Annotated "lap" scene with comments

p. 57 and on

I want my learned readers[half-insulting reference to the reader who may or may not be learned] to participate [the reader must take part in the scene, thereby replicating HH's action] 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."[contradicts itself] So

let us get started. I have a difficult job before me.

 Main character: Humbert the Hummer. Time: Sunday morning in June.

Place: sunlit living room. Props: old, candy-striped davenport, magazines,

phonograph, Mexican knickknacks (the late Mr. Harold E. Haze--God bless the

good man--had engendered my darling at the siesta hour in a blue-washed

room, on a honeymoon trip to Vera Cruz, and mementoes, among these Dolores,

were all over the place). She wore that day a pretty print dress that I had

seen on her once before, ample in the skirt, tight in the bodice,

short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and, to complete the color

scheme, she had painted her lips and was holding in her hollowed hands a

beautiful, banal, Eden-red apple. She was not shod, however, for church. And

her white Sunday purse lay discarded near the phonograph. Interesting contrast betwene the normal, martital sex that produced Lolita - and the kind he's about to have. By referring to Lolita as a memento, he underscores that to him she is language. He had seen her in the dress once before - for him, also, she is an echo of previous events or experiences.

 My heart beat like a drum [Nabokov's deliberate use of a trite experession from racy literature] as she sat down, cool skirt ballooning,

subsiding, on the sofa next to me, and played with her glossy fruit. [this may be Humbert's imagination, expressed as a double entendre: he imagines her masturbating] She

tossed it up into the sun-dusted air, and caught it--it made a cupped

polished plop. [a cupped plot because the sound is contained by her hands; she holds the sound. The apple is polished but not the sound - Humbert mixes kinesthetic experience (how something feels) with aural experience (the plop).]

 Humbert Humbert intercepted the apple. why third person here?

"Give it back," - she pleaded, showing the marbled flush of her palms.

I produced Delicious. [The odd naming of the apple by its type... a red delicious apple, shows that for him it symbolizes "sweet" experiences. Also, of course, an Edenic reference.] She grasped it and bit into it, and my heart was like

snow under thin crimson skin, and with the monkeyish [the sophisticated Humbert frequently refers to himself in animal terms, or as a monster when speaking of his sexuality. This underscores his division into two people: man and monster.] nimbleness that was so

typical of that American nymphet, she snatched out of my abstract grip the

magazine I had opened (pity no film had recorded the curious pattern, the

monogrammic linkage of our simultaneous or overlapping moves [their movements are linked as the letters in a mongrammed towel - the kind Charlotte Haze possesses - are linked.]). Rapidly,

hardly hampered by the disfigured apple she held, Lo flipped violently

through the pages in search of something she wished Humbert to see. Found it

at last. I faked interest by bringing my head so close that her hair touched

my temple and her arm brushed my cheek as she wiped her lips with her wrist.

Because of the burnished mist through which I peered at the picture [this description represents that mist; "burnished" is a repetition of "polished"], I was

slow in reacting to it, and her bare knees rubbed and knocked impatiently

against each other. Dimly there came into view: a surrealist painter

relaxing, supine, on a beach, and near him, likewise supine, a plaster

replica of the Venus di Milo, half-buried in sand. Picture of the Week, said

the legend. [The magazine item, like Charlotte's book club, shows the cheapening and mass-marketing of art. Nabokov also disapproved of most "modern" art.] I whisked the whole obscene thing away. Next moment, in a sham

effort to retrieve it, she was all over me. Caught her by her thin knobby

wrist. The magazine escaped to the floor like a flustered fowl. [The chicken-magazine is itself a surrealistic image. H.H.'s encounter with Lolita at this point seems like a fight.] She twisted

herself free, recoiled, and lay back in the right-hand corner of the

davenport. Then, with perfect simplicity, [Lolita's simplicity is the quality Humbert likes - she is ingenuous and guileless - mainly due to her ignorance of sex.] the impudent child extended her

legs across my lap. [He reverts here to the fatherly tone.]

