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Some Eccentric Readings of Ada

“I loath Van Veen”

Nabokov, Interview Time (1969), cited in Strong Opinions

“I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel — and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent, and pride”

Nabokov, Interview (1971) cited in Strong Opinions

“Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.”

Nabokov, On a Book Entitled Lolita

Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist’s son and translator, joined the Internet discussion with his recollection that his father thought the idea that either Shade or Kinbote could have invented the other barely less absurd than the idea that each could have invented the other…

https://thenabokovian.org/sites/default/files/2018-01/NABOKV-L-0013164___body.html

As I continue to my project of re-reading Ada, a couple of aspects are a struggle. One is the richness and allusiveness (or less charitably incomprehensibility) of the writing – Brian Boyd’s annotations are a great help there. The other difficult aspect is the motley appeal of the novel. While a clearer understanding of the structures make me appreciate it more, I am certainly not the only reader not to take to Ada. Even Boyd includes a kind of plea for patience and persistence in his Ada: the place of consciousness.

That aspects of the novel, and certainly its protagonists, are seemingly intentionally repellent has puzzled a number of readers. In response some have gone so far as to suggest unorthodox or revisionist readings of Ada. I’m going to consider here

  1. David Auerbach‘s proposal that Van is a radically unreliable narrator and that large portions of the novel are part of his fantasy (Kinbote Triumphant in Hell: The Riddle of Nabokov’s Ada)
  2. Alexey Sklyarenko‘s idea that the editor and typist of the novel dictated by Van and Ada, Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox, are themselves Ada’s grandchildren.

Kinbote is rich

While not a dedicated Nabokovian, David Auerbach is a careful and literary reader. I also have a lot of affection for another software engineer with a love of modernist literature (he particularly appreciates Musil and Bernhardt). There’s loads of good stuff in his review of Ada: Kinbote Triumphant in Hell – with real thought-provoking insights, like the associate of Van with Don Juan and Don Quixote. I agree with him in both the novel being (not just superficially) off-putting and that Boyd’s thesis of the centrality of Lucette’s martyrdom is ultimately unsatisfying.

Ada is a puzzle to me as well, and I am really sympathetic to such imaginative attempts to solve it. In particular Auerbach is dead right about Nabokov’s prior commitment against cruelty and in favour of tenderness. Ada is jarring.

I would actually love for something like Auerbach’s thesis to be correct – it would transform the novel for me, and open some fascinating avenues. I just don’t think anything in the novel can bear the weight of such a massive re-engineering.

So I find it interesting that the solution he comes up with – for he insists there must be a “satisfactory explanation” for the novel’s unlovability – seems at first glance looks rather unbelievable. This is not someone who has just dipped into Ada (he is certainly familiar with Boyd), or is unfamiliar to Nabokov, and his knowledge of modernism is certainly broader than my own. I want to look more closely at this hypothesis (Auerbach is refreshingly modest in his proposal) – what sort of evidence might support a reading where parts of Ada is Van’s (or someone’s) fantasy?; is this thesis powerful, explanatory and satisfying?; and if not where might Auerbach have gone wrong.

Auerbach’s Idea

What does Auerbach propose? Briefly:

  1. That Van’s character and the memoir he produces is repellent
  2. Nabokov must have been aware of this, and so the novel must have a hidden counter-reading
  3. That Van is certainly an unreliable narrator, and fantasises large parts of the novel
  4. What exactly is Van’s fantasy is a little loose (as Auerbach openly admits – “some broad guesses”). At various points in the essay he suggests:
    • The whole alternative world of Antiterra
    • Van’s reconciliation with Ada (“highly unlikely”)
    • The success of Van’s treatise, The Texture of Time
    • Ada’s contributions to the composition (a “voice within Van”)
    • Perhaps the happy section of Ardis the first
    • Maybe Van Veen himself (“I’m not at all certain that Van Veen, if he even exists in the “real world” of Ada…”)

are Van’s fantasy within the world of the novel. In general, he is sceptical of Van achieving any satisfaction: “The happier the events, the more dubious I am”.

“[Van Veen] will avoid unpleasantness as much as possible, even at the cost of making himself unpleasant.”

David Auerbach, Kinbote Triumphant in Hell

As a final stretch – and Auerbach is conscious of reaching here – he proposes Van is really Andrey Vinelander.

In many ways, Auerbach resembles and extreme version of Boyd and Wood in wanting a moral reading of Ada with Nabokov kicking Sin: here he wants to obliterate any suggestion of Van’s talent, success and eventual happiness as undeserving of his “rotten” character.

How plausible is this?

Pithily: not very.

What is interesting is this method has been applied to other Nabokov works in the past. In Even Homais Nods, Brian Boyd works through Leona Toker’s theory that the whole end sequence of Lolita: Humbert’s tracking down Lo, killing of Quilty and arrest – does not literally happen in the novel. This was based upon a discrepancy of dates: eagle-eyed readers spotted that there would not have been enough time for Humbert to complete his homicidal mission.

