So I’m 30 chapters through reading Nabokov’s Ada alongside Brian Boyd’s extensive annotations. It is quite heavy going, and I’m continuously grateful to BB for explaining all the numerous allusions, great and small, that otherwise would pass me by.
I’ll have a fuller appraisal up soon – in particular comparing Ada to Glory, which has lots of parallels I think to this section (Ardis the First) of the later work. In summary it’s still not really working for me. I’m surprised how much more I like the sections that appeal, but I’m also finding there are themes and whole chapters that plain aren’t working for me, even after they’ve been convincingly explained by Prof. Boyd.
Why can’t the whole book be as good as Ada’s real things, towers and bridges? It’s a well know mystery.
The structure of this first section is certainly impressive: I could even be persuaded that everything in part 1 is there for a purpose (whether that purpose is implemented in an artistically satisfying way is, of course, another question). A big problem is the length. I’m sort of saturated by Ada already, and it’s a little alarming I’m less than a third of the way through.
The length shows in another way too. A very curious thing about Ada is that, according to Dieter Zimmer’s chronology of Nabokov’s whereabouts, the bulk of Ada (excluding the Texture of Time section which somewhat stands along) was written in just under a year. This is an extraordinary achievement for something so dense and allusive, and might explain why even Nabokov seems to get fatigued and make some odd mistakes. It’s testament to Boyd’s professionalism and empiricism that he doesn’t try to explain these away as intentional.
Anyway for now, and to aid my memory, here are my impressions of individual chapters.
- Chapter 1. Straight in with obsessive translation puns, French-English-Russian pile-ups, pastiches of the genealogy of family chronicles, Proust references, and too many places called Ladoga, Kaluga, etc. On top of that it has the notorious attic scene, where Van and Ada discover they are not cousins or half-siblings, but in fact fully brother and sister. It is essentially intentionally impenetrable. BB describes this as “the densest passage in Nabokov” and he’s not wrong. I do enjoy poor Aqua’s “nusshaus” which is actually quite touching. “Awkward. Reword!” indeed.
- Chapter 2. I rather like the first chapter as a cryptogram, but really Nabokov needed to dial it back in the rest of the prologue. I’ve found it hard to stand the chapters with Demon. There’s an interesting discussion to be had on the unpleasantness of the characters: and if VN despised Van Veen, he must really have hated his father and model. But beyond that the stylistic weaknesses of Ada seem fully emerge in his scenes. The Parmigianino business with Demon figuring out Marina is having an affair based on her resemblance to a secret painting is particularly frustrating: even once we have figured out all the allusions (or cribbed them from Boyd) it doesn’t make a bit of sense. As so often, we are left with the question: is it Van Veen who is writing unappealingly, or his maker?
- Chapter 3. Still super dense, but this details Terra and Aqua’s disintegration, and so is much more appealing. There actually seems a point to decoding all the references here, and the affect and the style work together. It’s quite moving: Aqua is an “eye-rolling toy”, and
Her disintegration went down a shaft of phases, every one more racking than the last; for the human brain can become the best torture house of all those it has invented, established and used in millions of years, in millions of lands, on millions of howling creatures.
is brilliant, Nabokov as we know him. As is the water madness and the dreams of the parallel planet, Terra, where “giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire continent”. At this point you realise VN really had something here, a fantastic novel half the size could have come out of this.
- Chapter 4. Unfortunately we then go right back into Curate’s Egg territory. While this chapter is a lot more readable, it feels very uneven, a bit of a medley of charming Nabokovian first-love and pretty unwholesome stuff about Van “coldly watching” rough orgies with his school dormitory’s “catamite” and enjoying a “fubsy pig-pink whorelet”. It’s not the ugliness or Van’s venality I object to, it’s the unclear purpose and the failure to gel with the more affecting stuff. Nabokov of the 50s would never been able to “coldly” relate such cruelty. BB makes a gallant case of its structural purpose in the world of the novel; but I don’t think really handles the larger question of whether this is all Van Veen’s work, and if VN’s “loathing” of his character extends to Van’s composition of these chapters.
