From: I. Zelnik
Category: Other
Date: 6/24/99
Time: 8:58:27 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
[Poster's note: For further entertainment about Humbertian frottage, I refer you to a book chapter called *Dawn at the Pyramids* from *Flaubert's Parrot* by Julian Barnes. The following mojo is from *Where was Rebecca Shot?* by John Sutherland.]
FROM *HUMBERT'S FIRST CRIME* BY JOHN SUTHERLAND: The one thing in his favour is that, in the final analysis, it was she (Lolita) who began it all in the Enchanted Hunters Hotel. She was more 'debauched' than he was. When it comes to murdering Charlotte, for instance, Humbert finds that his nerve fails him. It might also have failed him when it came to seducing Lolita---had the little wanton not taken the initiative. He may *au fond* be a fantasist and nothing more. This ties in with Humbert's larger, quasi-theological belief, that 'nymphets' are succubi, demons sent to torment middle-aged males. They *know* full well what they are doing.
With this in mind, I want to look at the first of Humbert's molestations of Lolita, if that is what it is. It is not easy to disentangle from the obliquities of Humbertian prose. It takes place in Chapter 13 (significant number). It is a Sunday morning in June. 'Lo' sits alongside 'Hum' (soon to be her 'dad') on the pretext of reading his magazine. He is in his pyjamas and robe, she in her church frock. She takes the magazine, and throws her legs across his lap. He is in 'a state of excitement bordering on insanity; but I also had the cunning of the insane'. He manages to 'attune' his 'masked lust' to her 'guileless limbs'.
Talking fast, he increases the 'magic friction'. Her legs 'twitch' as they lie across 'my live lap'. She is eating an apple (significant detail) and as she throws the core in the fender 'her young weight, her shameless innocent shanks and round bottom, shifted in my tense, tortured, surreptitiously laboring lap'. He imagines himself 'a radiant and robust Turk, deliberately, in the full consciousness of his freedom, postponing...the moment of actually enjoying the youngest and frailest of his slaves'. As he comes to climax, she shows him a bruise on her 'lovely nymphet thigh', which 'my huge hairy hand massaged and slowly enveloped---and because of her very perfunctory underthings, there seemed to be nothing to prevent my muscular thumb from reaching the hot hollow of her groin'. She twists away, 'while I crushed out against her left buttock the last throb of the longest ecstasy man or monster had ever known' (pp. 59-60). He wipes his brow (and, we apprehend, other parts of his anatomy) with a handkerchief of multicoloured silk, and goes upstairs to take his bath.
The technical term for this, I believe, is 'frottage', from the French *frotter*, 'to rub'. Humbert has brought himself to climax. But is it indecent assault, or decently discreet masturbation? Is this crime, or merely 'thought-crime'---sex in the head? It depends on what Lolita perceives, and to what degree she was conscious, complicit or even provocative. We never know. This episode---which is, in its way, grossly sexual---is none the less wholly inscrutable. Certainly, once confessed, it would go into the charge sheet as Humbert's first crime. Whether it belongs there, or in the innocent (because verbal) fantasies of his journal is another question.