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

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 44: Pressure. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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PROBLEMATIC IS A WORD currently deployed rather in the way, in Victorian times, cloths were draped over naked statues. When we designate a person, or an event, or a text problematic, we simultaneously indicate its impropriety and choose, politely, to gloss over the details. Signifying disapproval, the word, in its delicate obfuscation, relieves us of the need to specify exactly what disturbs us. As it deflects, it reflects our incuriosity, and the presumed incuriosity of our interlocutors: you need not pay attention, we suggest, because problematic is all you need to know.

At 70, Vladimir Nabokov’s most famous book, Lolita, is decidedly problematic. It is, after all, a novel narrated by a pedophile, kidnapper, and rapist (also, lest we forget, murderer) who tells his story from prison, who relates his crimes with a pyrotechnic verbal exhilaration that is tantamount to glee, who seduces each reader into complicity simply through the act of reading: to read the novel to the end is to have succumbed to Humbert Humbert’s insidious, sullying charms. Framed by the banal platitudes of John Ray Jr., the fictional psychologist whose foreword introduces the account (“‘Lolita’ should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world”), Humbert’s exuberant voice seduces the reader, even as so many of the novel’s characters are foolishly, sometimes fatally, seduced. What are we doing, when we read this book with such pleasure? What was Nabokov doing, in writing this unsettling novel?

That the book is problematic—even deeply so—seems hardly worth saying, not least because it’s old news. Lolita caused scandal before it was widely available—completed in 1953, first published in France by Olympia in 1955, the novel’s appearance was delayed in the United States, and still longer in the United Kingdom. From late 1956 to January 1958, it was banned in France, and again in July 1958, as it was about to appear at last in the US, its distribution was restricted in France to people over 18. Upon its US publication in August 1958, the novel was hailed by Elizabeth Janeway in The New York Times Book Review as “one of the funniest and one of the saddest books that will be published this year.” She continued: “As for its pornographic content, I can think of few volumes more likely to quench the flames of lust than this exact and immediate description of its consequences.” But only a day later, in the daily New York Times, Orville Prescott, the paper’s main literary critic, proclaimed:

“Lolita,” then, is undeniably news in the world of books. Unfortunately, it is bad news. There are two equally serious reasons why it isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention. The first is that it is dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion. The second is that it is repulsive […] highbrow pornography.

Of the proximate appearance of these two differing reviews, Lolita’s publisher at Putnam, Walter Minton, excitedly wired Nabokov: “Everybody talking of Lolita on publication day yesterdays review magnificent and NYTimes blast this morning provided necessary fuel to flame 300 reorders this morning and book stores report excellent demand congratulations.” Within weeks, the book had sold 100,000 copies; it remained on the bestseller list for two years.

Controversy thus surrounded the novel from the beginning, and has ever since. In his afterword, Nabokov scoffs at responses that he deems inane:

Although everybody should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader […] described Lolita as “Old Europe debauching young America,” while another […] saw in it “Young America debauching old Europe.”

Such readings sought, of course, to render metaphorical the actual abuse of which Humbert Humbert—and his double, Clarence Quilty—are guilty; and, in so doing, to draw a gauzy veil, if not an opaque Victorian cloth, over the pedophiles’ actions. In reality, the novel is direct and concrete about Humbert’s crimes, as Caitlin Flanagan has noted:

I always forget how direct the novel is about the crimes at its center. All of that ugliness was hidden, we tell ourselves each time we close its pages, covered in Nabokov’s exquisite language. But then, at some remove of years, we pick up the book once again and discover what frauds we’ve been.

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According to Nabokov’s biographer Brian Boyd, Lolita’s creator was frankly appalled by the flippant reactions of many readers:

He was quite shocked when a little girl of 8 or 9 came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita. Before the novel’s publication, he had insisted to Minton that there be no little girl on the book’s cover, and now as a “Lolita” movie looked more and more possible, he warned Minton that he “would veto the use of a real child. 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.”