- Chapter 5. Van arrives at Ardis and first meets Ada, Lucette and Marina (and the rest of the household). After the confusing changing-of-vehicles motif – a paradigm case of an effect that’s structurally explicable (BB does a fine job here) but functionally unrewarding – the style settles down a bit and this is a lot more enjoyable. I really like “still veiled by an odd air of remoteness that children, especially impish children, retain for some time after brushing through death” and the family atmosphere.
- Chapter 6. Quite a simple chapter, Van and Ada explore the house. Some fun stuff here, Ada summarily throwing a loose bureau knob out the window and Van losing patience with Ada’s precocity (“I’m going to scream, thought Van”). There’s also some fun with magic carpets – generally I get on well with the science fiction Antiterra stuff. The end of the chapter with the Andalusian architect is sort of fun but its purpose seems a mystery: while BB does a good job unearthing the references, he doesn’t get much further than it being a “Spanish theme” that points towards Don Juan and/or Borges. It’s this kind of stuff that can make Ada feel very baggy.
- Chapter 7. Another light chapter which works well I think. In contrast to Ch4, Van making a pass at Blanche definitely feels of a piece with the manorial setting, and she is such a fairytale composite anyway it feels much more directed. Equally, the absurd wealth and hyperabundance – Ada’s specially monogrammed silver spoon – take us further into this world.
- Chapter 8. Ada and Van explore the gardens and Ada’s larvarium. It’s in chapters like this when I start to believe Nabokov is close to pulling off his magic trick: the “super-imperial”, ridiculously precocious aristocratic sibling lovers who also manage to appear as real children and make their love affair touching (“your round-cheeked script, my love, was a little larger, but otherwise nothing, nothing, nothing has changed”). I like the roundlet game and Van’s irritation at Ada’s childishness. Unfortunately the effect is vitiated by the long lepidopterological diversion: inevitable really, but there’s a real problem with Nabokov himself becoming so visible through the text. It’s interesting to compare how subtly butterflies are dealt with in Pale Fire, where they are arguably more structurally important.
- Chapter 9 is pretty much an encomium to Ada’s charms. This is nicely done, and I enjoy the insinuation of the sibling’s similarity alongside the genuinely appealing description of Ada’s “serious eyes had the enigmatic opacity … retaining a crescent of white remained when she stared straight at you”. It’s the first pervy chapter as well, and this sits a bit oddly. On the one hand we have really psychologically acute observations, stuff like when Ada “an odd, dull, arrogant look passed across her face: her sunken cheeks and fat pale lips moved as if she were chewing something” when the “blind virgin” Van accidentally looks up her skirt (a “sickening miracle” which is very good). Then we have some quite frank sexual stuff, and of course Van isn’t a “virgin” of any description – he has been constantly over-sexed since early adolescence. More unreliable narration from Van? Or a failure to integrate these tones by the real author?
-
Chapter 10. Speaking of uneven, the next chapter is both stuffed with sexual double entendres and a nightmare of tangled references, both literary and botanical. BB picks them apart but I’m doubtful the effort is really worthwhile. In principle the scene is funny, with Ada trying to prevent her mother telling dull acting stories (and I do like “launch Ada upon the troubled waters of Botany Bay” and “mad scholar’s quiet smile”.). Of course this displays Van and Ada are a match for each other’s perspicacity and that they do, in fact, have the same reading lists. The precocity may be intended to be infuriating or intimidating if we accept Van as author: but Nabokov tips his hand here by settling scores in the world of literary translation. Why would Ada by so absorbed with this (rather than real botonizing, which is more thematic?). Why would Van choose to write about it 80 years later?
