FREE ESSAY ON POETRY OF PERVERSION

POETRY OF PERVERSION

Poetry of Perversion
Lolita is perhaps one of the most disturbing novels of the century: it tells the immoral
story of a middle- aged man who falls in love with a twelve year- old girl (a nymphet, as
he calls her) and has a sexual relationship with her for over two years, until she
disappears with another more perverse middle- aged man. What makes this novel
particularly disturbing is the fact that Humbert's sexual perversion is disguised in
highly poetic garb and that the only monitor of virtue is the gifted pervert who narrates
the story.
Never before has sex been evoked as poetically or as erotically as in Lolita. The first
erotic scene takes place between an adolescent Humbert Humbert and a girl of the same
age, Annabel Leigh, who becomes the model for Lolita:
She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in he solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss
me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful,
and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering
mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of
breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve 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 at me 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.
Annabel Leigh's name is of course borrowed from Edgar Allen Poe's Annabel Lee, a poem
that is mentioned often throughout the novel. The narrator is not so much trying to
describe the erotic games of two children as to make us intimately feel their erotic
excitement.
Nabokov makes Annabel the focal point of the text, but not its reflector. The scene
begins with an alliterative evocation of her legs (her legs, her lovely, live legs)
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 cliches 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 us to sympathize with him
as a protagonist and to participate in the scene: I want my learned readers to
participate in the scene I am about to replay; I want them to examine its every detail
and see for themselves how careful, how chaste the whole wine- sweet event is if viewed
with what my lawyer has called, in a private talk we have had, 'impartial sympathy.'
Humbert says that he is aware of the reader's desire as a voyeur, and he thinks he can
depend on it for freedom from prejudice. Humbert the narrator is aware that the scene he
is about to replay is going to hurt many readers' feeling and offend their moral sense,
so he dissociates himself as a somewhat grotesque theatrical character: Main character:
Humbert the Hummer.
Lolita, too is portrayed as vulgar;  she wore a pretty pink dress that I had seen on her
once before . . . and, to compliment the color scheme, she had painted her lips and was
holding in her hollowed hands a beautiful, banal, Eden- red apple. The three adjectives
used by Humbert to describe the apple, which is objectively beautiful, artistically
vulgar and superfluous in this context, but appropriate and functional in this scene.
Lolita is no longer a vulgar little flirt, but the archetypal temptress and seductress.
Humbert the protagonist, burlesqued by Humbert the narrator, is too excited sexually to
be distracted by such cliches.
The apple serves as a prop in a first erotic exchange: Lolita tosses it up as if she was
juggling with it, he catches it, and she begs him to give it back: I produce Delicious.
She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like snow under crimson skin. Delicious
does not only refer to the apple, but, metaphorically, the penis, which in the present
scene will be turned into a poetic object. The scene becomes more predictable 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. The poetic
escalation accompanying Humbert's increasing excitement continues in the following lines,
and his masked lust becomes the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. In this once
metaphorical phrase, a word reappears that was used in the passage earlier, passion. The
subtlety and the intensity of his excitement, added to the poetic prowess of his narrator
double, have brought about this change. Step by step, Humbert the narrator redeems
Humbert the protagonist and eventually becomes one with him at the end, so it becomes
terribly difficult to distinguish each participant's contribution in the construction of
this scene. At the moment of climax, the narrator vanishes behind his protagonist self
who addresses the members of the jury as follows: and my moaning mouth . . . almost
reached the back of her neck, while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb
of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known. Later on, he will be very hard on
himself; here, though, he neither accuses himself nor makes amends but glorifies his
sexual experience which he claims had no precedent in nature and therefore cannot be
judged in any human court of law. The word monster probably does not imply that Humber
the narrator is beginning to feel remorse but rather that Humbert the protagonist feels
as if he has totally freed himself from the laws of men and has performed the ultimate
erotic act. To be sure, Humbert tries to vindicate himself morally after that: I felt
proud of myself. I had stolen the honey of a spasm without impairing the morals of a
minor.
The author gets personally involved in the construction of this scene: his writing seeks
to transmute Humbert's erotic experience into a work of art, and to induce us to relive
it intensely in our imaginations. He does not want us to simply to identify with its
protagonist as a crude pornographer would, but to adhere totally to this beautiful text
in which the gradual eroticisation of the language eventually created a poerotic ecstasy.
He complacently describes the subtlety of perversion, the seductions of forbidden love
objects, and the rapture of uncensored eroticism. We are doomed to follow the perverse
logic adopted by Humbert who, through his poetic language, tries to redeem the sins of
his protagonist self. Nabokov manipulates us arrogantly; he seeks to gain our complicity,
without which Lolita's immortality would not be insured