion will indicate the
distance. Nowadays we use the word chiefly to mean an
intense feeling, forgetting the old distinction between a passion and an
emotion, the former being an emotion before which we are helpless, which we
have to suffer, in whose grip we are passive. The passion-lover
was a sick man, a patient.
He
agrees with Brian that we have to distinguish this love from the kind we
generally desire. "“Now
it may well be that all this is absurd, and really and truly a kind of
pathology, and that we are much the better for being quite done with it, and
that our contemporary love-ideal of firm, tolerant, humorous, wry, happy
marriage is a great advance from it.
>>
Trilling proposes an opposition between two kinds of "love"
-- "healthy" marriage and "sick" "passion-love", even though the
"health" of modern marriage" may be boring and the
"sickness" may not be a true "pathology". It is his use of the language
of sickness and health that shows him to be the true Freud-follower
who laboured to enlighten the masses by abridging Jones's Freud
biography.
Of course, the word "love" is used in many ways, and it is
absurd to insist on only one of its meanings. But it is justifiable to insist
that a leading critic and a leading author should distinguish accurately
between the various meanings. What Brian and I are, I think,
both pointing to, and what Nabokov indicates in his novel by the via
negativa, is love as nothing to do with sickness or health, and certainly
not boring, but love as moral action as well as
passion.
Nabokov admitted that he was not good at talking, and when
he slipped from reading from prepared cards into risky spontaneity he tended
to give hostages to fortune. He did not do justice to himself or his book in
what I see as the mis-meeting with
Trilling.
Trilling is honest enough to acknowledge that he is not
sure whether to take Humbert's professed remorse and repentance seriously. I
think this must be because, although he writes that "Lolita" is truly
"shocking", he has not really got the moral measure of the book. Brian Boyd is
the better critic here, because he shows how Nabokov shows how
monstrously and absurdly ambivalent and dishonest is Humbert's
self-indulgent wallowing in "guilt". Just for a start, there is the
placing of the scene about the children's voices heard on the hillside,
and the awkward fact that a truly repentant man does not immediately
charge off to proclaim "She was my child, Quilty", protest his own "inner
essential innocence", and then foully murder his "Clearly Guilty"
rival.
Anthony Stadlen
"Oakleigh"
2A Alexandra
Avenue
GB - London N22 7XE
Tel.: +44 (0) 20 8888 6857
For
Existential Psychotherapy and Inner Circle Seminars see:
http://anthonystadlen.blogspot.com