Also notable is that Lucette is completely absent. This is where Boyd’s main thesis of the novel starts to get into trouble I think: his afternotes subsequently foreground Lucette in every chapter. This is based on oblique references – such as just the mention of green or water. Lucette is even supposed to be “central to Ada’s translation theme” itself. Boyd asserts here that “above all it is Lucette who is excluded from the attic scene, as she is excluded from the dinner scene at Ardis, and yet is centrally implied in both”. Boyd is superb at winkling out evidence for the subtlest themes and most obscure references: but this is more than a stretch. If this was Nabokov’s intention, he dropped the ball here: while the shades of Hazel and Aunt Maud are veiled in Pale Fire, the signals are insistent and (with Boyd’s help) we can begin to see beyond them. Nabokov just seems distracted by his own literary life and translation. Ten years working on Eugene Onegin might have that effect. In linguistic matters, I don’t doubt he’s right – it’s just shoehorned into Ada. - Chapter 11. Then follows a pretty silly, light-handed chapter. The doggy farce and even Van’s abuse of Dan is quite funny – a linguistic dunce like me can find it amusing that the nominally Dutch Dan has to look up words like groote in a dictionary and “the simplicity of its meaning” annoying him. It does raise the question of why Van is so brutal about Dan: given Van controls the composition, even the narrational contempt is his. BB has an interesting point that maybe Dan isn’t such an idiot (durak) and Van has missed something Dan knows more about than him: art history, where “oystering” is a kind of veneer. I like this idea that Nabokov is defending Dan from behind Van’s pen – Dan’s only real crime seems to be his mediocrity – but it seems a little implausible.
- Chapter 12. An absolute beauty of a chapter. At this point I feel I’m starting to like the book. I think the passage on Ada’s philosophy of happiness, her “real things”, “towers” and “bridges” is the finest thing in the novel: an intense sensuality that actually makes us want to be like this “superimperial” couple (even if the point is to dislike them, they should be compelling, and not just sexually). Van’s being tormented by the vastness of space when sleeping outside in the hammock, and his haunting by his expired virtuoso violinist genius of an uncle (very reminiscent of The Defence) is terrific, and the entomological and literary games of the fireflies and Chateaubriand’s mosquito actually flow and are integrated with the whole, unlike the distracting mess in Ch10. Actually, even incidental parts of the chapter are wonderful:
“No animal will touch a person’s tongue. When a lion has finished a traveler, bones and all, he always leaves the man’s tongue lying like that in the desert” (making a negligent gesture).
“I doubt it.”
“It’s a well-known mystery.”
I mean come on! Nabokov the master is still with us. And how about the end of the chapter:
She said nothing. She licked her spread fingers, still looking at him. Van, getting no answer, left the balcony. Softly her tower crumbled in the sweet silent sun.
Why can’t the whole book be this good? It’s a well known mystery.
- Chapter 13. We’re really into the swing of things now. This is the birthday picnic, and I’m starting to enjoy the novel and find it beautiful and funny. It occurs to me that it really is quite depraved, and getting a taste to actually enjoy Ada may not be good for me. The lightness of touch in this chapter carries with it all sorts of aspects that are troublesome in other chapters: the density of information, the literary references, the sexuality, and Van and Ada’s cruelty. Ada telling the butler to refuse Dan’s grotesque present, “carry the whole thing to the surgical dump” is just the right note of petulance. Van’s handwalking is one of the successes of the novel, and we’re first treated to it here. In a real tour-de-force, Brian Boyd argues Van is channeling Aqua, who he believes to be his dead mother, here:
Van incorporates another death even more directly into this first picnic, not a death to come, but a death not all that long ago … he evokes in tribute the death of the woman he had mourned as a mother.
