e the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”Therefore, Nabokov’s highly erotic, beautiful description becomes a justification for Humbert’s adolescent sexual deviance. Since pornography is usually the one-sided attempt at gaining sexual pleasure from another object or person, the author of a pornographic novel would have endeavored to describe the boy’s exploratory gestures in great detail, focusing the description upon him. Instead Nabokov reverses the situation, making Annabel the focal point of the text, though not its reflector. The scene begins with an alliterative evocation of her legs (“Her legs, her lovely live legs”) through which one can picture, as in a mirror, young Humbert’s erotic pleasure while he is caressing them and adult Humbert’s excitement as he remembers the event. These legs are hospitable but not wanton, Annabel’s (frayed) modesty being necessary to contain young Humbert’s ardor and to allow the poetic unfolding of the scene.In this marvelous passage from Lolita, one feels that Nabokov not only meant to mimic as closely as possible the voluptuousness experienced by the two adolescents and to make us feel it intensely in sympathy. But also to cast aside the vulgar clichs used in literature to represent sex, and, step by step, to prepare us for the blossoming of the final metaphor which bears little trace of trepidation and self-censorship. The tailored elements are not meant to turn the girl into a “tumescent” object nor as a euphemism representing the girl’s genitals, under cover of the fetish. They are not even refe...
