-------- Original Message --------
----------------- ------------------
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