An Interview with Maurice Couturier
- An Interview with Maurice Couturier
Note: This much overdue interview is the first in the series of Nabokov Studies interviews wuth pioneering Nabokovian scholars. It serves as a preface to Prof. Couturier's FORUM piece, and it took place on November 20, 2017, at Centre Commercial CAP 3000, 66 promenade Jacques Yves Cousteau, 06700 Saint-Laurent-du-Var, France.
The first question is always going to be "How did you end up becoming a Nabokov scholar?"
It's fairly easy to explain. When I started to teach, I followed an MA correspondence course with a professor at the Sorbonne, André Le Vot [repeats name], in which the set books were The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne Booth, The Sound and the Fury and Pale Fire. Good books. Very good choice.
What year was that?
I followed this course in '69. And that was the first time I heard of Nabokov. And then in 1970, I went back to the states, to the University of Notre Dame. When I visited the Notre Dame bookstore, I found The Annotated Lolita which had just come out. So, I bought it. That should have been September 1970. And I soon bought Ada through the Book of the Month Club. That's how I really discovered Nabokov and really fell in love with him. At the same time, I was doing another dissertation – there were two types of dissertations in France the short one and the long one. Now there is only one. The short one I was doing was on a Wisconsin writer that you probably have never heard of though she got the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, Zona Gale. She was a good friend of Bob La Follette and Eleanor Roosevelt. I wrote this dissertation at Notre Dame, from '70 to '72, while also researching Nabokov's work. When I came back from the States, I defended my dissertation on Zona Gale, took the "Agrégation," a very competitive exam, and was appointed at the Sorbonne where I continued to work on Nabokov. I had chosen as research director André Le Vot, a marvelous man to whom I am very grateful; he wasn't totally convinced by my structuralist approach yet backed me all the way. I took the liberty of staging him in my first novel, La Polka piquée, one of the first global campus novels by the way, but under an anagram, René Tadlov. My good friend Malcolm Bradbury listed Tadlov in the bibliography of a clever little book, My Strange Quest for Mensonge. Needing my permission, Malcolm arranged to meet me in Brittany where he was vacationing with David Lodge. That was also the beginning of my long friendship with David whose autobiography I am currently translating. Sorry for this digression.
And how does Ronald Barthes end up on your thesis committee?
An American friend of mine, Harry Blake, a draft dodger, had done some work for Barthes and Foucault as a translator. He managed to help me get an appointment with Roland Barthes at L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, and I had no difficulty, curiously, to make Barthes agree to sit on the panel of my Doctoral Defense. What were his reasons? Nabokov? I still wonder if he had ever read him. My structuralist approach? Perhaps. My friendship with one of his probable lovers? Perhaps again. More likely, his desire to set foot again at the Sorbonne where he had long been persona non grata. I found out a few weeks before the defense that he had lost the copy of my dissertation, so I sent him another one. And on the day of the defense, 23rd of October 76, we had to wait for him at the Sorbonne for at least fifteen minutes. He arrived at 2:15. The defense took place in the Louis Liar amphitheater, a kind of chapel with portraits of seventeenth century writers on the walls; it was full on this occasion, because of Roland Barthes' presence probably. He had read only part of my dissertation as I found out after he gave me back the second copy I had sent him and...
