I must admit that I was influenced not only by Trilling's article itself but also by the fact that it gave the British publisher Weidenfeld and Nicolson the opportunity to quote, misleadingly as I saw it, Trilling's statement that Lolita was about love not sex to promote the book.
 
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

 
In a message dated 11/09/2014 01:30:24 GMT Daylight Time, franassa@HOTMAIL.COM writes:
I see where Anthony Stadlen is coming from.  Interesting how two people can read the same text in such different ways.  In the paragraph I quoted, I did not view Trilling as using the terms health and pathology in Freudian terms at all.  He certainly didn't say he was relying on Freud, and it seemed to me, in deference to Nabokov's intent, that he was staying away from Freudian interpretation (as much as Trilling could.)  I read the paragraph in the more ordinary usage of the word "health"--as a metaphor, not as a medical pronouncement:  the kind of meaning  Brian Boyd used to describe a good kind of love, versus passion-love.  As Nabokov put it in Sebastian Knight, “Girls of her type do not smash a man’s life—they build it.”<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->  A life-affirming relationship, as opposed to psychoanalytic health, whatever that may be.  His point about passion-love in Lolita harkening back to de Rougement and medieval courtly love is, I think, a brilliant one.
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Date: Tue, 9 Sep 2014 14:30:00 -0400
From: nabokv-l@UTK.EDU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and L. Trilling
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] Nabokov and L. Trilling
From:
<STADLEN@aol.com>
Date:
9/9/2014 9:04 AM
To:
<NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>

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

 
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