Ada wears a black lolita to her picnic in a pinewood; Aqua thinks with a laugh of the novel we know as Lolita when she sets aside a purple pill for her suicide, and wears a black bolero when she breaks from the picnic in a pinewood to write her suicide note and ingest that and all the other pills she has gathered. A succession of details in Aqua’s saccadic suicide note recurs in Van’s description of his hand-walking. She calls herself “I, this eye-rolling toy”; Van describes himself “opening his mouth the wrong way, and blinking in the odd bilboquet fashion peculiar to eyelids in his abnormal position.” In the paragraph that first introduces his hand-walking, Van reports the arrival of the Erminin children with their Aunt Ruth; their mother, Lady Erminin, has committed suicide, apparently because of the affair between her husband and her sister, just as Aqua commits suicide, ultimately, as a result of the affair between her husband, Demon, and her sister, Marina.
Aqua in her suicide note pictures the scene of her death, a “landparty” (German for “picnic”), in a “piney wood” with exactly the same squirrels, “Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park.” She also stresses the uncertainty of her stance: “chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let others know. . . . I . . . do not know where I stand. Hence I must fall.” Reporting his supreme performance as a brachiambulant, Van recalls the professional handwalker Vekchelo (a chelovek upside down), celebrates “the effortlessness of his [own] stance,” even when his body is reversed, “veering and sidestepping”—“one wondered if this dreamy indolence of levitation was not a result of the earth’s canceling its pull in a fit of absentminded benevolence”—and imagines the whole scene as laid out “under Lady Erminin’s blue eye,” as she looks “from the Persian blue of her abode of bliss” (81-2).
Brian Boyd, Annotations to Ch13 https://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/index.htm
Is Van summoning Aqua’s shade here? If so, to what purpose? Or again, is it Nabokov writing past his creature, Van Veen?
- Chapter 14. Another scene en famille. This is a low key chapter, and it’s the first where Lucette legitimately appears more prominently. I particularly like Ada’s dimissiveness of Greg Erminin (“It’s Greg’s beautiful new pony”) – though I suspect Greg may be the character I feel most sympathetic to in the whole novel – her bitchiness about Lucette’s eductation, and Marina’s conventional Russianess (and antisemitism). Van ploughing around with Lucette is clearly sexual, but is sweet enough to fly at this point.
-
Chapter 15. The Shattal tree. The next few chapters are progressively sexy stuff. This raises some curious questions that BB’s commentary throw into sharp relief. On the one hand Boyd does a wonderful job with explaining the details here – while we may infer a connection between the “Shattal” tree and the garden of Eden, without his gloss I never would have come up with Shatt al-Arab as the origin: the modern Arabic name of the tidal river formed by the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates, and hence the site of the biblical Mesopotamian Eden. On the other, I’m not sure Boyd ever really deals with what the function is of the sexy stuff (preferring to focus on Lucette: while the ardilla squirrels are certainly associated with her, otherwise she barely figures).
Ada is Nabokov’s most sex-obsessed book: Lolita is veiled and oblique by comparison. Are we supposed to find it erotic? That opens all sorts of troubling implications, given it should be obvious to almost all readers at this point that Van and Ada are full siblings, and they are young teenagers (if that). Is the prurience all Van’s, then – another example of his excesses unpleasant to the reader? It’s clear that Van (and Ada) mythologise this time – but we again have to wonder whether and why Nabokov has given complete control of his work to his creature, or if his own control over the material is wavering. - Chapter 16. A bit of a lull in the sexual progression, the cringing stealth. This has more of (and a pastiche of) a traditional romance, and so is more directly appealing and I’m happy to find it charming. Does contain some wanking, which alongside the amount of shitting in the novel is very different from past Nabokov. Some lovely stuff though: “Nature is motion and growth” may become my motto.
