Brian Boyd:
"I must say I hadn't thought of ADA in the terms Joseph
Aisenberg mentions (in his previous post) about the stereotyped bad girl (with
Gothic pallor) / good girl (with healthy glow) structure of romantic and
melodramatic fiction. But it seems entirely plausible..."
J.Aisenberg: ... Do you mean that you don't
understand how my way of reading the book fits with the notion that "Lucette was
the only taboo he [Van] could respect in his dissolute life"? Let me put what I
meant a different way. First remove the fact Ada, Van and Lucette are
siblings ...
JM: I had originally
disagreed with Aisenberg's "remove the fact that they are siblings," but I found
there is an interpretation that might allow the reader to forget those
genetic bonds. It derives from a statement once made by VN ( and
explored by Don B. Johnson in one of his chapters of "Worlds in Regression")
indicating that the sound of "bl" ( in "siblings") was agreeable to his ears,
conjuring away blood-bonds into gaping phonemes.
Perhaps Ada-Lucette-Van constituted a
verbal family sired by VN's fiery loins, so there would be no taboo for any
traditional mating scheme.
btw: in a former posting I quoted V in
RLSK ( "I cannot even copy his manner because the manner of his prose was the
manner of his thinking and that was a dazzling succession of gaps") and the iteration of "manner" sugested to me, soundwise, the
German plural for "Man" ( ie, "Männer"), but this idiosyncratic reading
most probably was not intended by
VN.