Yes, the way Hitchens poses the topic is absurd.  The formulation should be not whether Nabokov 
could or could not use certain words but WHY he did or didn't.  In some respects, Lolita is all 
about "oral sex," but Nabokov is redefining the concept.  Why does Humbert use the French, 
especially French which doesn't mean colloquially what the English expression would?  I think 
Nabokov's point here is that oral sex is all about language, especially when one only has words to 
play with.  This is a wonderful passage because instead of baring the body, Nabokov bares the 
device....  Hitchens mentions two appearances of "fancy" in the novel, instances where it clearly 
refers to oral sexual activity of a physical kind.  But what about that "fancy prose style" on 
which a murderer's readers can always count?   The novel begins with an oral how-to that recalls 
pronunciation exercises (“Please take out your mirrors, girls, and see what happens inside your 
mouths”) or something else, and the number of chapters in Lolita is probably significant in this 
regard, too.

We might focus on other aspects of what Nabokov does in this passage.   These are things  he might 
have pointed too if he had been teaching Lolita and it was someone else's novel.  The theme of 
wind, breath, inspiration that runs through much of his work (Windmuller in Lolita, 
veter-iniarians in Despair inter alia as Sergei Davydov has pointed out).  Souffler is part of 
that motif.  Another topic is the silencing of Lolita -- here is another place where Humbert 
screens her speech from the reader, while at the same time indicating that it is speech we 
wouldn't want to hear.  How horribly disingenuous.  After all, whose fault is it that her world 
has been "just one gag after another?"

Eric Naiman
> 

Eric Naiman
Chair, Department of Comparative Literature
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2580

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