Were Lolita to be published now for the first time, it would be tempting to experience it, indeed, as “topical trash,” fiction conceived in direct response to news headlines and contemporary societal ills. Over the past decade, thanks to the #MeToo movement, many women’s experiences of sexual exploitation have come to light—instances from private life, of course, and most famously instances from the realms of modeling and acting: Harvey Weinstein may have preyed chiefly upon adults, but the French actress Judith Godrèche reports having been sexually assaulted at age 14; her compatriot Adèle Haenel at age 12. 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. In the same year, the world was appalled and riveted by the trial in France of Dominique Pelicot, found guilty along with 50 other men of repeatedly raping his ex-wife, Gisèle Pelicot, whom he drugged and abused for years. To reread Lolita is to recall with horror that this, too, is a part of Humbert’s fantasy: he wishes to drug mother and daughter both, so as to have his way with young Dolores (“I saw myself administering a powerful sleeping potion to both mother and daughter so as to fondle the latter through the night with perfect impunity”). Indeed, soon after Charlotte Haze’s death, on his first night with Lolita at the Enchanted Hunters hotel—on the very night he first unwittingly encounters Quilty—Humbert drugs her, albeit unsuccessfully, in hopes of intercourse with her inert body. (This failure, it transpires, is due to the pharmacist’s suspicions: while many around Humbert either misread the situation or prove eager incuriously to avert their eyes, certain minor characters in this story pay closer attention than we first think.)

The real world around us, 70 years after Lolita’s publication, unsettlingly resembles that of Humbert’s account, one in which men are psychotically obsessed with women (or girls, in his case) whose human reality is all but obliterated by their projected fantasy. As Leland de la Durantaye, in his 2006 essay “Lolita in Lolita, or the Garden, the Gate and the Critics,” observes of the early scene where Humbert masturbates underneath an oblivious Lolita in the Haze living room, Humbert has superimposed upon the actual girl before him an imaginary, “solipsized” Lolita: “External reality plays of course a role in the attainment of this pleasure, but it is a reality made passionate by being made passive to imaginative construction and creation.” Humbert, that is to say, is quite happy to invent his reality, to invent his own Lolita, and for the actual embodied girl to serve essentially as a stand-in for his fantasy. His intermittent, growing awareness of his terrible harm (she “said she could not sit, said I had torn something inside her” ; or “I held her quite hard and in fact hurt her rather badly […] and all the while she stared at me with those unforgettable eyes where cold anger and hot tears struggled” ; or her “sobs in the night—every night, every night—the moment I feigned sleep”) only serves to reinforce the intensity of his erotic projection and the degree to which he is able to ignore and override the concrete facts before him.

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We now know clearly, thanks to Sarah Weinman’s 2018 book The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World, that Nabokov was aware, when writing, of the actual two-year kidnapping of 11-year-old Sally Horner by Frank La Salle, in 1948—a real event mirrored in his fiction. Lolita might thus have been construed, even then, as some version of “topical trash.” We must also recognize (as in the cases of Andrea Skinner in the 1970s, or of Elizabeth Smart in the early 2000s) that human nature has not changed and is alas unlikely to: in the United States in 2023, 1,408 child pornography cases were brought against individuals. Arguably, we confront more openly now the realities around us, but they are not, in kind, different from those in the 1940s and 1950s: the world in which Lolita was simultaneously scandalous and powerfully compelling remains unchanged.

One way or another, we manage our uneasiness by deflecting and denying. We can simply describe the novel as problematic and turn away. 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:

A patch of beautifully eroded clay; and yucca blossoms, so pure, so waxy, but lousy with creeping white flies. Independence, Missouri, the starting point of the Old Oregon Trail; and Abilene, Kansas, the home of the Wild Bill Something Rodeo. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains; bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into inhabited hill after hill; south-eastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go; heart and sky-piercing snow-veined gray colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere at a turn of the highway; timbered enormities, with a system of neatly overlapping dark firs, interrupted in places by pale puffs of aspen; pink and lilac formations, Pharaonic, phallic, “too prehistoric for words” (blasé Lo); buttes of black lava; early spring mountains with young-elephant lanugo along their spines; end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain with a rich rug of lucerne at its foot.

