-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] [Thoughts] Art's higher level - comments related to Matt Roth's post
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 08:10:29 +0200
From: <Maurice.COUTURIER@unice.fr>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>


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In response to Matt's question about incest, may I quote a brief passage of my forthcoming "Nabokov's Eros" (there is plenty more on the subject in my book)? "To an interviewer who had asked him if incest was "one of the possible roads to happiness", Nabokov answered: "If I had used incest for the purpose of representing a possible road to happiness or misfortune, I would have been a best-selling didactician dealing in general ideas. Actually I don't give a damn for incest one way or another. I merely like the 'bl' sound in siblings, bloom, blue, bliss, sable." It is true that the poetry of the novel transcends its transgressive implications. Yet, there is a touch of bad faith in his statement: he does care about incest, and his narrator-protagonist does, too. The story told in this novel would not have the same mythopoeic significance if Van and Ada were simply cousins or neighbors. The interdict lends an additional aura to this idyll. Many of the love stories told in modern novels owe a great deal of their intensity and literary value to the fact that the characters are transgressing an interdict, rape (Clarissa), adultery (Madame Bovary), pedophilia (Lolita), or incest like here."

Maurice Couturier

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