rred to as a forbidden nook, as the phrase “my hand located what it sought,” in which there is hardly any trace of self-censorship, confirms. The girl’s genitals are neither named nor described; they are simply designated deictically as the sublime goal of a quest. Here, the anatomic word or the exaggerated metaphor would inevitably mar the poetic beauty of the passage and betray the inadequacy between the words and the idealized referent. Humbert, as a narrator, does not insist on his gesture as a protagonist; on the other hand, he extensively, poetically, evokes the effects of his caresses on Annabel who seems to be teetering between pleasure and pain. The scene is all the more exciting as the girl’s gestures, which are described in such voluptuous detail, inevitably reflect the caresses lavished on her by the boy; they mirror the rhythm and configurations of his caresses. The protagonist and the narrator betray the same fascination in front of Annabel’s voluptuous contortions, drawing their excitement from the spectacle, so that the final gesture is hardly indecent: it is the ultimate gift made by the young boy to the ecstatic virgin. There is no trace of vulgarity in the phrase, which is both a metaphor and a metonymy and constitutes a kind of poetic climax. After the implied evocation of the girl’s genitals, the narrator had no choice but to invent a beautiful poetic formula which would sound at once natural and relevant. Unlike the explicit description of his sexual encounter in adolescence, Humbert avoids extensive detail of the sexual act itself with Lolita. To Humbert, Lolita allows the deviancy of sexual union because she represents both deviancy from the norm and the sexual freedom of his youth. Although there is no real sexual act, the description of the Sunday morning scene on the divan is one of the most erotic and poetic passages, showing the extreme deviancy of Humbert’s sexua...