Is this spectacular jazz, then, a concrete example of Nabokov’s exhortation to “aesthetic bliss”—the opposite of “topical trash” with its tedious didacticism? If so—this paragraph is but one among dozens similarly thrilling, and Humbert’s verbal play repeatedly the seduction that rivets us—could Nabokov’s invitation not be taken to entail an almost amoral detachment from referential significance, an unsettling insistence upon Huysmanian aestheticism? Does Nabokov want us to abandon reference to the external world in favor of a sort of untethered play in the realm of language? The case has certainly been argued. At the risk of falling into Nabokov’s slippery absurdist trap (the author passionately resistant, as aforementioned, to symbolism and analysis)—whereby, in seeking to elucidate and thereby exculpate him as author, I seek, in his eyes, ultimately chiefly to exculpate myself—this reader experiences Nabokov’s exhortation differently. I experience it as, if you will, a moral exhortation that doesn’t fall into conventional morality: an exhortation, that is to say, to transcend convention.

Most of the parenthetical terms with which Nabokov defines “art”—that state to which he intends to transport his readers—are hardly amoral. “Ecstasy,” to be sure, has little inherent connection to ethics; but “kindness” is widely understood to be a moral good, and “tenderness” its less robust relation, potentially interpreted as weakness but indicative of an open heart, the open heart that precisely enables kindness. Nabokov’s first and perhaps most abiding call, though, is to “curiosity.” The philosopher Richard Rorty, in his celebrated 1988 essay “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty,” describes “incuriosity” as the “particular form of cruelty about which Nabokov worried most.” Rorty’s reading of Lolita hinges on the novel’s lone long sentence about the Kasbeam barber, of whom Nabokov writes, in his afterword, that he “cost me a month of work.” Humbert, recalling said barber, describes him nattering at length about his son during Humbert’s haircut, while Humbert signally fails to grasp the essential fact that the boy has been dead for 30 years. Rorty notes Humbert’s “inattentiveness to anything irrelevant to his own obsession—and his consequent inability to attain a state of being in which ‘art,’ as Nabokov has defined it, is the norm.” The artistic state of being, then, is precisely selfless, a capacity to step beyond one’s own experience: this is Humbert’s egregious limitation, the flaw that enables his crimes. Rorty suggests that the Kasbeam barber evokes, in the reader, an apprehension of our own inattentiveness:

Suddenly Lolita does have a “moral in tow.” But the moral is not to keep one’s hands off little girls but to notice what one is doing, and in particular to notice what people are saying. For it might turn out, it very often does turn out, that people are trying to tell you that they are suffering.

Lolita seduces us with language, and insists, in the intense pleasure of its verbal play, on being read. Whether we pay attention to what Humbert is actually saying is, of course, up to each reader. To turn away from the novel without reading it—to hide the book, and spare ourselves, with the problematic veil—bespeaks a dangerous, even immoral, incuriosity. To insist upon our own projected vision—to “solipsize” Lolita and Humbert both, if you will, or to reduce them to symbols or types, or more broadly to read without rigorous attention to the finer details of the text; to be shoddy, inadequate readers—is equally to be condemned.

As a character comments in Nabokov’s early novel Bend Sinister (1947), “curiosity […] is insubordination in its purest form.” Such insubordination is, and perhaps not only in a Nabokovian universe, the beginning of hope: it’s a refusal to accept the limitations of the known; it’s an openness to the real, to whatever that may be and however uncomfortable we may find it. When we read Lolita with our eyes open, we experience perforce multiple emotions, often simultaneously. We can’t help but recognize this known world, our familiar fallen humanity—terrible, hilarious, beautiful, absurd, monstrous and tragic. Who doesn’t wish to shape the world according to our fantasy? And yet, Nabokov suggests, each of us must learn the evil consequences of such desire. Humbert, at 70, remains unspeakable but as meaningfully speaking as ever. His story and Lolita’s fate resonate beyond topical trash, beyond the hollow problematic, in an overdetermined ecstasis (in its original Greek sense: standing outside oneself). Painfully, paradoxically, in this powerfully uncomfortable place, curiosity proves at once our key to the sublime and our moral compass.