John Morris: "The discussion about "inventing" the word nymphet, prompted by the interview unearthed by Maurice Couturier, is very interesting.  Even more interesting to me, however, is VN's answer to the question about whether Lolita is a "violent satire" of America.  He replies:  "Maybe. But it is a mock-up America and I could have assembled another one. I created an America I like, strange, amusing, and I arranged for my characters to wander around its gardens and mountains, which I imitated or rather invented." This is the clearest statement I can recall seeing from VN about the relative "realism" of Lolita's America...Like every setting he ever used in his fiction, "the United States" is an invention, indeed "strange" and "amusing" but -- to use another of VN's favorite notions -- a fairy tale.

 

JM: I once read that the movie "Lolita" was not filmed in America, but in sets installed in England (Kubrick didn't like to travel much). The word "invention" popped up also in the sentence John Morris quoted. I understand it to mean a philosophical attitude towards everything we perceive and register, not as a realistic appraisal that Nabokov's America (in Lolita) would simply represent some sort of fairy-tale. JFK's "Camelot" was simultaneously real and fake, must to cite one example that initially was not entirely hollywoodesque (sometimes the real face of a country appears somewhere else in the world, like Dorian Gray's painting he kept in the attic-room).