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"Quite an unwholesome book."-Adolf Eichmann commenting on Lolita to his jailer while awaiting trial for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem, 1960, quoted in Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem Humbert is perfectly willing to say that he is a monster; no doubt he is, but we find ourselves less and less eager to say so.-Lionel Trilling, Encounter, October 1958
That Eichmann and Trilling had had an opportunity to directly debate the merits of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is, of course, a literary encounter devoutly to be wished. I have tried to compensate for history's oversight by introducing them here to highlight both the strangeness and familiarity of Trilling's reluctance to accept what Eichmann (a monster pontificating on monsters) clearly did-the confession of a self-professed monster.l At a time when confession was the principal mode of inquiry into political and sexual truth (in many ways, a pleonasm during the Cold War), the figure of the literary critic, professional interrogator of the truth of literary texts, declining to take Humbert at his word must strike us as at once aberrant and exemplary-aberrant in ignoring the ethical and political dimensions of pedophilia, an issue that, then as now, has been the source of so much popular concern and legislative activity;2 exemplary in the context of the general retreat from politics into formalism that characterized so much of the literary criticism of the period. Trilling wasn't alone in his defense of Humbert and Lolita. In the novel's first American review, John Hollander, writing in the Partisan Review (fall 1956), saw Lolita as purely an experiment with literary forms: "Lolita, if it is anything 'really,' is the record of Mr. Nabokov's love affair with the romantic novel." Howard Nemerov (Kenyon Review, spring 1957) concurred: "Nabokov's own artistic concern, here as elsewhere, I should say, has no more to do with morality than with sex." In Nemerov's reading, Nabokov presided over a purely artistic universe "to which morality stands but as a dubious, Euclidean convenience. "3
Hollander's and Nemerov's remarks indicate another strangely familiar effect of the refusal to recognize Humbert's monstrosity-the exculpation of Nabokov. As the novel's vexed publication historyits initial rejection by publishers in the United States as well as the admixture of horror and fascination with which it was...