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In Its Purest Form

Claire Messud reads “Lolita” on its 70th anniversary, in an essay from the LARB Quarterly, issue no. 44, “Pressure.”

Let them find a dwarfess.” Over decades—for Lolita is now a senior citizen—diverse brilliant analyses have sought to illuminate and explicate, to relieve us from our complicit readerly fallenness (hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère, to cite Baudelaire), and to cast the novel or its author as a complex moralist with pedagogical intent, even though Nabokov states, in no uncertain terms in his afterword, “I am neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction, and, despite John Ray’s assertion, Lolita has no moral in tow.” Rather, he insists, “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” Nabokov dismisses “all the rest” as “topical trash or what some call the Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash.” In 2024, the late Canadian writer Alice Munro’s youngest daughter Andrea Skinner came forward with her story of prolonged childhood sexual abuse by her stepfather, Gerald Fremlin, from the age of nine—and accounts of his depravity seem practically drawn from the pages of Lolita. Alternatively we can, as Caitlin Flanagan confesses she does (and as I, too, have done; as so many readers have done—as Humbert does when “solipsizing” Lolita), superimpose in memory our own imaginary, more sanitized version of the novel, repressing the acts that are explicit in the text, retaining instead Nabokov’s/Humbert’s nimble ironic wit (“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three”), and glorious verbal riffs:

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