Lolita, 9/16

“All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other's soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do. After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage. There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other's salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief.”(12)

In this scorching three sentence passage, Nabokov kicks things off with the use of sentence type #14, the prepositional phrase before the subject and verb, and follows it up with sentence type #4, a series without a conjunction, which lets him exercise his frequent desire to list the many odd ways in which he and Annabel were in love with each other. What follows the semicolon, “hopelessly,” though not technically a new sentence, seems to fall within the interrupting modifier between subject and verb sentence style, or at least that’s how it looks to me. Almost every time he isolates a part of a sentence by using parentheses, the sentence switches to interrupting modifier mode. For example, “After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later)…” displays how his parentheses, though seemingly supplemental, contain important contents from the future. It’s as if to say, quite conversationally, “Don’t you worry, you’ll hear all about it in time.”

The second half of his paragraph again features the prepositional phrase before the subject and verb, later combined with what I think looks like sentence type # 7 or 7a, the internal series of appositives or modifiers, or a single appositive or pair. He uses prepositional phrases to qualify much of the actual action that occurs in this passage, and all through a long winded sentences, carefully punctuated with semicolons to the point when it becomes too easy to forget that the whole thing was ever just one big fat sentence to begin with. His sentence styles vary for the remainder of the passage, but together offer an extended, twisted, meandering effect.

This particular passage doesn’t offer the relief of an occasional, ironically placed short sentence (unlike other moments in the first few pages), but it’s interesting to consider that, in describing the height of his passion with Annabel, he chooses to draw out his description and pile on as much detail, physical and emotional, as he could comfortably compress into three sentences. His consistent use of alliteration throughout, while always lovely to the eyes and ears, has even greater rhythmic qualities in this passage. I especially like his use of “p” words, like “populous part of the plage” and “petrified paroxysm.” There’s something very sensuous and intense about the harsh PUH sound, especially when in sequence. His use of “h” words like in “her hand, half-hidden in the sand” contrarily have a softer sound, quite befitting his softer, feminine subject matter.