20;lady’s new white purse.” Yet, he knows as a narrator that the intensity of his pleasure at the time owes a great deal to his conviction that he was actually defiling Lolita. In comparison, his first actual lovemaking with her will be very disappointing, both erotically and poetically. The poetic, erotic, and romantic language Humbert Humbert uses to describe his passionate sexual attraction to Lolita is an attempt at redeeming the sins of his protagonist self. It is no longer the portrayal of a love that is defined by law and by society as deviant. Nabokov’s writing unambiguously seeks to transmute Humbert’s erotic experience into a work of art, and to induce us to relive it intensely in our imagination and with our senses. He does not want us simply to identify with his protagonist as a crude pornographer would, but to bring us to adhere totally to this beautiful text in which the gradual eroticization of the language eventually creates a poerotic ecstasy. There is no longer any separation between signifier and signified, between the pretext and the present text; the obstacle that prevented novelistic language from representing the sexual act is magically abolished, even though sex still remains a powerful source of anxiety. It is not the sexual interdict, no matter what its true nature is, which is transgressed, but the aesthetic one. As Humbert later acknowledges “sex is but the ancilla of art,” it cannot be its main subject....
