‘The word is incest’:1 Narrative, affect and judgement in and across the Lolitas

Through intertext, adaptation, nominative re-births and epiphanies, Lolita (1955) enacts a kind of incestuous narcissism, a self-consuming act of libidinality and linguistic desire that offers a fantasy of self-exculpation and discovery, a narrative of abuse and trauma, and a meta-fiction that revels in the performative perversions its characters suffer from. Each part of the novel is born of an incestuous relationship with an earlier (part of the) text, every subsequent re-statement of Lolita carries this textual-familial weight.This essay frames an analysis of the novel and its two filmic daughters in the light of these three strands: a realist fantasy of a man’s maniac relationship with a girl who becomes his daughter and sexual partner; his ‘confession’, her distorted trauma tale; the various formal, stylistic, intertextual “incests” that stand in dizzying juxtaposition to the ‘ethical impact’ assigned to it by the pre-facing John Ray Jr.

‘Waking in the dark’:1 Remembering incest in A Thousand Acres (1991), Exposure (1993) and Beautiful Kate (2009)

During the 1990s, such inherent difficulties in recalling and expressing abuse were heightened by the so-called ‘Memory Wars’, as the Recovered Memory Movement (which advocated the validity of women’s rediscovered recollections of trauma) conflicted with the theories of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (which maintained the tendency for (misguided) therapists to implant experiences in their (generally female) patients’ minds). Working within this often volatile critical context, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) and Kathryn Harrison’s Exposure (1993), together with Rachel Ward’s film version of Newton Thornburg’s Beautiful Kate (2009), embody the tense interplay between the ‘real’ and the reconstructed that characterises debates about incest and memory. All three texts engage with the ambiguities associated with recounting incest, not least through their status as fictions-as fabrications. Recalling and reworking the very notion of False Memory Syndrome, Smiley and Harrison reclaim and rewrite male-authored stories, implanting them with the perspectives of subjugated daughters. However, over a decade later, Rachel Ward’s Beautiful Kate presents something of a turning point, as this critically-acclaimed film marries explicitness and artistry, and, in doing so, confronts openly the memory of incest.

Assuming a ‘manly position’:1 The crisis of masculinity in Ian McEwan’s early fiction

Ian McEwan’s early fiction delves into the dark drives and desires of ordinary men and women, revealing disturbing realities about the human psyche. McEwan’s psychological probing of deeply disturbed characters reveals how it is often the mundane feelings of inadequacy or failure that compel seemingly ‘normal’ people to commit horrific acts of sexual violence. Within selected short stories in First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), and his first novel The Cement Garden (1978), McEwan horrifies his audience by representing insidious evils that occur through the actions and in the minds of seemingly ordinary men. Reading McEwan’s portrayals of ‘manliness’ is shocking and disturbing not only in his portrayals of rape and incest, but also in the seemingly normal occurrence of sadomasochism, produced and supported by traditional gender relationships.

Appropriate or anathema? The representation of incest in children’s literature

The chapter draws attention to the extreme unspeakability of incest in children’s literature and the rarity of texts either literally or symbolically dealing with the topic. It analyses Crew and Scott’s picture story book, In My Father’s Room (2000), in terms of the Bluebeard fairy tale, with close attention to ways of seeing and being seen. This disturbing text (marketed as a book for young children) plays a father’s love for his daughter, manifested in his secret story-writing, against the Bluebeard story of secrecy, multiple sexual partners and murder. The boundaries of the unspeakable in literature for children have changed markedly in the post-war era, particularly in terms of problem novels for a young adult readership; but picture story books for younger readers remain almost uniformly committed to a depiction of the loving nuclear family with mother, father and child or children, where childhood naughtiness is the worst evil that can be encountered; incestuous behaviours by a father are barely mentionable and the incestuous mother unthinkable.

‘Our close but prohibited union’: Sibling incest, class and national identity in Iain Banks’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007)

The work of Iain Banks has been prominent in exploring the crossing of different kind of borders: national, aesthetic and generic, ontological, gender and class to name but a few. Banks has also been part of a wider preoccupation in contemporary Scottish writing to do with inhabiting border zones, where the border ceases to be an idealised geometric line with almost no width or physical extension, and instead broadens to become a site that one can reside in, the ground against which the figure emerges. The Bridge, along with The Crow Road (1992) forms the background of the chapter. This chapter will illuminate how The Steep Approach to Garbadale’s continuation of and departure from the border explorations and reflections on national identity of his earlier books is rendered through the crucial deployment of the motif of sibling incest in the novel.

