ene becomes more and more writerly as Humbert’s excitement increases: “Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her guileless limbs.” There is no trace of embarrassment in the phrase “masked lust.” Nabokov is not attempting to compose luxuriant, exaggerated, or paradoxical metaphors as pornographers did to depict the tumescent penis. He prefers to use an abstract word, “lust”, which evokes a highly concrete experience and alliterates with “Delicious. Humbert’s elevating sexual excitation is accompanied by heightened poetic language, making his deviant sexual desire romantic and endearing.There are elements of pornography present throughout Lolita, including the concept of sexual possession and consumption; however, these pornographic factors are masked in poetic language making his forbidden desire understandable. His language is reflective of sexual acts while maintaining the lilting quality of romantic allusion: "She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock". The poetic language is a concealment of the escalating interdict sexual desire Humbert is experiencing at the moment. The allusion to sexual activity through the act of 'devouring' becomes a veiled metaphor for his possession of both the girl and the 'forbidden fruit'. Humbert’s “consumption” of Lolita is indicative of his ability to solipsize the forbidden. However, the strength of the sexual metaphor is veiled by the reference to youth in its innocence. He refers to childhood tales (Beauty and the Beast) in conj...
