The Enchanted Hunters in Nabokov’s Lolita

In Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert’s The Enchanted Hunters, as a quest for love, aims to reconstruct a felicitous world or integrate various fragmentary details into an organic unity that revives a lost love, experiencing it on the basis of irony, and revealing a simulation of the desire, violence, and despondency which have been expressed in myths of nymphs and Persephone. The protagonist never reaches this unity, but his narrative of erotic and romantic love reveals him as a pathetic addict engaged in mechanical reproduction related to the phenomena of desire, seduction, violence, and sex. His The Enchanted Hunters does not simulate what he expects of his childhood love with Annabel; rather, it simulates the erotic imagination suggested in Mary D. Sheriff’s term “nymphomania,” in which artists fall degenerately to a model of tragedy

The experience of literature; a reader with commentaries.

xxiv, 1320 p. 26 cm

Hemingway and His Critics

Review of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories, assessing the play as inferior because it is written by “Hemingway the man”; the stories, however, are excellent because they are the products of “Hemingway the artist.” Contends that The Fifth Column and To Have and Have Not’s reliance on first-person narration leads to disaster. Trilling also discusses the place “critical tradition” holds in Hemingway’s career. Previously published in Partisan Review 6 (Winter 1939): 52-60, and elsewhere

The Middle of the journey

319 p.; 18 cm