through witch one can picture the young Humbert's pleasure while he is caressing them and adult Humbert's excitement in recalling the event. These legs are hospitable, but not wanton; Annabel's modesty is necessary to contain young Humbert's ardor and to allow the poetic unfolding of the scene. The girl's genitals are neither named nor described, but are simply designated deictically as the sublime goal of a conquest. Here, the anatomic word or metaphor would mar the poetic beauty of the passage and betray the "inadequacy" between words.The neutral phrase used by Nabokov prevents the intrusion of the Freudian tragic in unfolding of the scene and induces a great complicity between the author, the narrator, and the reader, who is invited to fuse his desires with those of Humbert. Humbert, as the narrator, 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 her gestures, which are described in voluptuous detail, reflect in rhythm and configuration the caresses lavished on her by the boy. The protagonist and the narrator share the same fascination in Annabel's contortions, drawing in the excitement from the spectacle, 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 metaphor and metonymy, and constitutes a kind of poetic climax. After the evocation of the girl's genitals, the narrator had no choice but to invent a beautiful poetic formula that would sound at the same time natural and relevant. In this passage from Lolita Nabokov casts aside the vulgar clichs used in literature to represent sex and to prepare us for the final metaphor, which bears little trace of trepidation.The most erotic passage in the novel is the description of the Sunday morning scene on the divan. Here the narrator takes endless precautions, begging u...