Everyone is fair game at Ardis hall
- Chapter 17. The kissing phase. It’s fairly anatomical from here on in: Van is right, it isn’t particularly healthy. “Each other’s raging bodies” is pure slash/fic – to the extent where Nabokov must be pulling our legs. But to what end? Maybe just prurience. This is one of the chapters where I take issue with Boyd’s characterisation of Lucette as unsexualised at Ardis: see the comparison of Ada and Lucette’s skin at every age (“lusterless whiteness” vs “golden bloom”). Everyone is fair game at Ardis hall. Boyd is excellent here on the comparisons to The Garden of Earthly Delights, and the Dionysian orgies of Bosch’s central panel. Maybe every one of Bosch’s strange figures was an allegory as well – but we knew what Nabokov thought of symbols. It’s definitely a distraction from the good stuff: “What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human, lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the seat of a taxi?” is pleasingly weird. And Chateaubriand’s mosquito and the refrain of “Mon enfant, ma soeur” is a poetic and entomological leitmotif that is actually moving.
- Chapter 18. Yep, more sex. Ada’s earlier sexual memories, including being felt up by a Gauguin-like artist (which apparently is just fine by Van). We are fairly into de Sade territory here, and I find it a little unedifying. Also contains description of “the shattering force of self-abuse” (its “philosophic” aspects!) which made me guffaw (you’re doing it wrong, Van!) but I don’t think is meant to be funny. There is some nice stuff, but it’s a minor note now and I struggle to integrate the two. I particularly like:
“But I was only twelve,” Ada would cry when some indelicate detail was brought up. “I was in my fifteenth year,” sadly said Van.
That “sadly” is perfect, and if Nabokov could have sustained that tone, we really would have something here. On the other hand, perhaps we have another possibility:
Ada: “We were abominably depraved, weren’t we?” Van: “All bright kids are depraved”.
If the depravity is what it’s actually about, Boyd is quite wrong about his moral thesis.
- Chapter 19. Burning barn (so, sex). Actually there is quite a bit of fun here with the household running out to the barn – I particularly like “she was fast ablaze”. Then it’s pretty full-on. The contrast between Ada’s childish “I wannask, I wannano” and her matter-of-fact comparing Van’s anatomy to flora is deliberately perverse and hard to make cohere. Van himself cannot decide whether Ada “was utterly ignorant or … total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game”. The whole thing reads like Humbert’s fantasy of possessing a “singularly knowing cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita” by the lake – “behaving as reason knew she could not possibly behave”. Is Van unironically repeating this fantasy, writing years later, with Nabokov disappearing entirely behind his narrator? Or is the depravity of the “cold game” the point?
- Chapter 20. A nice change of pace, with Van’s ambiguous dreams and uncertainty the morning after. “Certain caged birds … knock themselves out against the bars (and lie unconscious for a few minutes) every blessed morning” is very reminiscent of the caged animal ape learning to draw its own bars, an inspiration for Lolita. There’s more fun at Dan’s expense, and there’s no real sense that anyone believes he is Ada’s real father. The degree to which Van has it in for Dan, and the pathos of him “opening his arms wide in paternal welcome as guileless Lucette trotted into the room” – Demon certainly never shows any such affection for either of his children – makes it seem as if Dan too is aware. Surely Nabokov intends for us to feel some ordinary human warmth towards Dan here, away from our demonic narrators? There’s more lepidoptery and translation, but combined with this I think the chapter works well, and I enjoy the Copee motif. I also find “loved more vigorously than his office required” (on the postmaster and his boy) genuinely funny, which makes me feel I am being worryingly drawn into the depraved world of Ardis Hall.
- Chapter 21. The library. This continues the varied texture of the last, combining a potted history of incest on antiterra – paralleling Humbert’s apologia for nympholepsy – with the Gogolian eccentric librarians popping into existence purely in this chapter. The association of sex with literature and the library – familiar to so many nerdy teenagers – contrasted with the virginal librarians is nicely done. I’m not sure Nabokov can sustain this tone though: we know Van and Ada are magnificent physical as well as intellectual specimens, and indeed run rings around the prudish rules of library while deciding that Dan’s pornography is “artistically second-rate”. The story of Ivan Ivanov’s serial incest is also grotesque (BB correctly, I think, relates it to Humbert’s dream of fathering a Lolita the second – but finds this instance comical rather than deeply disturbing). While Nabokov is surely parodying himself, we do wonder to what purpose – to undermine the artistic primacy of Van and Ada’s love? Or in an embrace of a purely aesthetic amorality?