There were just two problems. One was that this would, rather arbitrarily, remove a significant chunk of the novel’s content to the realm of a rather inutile fantasy with little bearing on our understanding. The second was that it was – in true Nabokovian irony – based on a missprint. Later printings corrected the date, and rendered the radical re-reading otiose.

Boyd has a simple and I think decisive argument against these sorts of revisionist readings, and he makes this explicitly for Auerbach’s suggestion when asked by the Kyoto Reading Circle (Ch40, 2017): how can we have any demarkation process for what is “real” or “fantasy” if it does not bear on the empirical “facts” of the book? If antiterra is not real, does Ardis Hall exist in Ladore? Is Ada even a real person? Lucette? Are they even siblings? Could Van walk on his hands? Does he have any money, status or talents at all? It just isn’t very interesting. As Boyd says, maybe John Shade is the real author of Ada.

However complex the worlds or unreliable the narrators, the basic facts of Nabokov’s novels generally do pertain (our aesthetic and moral responses, and the internals of the characters, is another matter). Nabokov frequently hides things, but he makes them discoverable, and supported by direct evidence in the text.

There is another problem. To borrow Auerbach’s schematic:

  1. The novel is off-putting and unlikable, as are its main characters Van and Ada Veen.
  2. Nabokov must have been aware of Fact #1.
  3. Reimagine the novel as if large parts of it are fantasy
  4. The book remains unsatisfying (“Even under this interpretation, I’m not sure if the book justifies itself.”)

I don’t actually disagree with any of Auerbach’s premises here (or indeed his conclusion the book not justifying itself) – but the problem is obvious: if Auerbach is motivated to make a radical re-reading of the novel because he finds it unsatisfying, and it remains unsatisfying even after this major intervention, surely the re-reading has no explanatory power and is superfluous.

I think these two points are conclusive. I enjoy Auerbach’s speculation and appreciate he has done considerable work with Ada when he doesn’t particularly care for it (can relate!). So for fun, let’s look if at whether we can get more explanatory power than this out.

Pale Fire: The Prototype

The prototype for this kind of approach to Nabokov is the question of who writes what in Pale Fire. This is certainly an area of dispute, with Shadean (i.e. Shade being the author of the commentary) as well as Kinbotean (Kinbote the poem) readings long suggested.

It is important to note that (i) these theories of shifting authorship are motivated by real problems in the text that do not really exist in Ada: namely acute and specific mysterious correspondences between the poem and commentary that appear not be motivated either by Kinbote’s visions of Zembla or Shade’s intentions, and that (ii) they do not – to a surprising degree – actually impinge upon the basic immediate facts of the novel. Only a very odd reader would not suspect that Kinbote is, frankly, a lunatic and his Zemblan adventure is a fantasy. That Kinbote is probably Botkin is better hidden, but there are plenty of clear clues (Botkine, a “giant Botfly”, etc).

Of course Shadean (and Kinebotean) readings do change our understanding of parts of the novel’s sequence. If Shade is the author, he is not really dead. However, this is their greatest weakness: it would be quite contrary to Shade’s modest character to project himself as so reverred after death (he would be the one imaging that Wordsmith renamed their main hall “Shade Hall” after him). This tension, combined with Dmitry Nabokov’s reporting of his father’s amusement at imagining that Shade or Kinbote wrote the other’s parts (“barely less absurd than the idea that each could have invented the other”) famously made Boyd abandon his Shadean reading – and suggest that something stranger, and actually more interesting is going on.

The theme of the afterlife, and veiled but cryptic communication between the worlds is in fact pervasive in later Nabokov. The Vane Sisters is an explicit example of this; and the first lines of the poem of Pale Fire describe exactly this, the Waxwing slain by the false azure in the window pain – but flying on, in that reflected sky. Shade is obsessed with death, his own multiple near-death experiences, his grief surrounding his daughter’s suicide and her and Aunt Maud’s ghost.

Unlike the readings shifting authorship, this is a much more satisfying resolution of the tension pointed to by the corresponding facts in the poem and commentary; without re-writing the basic facts which then essentially are all intact. This is the real demonstration of how Nabokov does sometimes hide information in his novels, while providing a path for us to discover it.

Other Worlds

What about evidence emerging from the text of Ada? This might be a justification for such a radical reading.

Auerbach is relying on the book not working, and events seeming unlikely, to provide the basis for his reading. There is a key problem here: that Ada is set in a science fiction world. That world is a bizarre setting (rearranged geography, anachronistic technology, banning of electricity) which is a mélange of themes from Nabokov’s life and his earlier fiction. It is acutely arranged to his taste, and nearly everything in the novel seems unlikely (Van and Ada make love on a flying carpet!)

One way of handling this is to suggest that antiterra itself is in some way Van’s fantasy and not “real” in the world of the novel. Auerbach gets close to this, calling it “unlikely” not to be “an explicit fantasy within the text” (emphasis his). (additionally he denies that antiterra is “some kind of afterlife” – I think he is a touch confused here, as it is Terra that is supposed to be the afterlife, at least according to Aqua and others nearing insanity).

