Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee

two long sessions—two gulps, as it were.
    You told me last November that there would be incest in your next book, but I didn’t appreciate—given the added complication you introduce, namely the question Where does the act of incest take place, in the bed or in the mind or in the writing? —how close to the heart of the book incest would be.
    It’s an interesting subject, incest, one to which I have not given much conscious thought until now (how would one dare to deny, post Freud, that one has not given it unconscious thought?). It strikes me as curious that, even in the popular tongue, we use the same denomination for sex between brother and sister as for sex between father and daughter or mother and son (let’s put aside the various homosexual combinations for the moment). It’s hard to experience the same frisson of repugnance about the first as about the latter two. I don’t have a sister, but I find it all too easy to imagine how alluring sex games might be to a brother and a sister of more or less the same age—sex games proceeding to more than sex games, as in your book. Whereas sex with one’s own offspring must seem quite a step to take. I would have thought we would have developed different terms for two very different moral acts.
    There was a case last year in rural South Australia in which a father-daughter couple who had been living for decades as man and wife in fairly isolated circumstances were prosecuted. I don’t remember all the details, but the court ordered that they be separated, the father/husband being enjoined not to come anywhere near his daughter/wife under threat of a jail term. It seemed to me a cruel punishment, given that the complaint had come not from either of the partners but from neighbors.
    Having sex with one’s parents or children must be just about the last sexual taboo that survives in our society. (I confidently predict that Invisible will not be greeted with howls of outrage, confirming my sense that brother-sister sex is OK, at least to talk about and write about.) We have come a long way from societies divided into castes within which sexual relations had to be confined. I suppose that the arrival of easy contraception marked the demise of sexual taboos: the bugaboo that the woman might give birth to a monster lost its force.
    Not enough attention has been given, I think, to the role that the lore of animal husbandry played in the creation of sexual and racial taboos—lore dictating what species might be allowed to mate with what other species, or within a bloodline how many degrees of separation there had to be, evolved in the course of hundreds of generations of stock raising.
    Anyway, today pretty much everything seems to go. The righteous fury that used to be able to play over a whole range of tabooed sex acts (including adultery!) has been focused on a single act, namely grown men having sex with children, which is, I suppose, our way of extending the coverage of the father-child taboo.
    Interesting that when in benighted corners of the world (most notably benighted corners of the Muslim world) adulterous couples are punished, we criticize the law that punishes them for ignoring their human rights. What kind of world are we living in in which it is our right to break a taboo? What is the point of having a taboo (your Byronic Adam Walker might ask) if it is OK to violate it?
All the best,
John

April 25, 2009
    Dear John,
    So happy that Invisible reached you and that you have consumed it so quickly.
    No, I haven’t given much conscious thought to the subject of incest either—at least not until I wrote the novel. Unlike you, I do have a sister, but she is nearly four years younger than I am, and the thought of going down that road with her never once crossed my mind. On the other hand, when I was eighteen or nineteen, I dreamed one night that I was making love to my mother. The dream baffled me then and continues to baffle me today, since it seems to demolish the