Rachel Trousdale: If you're interested, I wrote a brief
note on this subject a few Nabokovians ago: "Incest and Intertext: Mansfield
Park In Ada." Nabokovian 61 (2008): 48-52. I missed the
ha-ha connection, though! [A.P:"It is no coincidence that 21st century
awareness of the pervasive sexual subtext in Austen's novels was triggered by
the notoriety of an article (later expanded into a book) by Prof. Jill Heydt
Stevenson entitled "Slipping into the Ha-Ha: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in
Jane Austen's Novels" in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 55, No. 3
(Dec.,2000), pp. 309-339 ]
JM: What a marvellous opportunity to be directed to
Trousdale's "Incest and Intertext...," in The Nabokovian, after
Alexei's initial push towards Brian Boyd's "ha-ha" and their ramifications and
overinterpretations. Rachel Trousdale's text is an example
of elegant scholarly discipline, when it respects
both writers and readers by accepting the boundaries, even those of
a horticultural ha-ha, that help to establish different critical
apparatuses, and the sceneries they provide, in their own
right. She successfully evaluates Nabokov's allusion to Jane
Austen and his critique of literary allusions and of "the
inward turning of literary traditions"*. (Thank you for having extended
your invitation to the N-List!)
Opening lines:"In his notes to Ada, Brian Boyd identifies a series
of references to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814). Some of these
references are direct (...);some less direct(...); and some quite covert:
Marina's warning to Van that "cousinage dangereux voisinage" (232)
echoes Sir Thomas Bertram's concern early in Mansfield Park (...)
Nabokov, who taught Manfield Park in his European literature course at
Cornell, clearly treats the love of Fanny Price for her cousin Edmund as a
precedent for Ada's story of a love between cousin/siblings. But what kind of a
precedent is it?"
Closing lines: "Readers will see through this move, however, since
unlike Fanny and Edmund, Van and Ada really are brother and sister. Instead of
legitimizing their relationship, then, the allusions to Austen undermine Van's
argument for the sublimity of his love for Ada. More peculiarly, through its
overt and somewhat awkward insertion into the text, the Austen theme links the
notion of incest to literary allusion itself (Don Barton Johnson notes similar
linkings of incest to allusion in Ada's treatment of Byron,
Chateaubriand, and Pushkin.[...] Van and Ada's treatment of Mansfield
Park as providing both a setting and a precedent for their romance seems to
suggest that literary allusions, too, can be a dangereux voisinage,
rendered both attractive and perilous - and possibly sterile - by virtue of
their familiarity. Manfield's Park privileging of the familiar
over the new love becomes, in Ada, a hidden critique both of the
protagonists and of the inward turning of literary traditions."
...................................................................
* - It is my impression that, at present, some of
the critical or literary uses of psychoanalytic
ideas fail to distinguish a writer's perverse fantasies
- as they are legitimately cultivated in his literary work
in the light of different cultural mores and censorship - from the
pathological acting out of these same fantasies (should that
happen as it does in an overinterpretation) to better distort
or corrupt a readers's views and as a critic's way to
assert an assumed authority over
divergent opinions.