Sexuality and American Culture

“The psychiatrization of perverse pleasure” and its respective figure, “the perverse adult,” are directly addressed in Nobokov's Lolita through the main character Humbert Humbert. Through a multiplicity of narratives and particular employments of language, Nobokov saturates perversion and the pervert with a strange and frightening pleasure derived from obsession. This pleasure is experienced on numerous levels: by Humbert, by Dr. John Ray, by the reader, by the author himself.

One of the most pervasive aspects of Humbert's perversion is his own awareness of it. Throughout the book an obsession with describing, scrutinizing, criticizing, and defending his every thought, feeling, and action associated with his pedophilic condition. This obsession is part of the overarching necessity Humbert feels to confess and reveal his true nature, the secret. The first aspect of the condition that Humbert attempts to explain is its root cause, and digs into his past in order to do so—childhood memories of the death of his mother and especially the death of his first love Annabel (his first “nymphet”):

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. . . . That mimosa grove—the haze of starts, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me, and that little girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since—until at last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another. (Ch. 4)

Humbert has a painful self awareness of his perversion and communicates the conflicting binary nature of his sexual reality: “Overtly, I had so-called normal relationships with a number of terrestrial women having pumpkins or pears for breasts; inly, I was consumed by a hell furnace of localized lust for every passing nymphet whom as a law-abiding poltroon I never dared approach” (Ch. 5). This binary manifests itself in immensely tense scenes in which Humbert's worlds are juxtaposed, such as the car trip in Chapter 11:

My knuckles lay against the child's blue jeans. She was barefooted; her toenails showed remnants of cherry-red polish and there was a bit of adhesive tape across her big toe; and, God what would I not have give to kiss then and there those delicate-boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet! Suddenly her hand slipped into mine and without our chaperon's [the child's mother] seeing, I held, and stroked, and squeezed that little hot paw, all the way to the store. The driver's [mother] Marleneque nose shone, having shed or burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue anent the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in profile, while I prayed we would never get to that store, but we did. (Ch. 11)

This last quote, taken from Humbert's photographic memory of a diary he kept and wrote twice while boarding with the Hazes, also exemplifies Humbert's obsession with every minutial detail of his condition and its operation. Epitomizing this obsession with recollection and analysis is the “poem” he speaks of in the same diary, “a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school . . . and poem I know already by heart” (Ch.11).

Perhaps the two most revealing peculiarities of Humbert's obsession are his subjectification of himself and his narrative relationship with the reader. By constantly referring to himself in the third person and giving himself odd little nicknames, (“Humbert the Hoarse, Humbert the Humble, Humbert the Wounded, etc.), Humbert takes himself out of his memories, thoughts, feelings, and actions in order to engage in a more objective analysis. Effectively, he places himself on the surgical table and attempts to dissect himself. In doing so, Humbert also incites his audience to do the same. We, the readers, are also surgeons in Humbert Humbert's haunted hospital—probing, analyzing, and criticizing every detail of his perversion. By the simple act of reading this book, we are in fact engaging in the process of psychiatrizing perverse pleasure.

Moreover, this process is motivated and perpetuated by the pleasure we (and Humbert) derive from obsession over perversion. Foucault articulates this quite poignantly in his discussion of the mutually reinforcing relationship between power and pleasure inciting the “perverse implantation”:

The implantation of perversions is an instrument-effect: it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct. And accompanying this encroachment of powers, scattered sexualities rigidified, became stuck to an age, a place, a type of practice. A proliferation of sexualities through the extension of power; an optimization of the power to which each of these local sexualities gave a surface of intervention: this concatenation, particularly since the nineteenth century, has been ensured and relayed by the countless economic interests which, with the help of medicine, psychiatry, prostitution, and pornography, have tapped into both the analytical multiplication of pleasure and this optimization of the power that controls it. Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement. (Foucault, 48)

Humbert uses his nicknames to isolate isolate a body into which he can implant his perversion. Nobokov has done the same for the reader by isolating Humbert and all of Humbert's multiplicities in the form of the book. As such, Humbert (the analyst and analyzed) calls out to us: “Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me; try to discern the doe in me, trembling in the forest of my own iniquity, let's even smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling” (Ch. 29). The imagination is the implantation, and the smile, respectively, is the pleasure that we derive from it.