‘[T]he thing that makes us different from other people’:1 Narrating incest through ‘différance’ in the work of Angela Carter, A.S. Byatt and Doris Lessing

Using Carter’s textual relationship with Saussure and Derrida as a starting point, this chapter will examine the writing of two other “literary” female authors and their narratological engagement with incest and difference with regard to Derridean différance. This will include a discussion of A.S. Byatt’s writing of incest and the assertion of familial class difference in Morpho Eugenia (1992). Similarly in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), there is also a social and cultural hierarchy of difference, which is expressed through the telling of incest. By linking the difference of both the incestuous and the separateness of the notebooks a reading of transcription will suggest that incest does not only fill the abject space but comes perilously closer to home.

‘Is’t not a kind of incest?’1 Metaphor and relation in the poetry of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

In his selections for Tales from Ovid (1995) Hughes includes several incest narratives: ‘Myrrha’, ‘Venus and Adonis (and Atalanta)’, ‘Pygmalion’, and ‘Tereus’. In arguing that they, in addition to other ‘late’ Hughes poems, develop dialogic relationships with Plath’s earlier texts, the chapter builds upon Lynda K. Bundtzen’s observation that Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) is centrally informed by Ovid’s tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. Analysing the self reflexiveness of aspects of Ovidian narrative, Philip Hardie has commented upon the ‘narcissistic and incestuous relationship between author and his book.’ The complexities that Hardie outlines in Ovid’s relationship with text are extended in the chaoter to consider the relationships of the two poets, Plath and Hughes, with their own and each other’s texts. In the process of pursuing this idea across key poems by Plath and Hughes, the chapter further explores ways in which Ovidian mythology is transformed not only through translation but also through its proper and improper relation with other mythologisations and metaphorisations. These range from the Garden of Eden, and different versions of the Underworld, and return us to Shakespeare.

The desire for power and the power of desire: The case of Pier Paolo Pasolini

This chapter focuses on Pasolini’s film Edipe Re (1967), his love poem to his mother, and his play “Affabulacione” (1966). The latter is concerned with a father who turns into a jealous lover of his son. He is so possessive of his son that he ends up killing the son. A reversal of Oedipus and Sophocles’ ghost is a key character in the play. Thus “Affublacione” or “Fabrications” problematizes incest as a gay reversal of the Oedipus complex. The crucial point is that the reversal of Oedipus in Pasolini’s play “Affabulacione” is Oedipal too: it is premised on the desire for power and the power of desire. Art and psychoanalysis here meet politics. The political aspect of mental life and its deceptive representations are also pertinent for a better understanding of Pasolini’s early films. “Mamma Roma” (1962) and Accatone (1961).

Is posthuman incest possible? Science fiction and the futures of the body

In evaluating the interplay of biological and social interpretations of the incest taboo, most literary commentaries have used fiction to show how notions of incest have changed historically through the variable of culture; in these accounts, the biological body remains a constant, whilst society adapts its parameters for what counts as incest. However, science fiction introduces material embodiment itself as a variable, as it hypothesises bodies that can be altered (e.g. through genetics) or even eliminated (e.g. through virtualising the mind via a computer). Through comparing three science fiction novels, this chapter evaluates whether such changing types of embodiment will also change the way in which society approaches the incest taboo, or even remove it entirely.

‘[B]orn to make a real life, however it cracks your heart’:1 Creative women and daydreaming in Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (2008)

Since its release in 2008 as a Young Adult (YA) text, Tender Morsels has been subject to widespread praise and censure. In reviews and reading groups it has been criticised by adults (including educators), as well its target audience of fourteen plus readers, for containing circumstances too challenging and traumatic for young readers; and with incestuous sexual abuse and gang rape in the first few pages it is easy to see why that has been the case. By juxtaposing the dominant psychoanalytic theories of literary criticism, with the fairytale retellings by feminist authors from the 1970s to the present time, as well as key second wave feminist texts like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975), this novel can be seen to not only challenge the prevalence of a ‘real’ feminism in our literary criticism, but also in the Western world at large.