 By this time I was in a state of excitement bordering on insanity [Humbert's "madness" is referenced here, but it separates him from his sexual leanings]; but

I also had the cunning of the insane. Sitting there, on the sofa, I managed

to attune, by a series of stealthy movements, my masked lust to her

guileless limbs [her limbs have no cunning design or plan; H.H. attunes his movements - another musical reference - to hers]. It was no easy matter to divert the little maiden's

attention while I performed the obscure adjustments necessary for the

success of the trick. [Humbert describes his sexual maneuvering as a technical operation - like tuning an instrument.] Talking fast, lagging behind my own breath [he is panting, a clue to how extreme the situation really is], catching

up with it, mimicking a sudden toothache [H.H. suffers from toothache throughout the novel, as Nabokov (and Joyce) also did.] to explain the breaks in my

patter--and all the while keeping a maniac's inner eye on my distant golden

goal, [the "golden goal" has a religious ring: like a search for the holy chalice.] I cautiously increased the magic friction that was doing away, in an

illusional, if not factual, sense, with the physically irremovable, but

psychologically very friable texture of the material divide (pajamas and

robe) between the weight of two sunburnt legs, resting athwart my lap, and

the hidden tumor of an unspeakable passion. [The "material divide" suggests the spiritual or interpersonal distance of which Humbert is not aware. The many phallic references in the passage are usually somewhat negative, although Humbert is proud of his "exceptional virility": tumor, monster, beast, etc.] Having, in the course of my

patter, hit upon something nicely mechanical, I recited, garbling them

slightly, the words of a foolish song that was then popular [Humbert needs to escape from the intricacy of his own thoughts and into her world, represented by a popular song he would probably despise.] --O my Carmen, my

little Carmen, something, something, those something nights, and the stars,

and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen; I kept repeating this automatic

[the automatism of the song is indicative of the "bestial" state Humbert has entered as a result of his "insanity" or arousal.] stuff and holding her under its special spell (spell because of the

garbling), and all the while I was mortally afraid that some act of God

[the interruption of God or, more likely, Charlotte, shows that Humbert thinks of his goals in terms of fate... and returns to the Edenic theme: illicit apple-eating is discovered and punished by Yahweh.] might interrupt me, might remove the golden load in the sensation of which

all my being seemed concentrated, and this anxiety forced me to work, for

the first minute or so, more hastily than was consensual with deliberately

modulated enjoyment [Humbert here does not refer to the issue of consent: rather, the sensation of haste is not consensual or "of the same sense" with his restrained enjoyment (or, to put it more simply: he is going too fast to enjoy himself.]. The stars that sparkled, and the cars that parkled, and

the bars, and the barmen, were presently taken over by her; her voice stole

and corrected the tune I had been mutilating. She was musical and

apple-sweet. [Not only is Lolita musically talented, but, to Humbert, she is like music: he refers repeatedly to her sweetness or the sweetness of the act here.] Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I

stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl,

Lola the bobby-soxer, [she listens to swing or jazz, not the "classic pop" of the early '50s (e.g. Sinatra etc.) devouring her immemorial fruit, [as a type of Annabelle, she originates in the past; also, as an Edenic symbol, the apple does - being present and past at the same time is her fundamental quality for him.] singing through its

juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless [the lost slipper has cinderella overtones] foot in its

sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the

sofa--and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, [these are dance movements - and remember the dance-step description of her name that opens the book] helped me to

conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence [his "method" of molestation is a language based on touch - perhaps like some languages for the deaf] between

beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her

dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock. [phallic references - the frock is innocent, although he defiles the frock without her knowing it]

The scene is a parody of "racy" scenes in contemporary literature, with its euphemistic language underlining the way art can transform even the crudest content. It is also, and more importantly, a document of Humbert's own blindness to his own identity and actions. He uses language and poetic references to convince himself that he is different than a common deviant. He literally does not know what he is doing.