- Chapter 22. A genuinely beautiful chapter. When the novel is in this mode, I almost think I could be carried along with it into its incestuous sensuousness. The refrain of Chateubriand’s verse is genuinely moving and nostalgic in the way Boyd I think wants the novel to be, and for a while I’m with him. Referring back to Lolita I’m amazed at how convincing Humbert makes himself, even as we see his venality and Nabokov writing past him. So often Van succeeds only in revolting the reader, while we sense we are stuck in the world of Van and Ada with Nabokov at best indifferent. In this chapter he actually makes their love compelling, and that makes the (pretty frank) sex and nymphet references fly. I’m not sure how much ironic distance Nabokov can really claim here: the château que baignait la Dore motif is one of his favourite.
- Chapter 23. The lovers attempt to escape Lucette. This is a chapter where BB’s Lucette thesis is well justified – and he makes nice observations on the prefiguration of Lucette’s death, and her obsession with sex with Van (and indeed Ada). With this foreshadowing of grief contrasted with the comical games and the teenagers sneaking off to have sex, this chapter flows well and is a blast to read. I think Boyd is off where he thinks of Lucette as completely unsexualised at this point though: Lucette has a “delusive pubescence” is described in some detail. The perviness is pervasive at Ardis hall.
- Chapter 24. A rather dragging chapter where Van and Ada attempt to establish connections in their earlier lives. There is so much Nabokovian history here: Humbert and Nabokov’s first loves – but it’s rather tawdry in comparison to “First Love” or Humbert’s masterful manipulation it’s difficult to know whether its deliberately disappointing or Nabokov losing his touch. Boyd does have a wonderful observation: “Ah, cette Line” = acetylene, as Lucette is a “little light” and the compound by which bicycle’s carbide lamps, straight out of Nabokov’s childhood, emit light. We get Ada as nymphomaniac – they have made love “only seven,” replied Ada with a munch smile which feels like someone’s fantasy.
- Chapter 25. Van leaves, tryst at Forest Fork. Very novelistic, Byronic and romantic, Nabokov continues to have fun with Van changing modes of transport for no real reason. More Ada as a “horribly physical” nymphomaniac. I think Boyd is right this is a structural pivot, but it comes off as rather slight chapter.
- Chapter 26. Explains the code used in the previous chapter. BB and D. Barton Johnson seem disenchanted with this chapter: “Just as Transparent Things as a whole is short and jarringly uncomfortable after Ada’s protracted radiance” – but I rather like it (and much prefer Transparent Things to Ada). Firstly, because the codes themselves are not very complex, and it’s quite amusing to see Van struggle with them. Secondly, because it highlights the complex composition of Ada in a way that seems to promisingly foreground Van as an unreliable narrator – when he otherwise seems all too opaque and infallible. Unfortunately Nabokov’s mind isn’t entirely in the game either: as Boyd scrupulously points out, Nabokov inserts dates here that don’t correspond with the rest of the novel.
- Chapter 27. Demon catches up, and introduces Van to Cordula who later chaperones when he and Ada meet. A gruesome chapter this – as with all the Demon material it’s actively repelling – amply reflected by Van when despite being unattractive to Cordula, he immediately asks “Would you come to Riverlane? Are you a virgin?”. This is put to better use later in the chapter though, when Van’s peevishness and the headachy (Ada is “seasick but doing her duty” and suffering from migraines) atmosphere is strongly evocative of frustrating teenage dates. Van’s frank unpleasantness is countered rather wonderfully by Ada – who we might expect – but also Cordula: “Both girls giggled, and Cordula kissed Ada’s cheek. Van hardly knew what reaction he had expected, but found that simple kiss disarming and disappointing.” Seeing more of Van’s iron control of the narrative would be welcome I think, and this Joycean atmosphere works well despite the unattractivenss of the aesthetic.
- Chapter 28. Van learns sleight of hand as a child, then practices it gambling when at college in England. Another chapter that pulls off the magic trick of showering Van with gifts, displaying unanswerably Byronic behaviour, but with enough life peeping through to make it compelling. Dick the gambling cheat is a great character, who for once rather deserves Van’s ire – and it is interesting to see Ada calling for more vengeance from the sidelines of the composition. Dick continuing his tricks years later and “Mark ’em! Mark ’em!” is perfect, too.
- Chapter 29. Van home, short Tryst at Forest Fork with an ill Ada. Suddenly I feel the whole novel is working again. This is a delight, from Blanche and Bout’s dalliance to Ada’s illness: “he felt the fever of her body, but only realized how ill she was when after two passionate spasms she got up full of tiny brown ants and tottered, and almost collapsed, muttering about gypsies stealing their jeeps.”. “You know, that’s my favorite chapter up to now, Van, I don’t know why, but I love it”.
- Chapter 30. Van performs as Mascodagama. A great one to close on: this is terrific, almost top-tier Nabokov. He just does that physicality so well:
The stage would be empty when the curtain went up; then, after five heartbeats of theatrical suspense, something swept out of the wings, enormous and black, to the accompaniment of dervish drums. The shock of his powerful and precipitous entry affected so deeply the children in the audience that for a long time later, in the dark of sobbing insomnias, in the glare of violent nightmares, nervous little boys and girls relived, with private accretions, something similar to the “primordial qualm,” a shapeless nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings, the unendurable dilation of fever which came in a cavern draft from the uncanny stage.
The unpleasant colossus kept strutting up and down the stage for a while, then the strut changed to the restless walk of a caged madman, then he whirled, and to a clash of cymbals in the orchestra and a cry of terror (perhaps faked) in the gallery, Mascodagama turned over in the air and stood on his head.
“unedurable dilation”!. Van writes about himself: “Van on the stage was performing organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life – acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children.”. This is wonderful but is quite untrue of Van, who is not a gifted writer (at one point he claims his only contribution to verse is “Ada, our ardors and arbors”) and I don’t think Nabokov makes convince as a psychologist or philosopher. It’s Nabokov who can bring the acrobatic wonders:
It was Ada’s castle of cards. It was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick’s difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time.
That’s all for Ardis the first: in Chapter 31 Van returns, and he and Ada resume their romance, under the shadow of Ada’s affairs.
Those last chapters are really strong, I think. In general:
- I admire and am impressed more than I ever was with the structure, and the interlinking allusions that really are meaningful
- I am in awe of Brian Boyd’s ability to elucidate these
- The narrative moves faster than I remember. It’s just individual chapters that can drag.
- It’s just too long and convoluted. I could lose good chunks of the prologue, the grossness and the sex.
- While the microstructure may be sound, I remain in the dark as to what’s Nabokov’s intention for the whole book was and sceptical it comes off. It isn’t that Boyd is mistaken in his martyrdom of Lucette theme – this is certainly one important strand – it’s just I don’t think it explains the depravity and ugliness which seem integral to the novel, and tend to strike the reader more forcefully. Typically in Nabokov we are primed to separate our unreliable, literary narrators from their creators. Nabokov has often emphasised that he has no message and doesn’t want to pollute his aesthetics with ideas. Is Ada the reducto ad absurdum of this idea – where there is almost no way to see past the narrator, who is smarter, better read, and more aesthetically sensitive than all of us? Or will this triumphalist tone dissolve as I read more into what I (seem to recall) is Van and Ada’s eventual mediocrity?