Denying the science-fiction world of Ada is about the most basic re-writing of the facts of the novel one could imagine: a very strong justification is required.

Auerbach states: “To the best of my knowledge, all of Nabokov’s alternate worlds are revealed to be explicit fantasies within the text: the unnamed country in

  • Invitation to a Beheading,
  • Zembla in Pale Fire,
  • Badonia in “Terra Incognita,”
  • Padukgrad in Bend Sinister.

Are they?

Kinbote’s version of Zembla almost is certainly a fantasy (though Zembla itself appears to exist in the world of New Wye: see below) – though this is hardly a secret, as even if they notice nothing else even a first time reader will realise Kinbote is hilariously nutty and nowhere else is his fantasy validated within the world of the book (and he even doubts himself – “you have hallucinations real bad”). Actually, it is interesting that Zembla is not explicitly revealed to be a fantasy in the text in the way Auerbach argues: it is just heavily and justifiably implied. (I have to admit I am pretty perplexed by his inclusion of Pnin the character as a fantasist.)

There is something explicitly revealed in Invitation to a Beheading (ItaB), Bend Sinister (BS) and Terra Incognita – but not that the worlds are inventions of characters in that fictional world themselves. In each case, the scenery of the invented world is removed, providing to protagonists in distress an apotheosis that they are characters in Nabokov’s fiction. The important part is that the underlying driver of their lives is revealed to be part of a fictional pattern provided by a mysterious and benevolent exterior force, and that force is Nabokov’s art.

The end of Invitation to a Beheading:

“Come back, lie down – after all, you were lying down, everything was ready, everything was finished”

Little was left of the square. The last to rush past was a woman in a black shawl, carrying the tiny executioner like a larva in her arms. The fallen trees lay flat and reliefless, while those still standing, also two-dimensional … everything was coming apart. Everything was falling. A spinning wind was picking up and whirling: dust, rags, chips … amidst the dust .. Cincinattus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.

In Bend Sinister:

Imagine a sign that warns you of an explosion in such cryptic or childish language that you wonder whether everything … has not been reproduced artificially, there and then, by special arrangement with the mind behind the mirror.
It was at that moment, just after Krug had fallen through the bottom of a confused dream and sat up on the straw with a gasp – and just before his reality, his remembered hideous misfortune could pounce upon him – it was then that I felt a pang of pity for Adam and slid towards him along an inclined beam of pale light – causing instantaneous madness, but at least saving him from the senseless agony of his logical fate.
With a smile of infinite relief on his tear-stained face, Krug lay back on the straw. In the limpid darkness he lay, amazed and happy, and listened to the usual nocturnal sounds peculiar to great prisons: the occasional akh-kha-kha-akha yawns of a guard, the laborious mumble of sleepless elderly prisoners studying their English grammar books (My aunt has a visa. Uncle Saul wants to see Uncle Samuel. The child is bold.), the heartbeats of younger men noiselessly digging an underground passage to freedom and recapture, the pattering sound made by the excrementa of bats.

Bend Sinister, emphasis mine

Note that realism, colour and detail of Krug’s world (“his reality”) remain – are in fact made even more vivid – after this moment of seeing “the mind behind the mirror”. In the next few pages after this Krug’s world collapses in a way similar to ItaB – but rather into more fantastical world, where Paduk is back to sniveling in the schoolyard.

Important here is the shift to the first person – who is the “I” that grants Krug grace? Krug almost meets I as a “better bullet hit him”:

“he [Krug] shouted again: You, you – and the wall vanished, like a rapidly withdrawn slide, and I stretched myself and got up from among the chaos of written and rewritten pages, to investigate the sudden twang that something had made in striking the wire netting of my window.

As I had thought, a big moth was clinging with furry feet to the netting … I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words. But the very last lap of his life had been happy and it had been proven to him that death was but a question of style. Some tower clock which I could never exactly locate, which, in fact, I never heard in the daytime, struck twice … I could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life), an oblong puddle invariably acquiring the same form after every shower because of the constant spatulate shape of a depression in the ground. Possibly, something of the kind may be said to occur in regard to the imprint we leave in the intimate texture of space. Twang. A good night for mothing.

The “I” is Nabokov (the flesh-and-blood man1). Nabokov inscribes his study with as much realistic detail as he makes it clear that the fictional world of Padukgrad is his fantasy, and also creates a rather mysterious connecting principle between them, in the form of the oddly-shaped puddle (again, note the concreteness of these elements). As Boyd has it:

Just before he dies, Krug understands that beyond his whole world looms a different kind of dictator who makes no mistake—”if you like,” as Nabokov explained to a publisher, “a kind of symbol of the Divine power” – and who as we can see from our special vantage point subjects Krug to all his misfortunes precisely to affirm Krug’s individuality, his tenderness, the poignant vulnerability of mortal life.

At various points throughout the novel there have been intimations in Krug’s world of “someone in the know,” a “secret spectator,” an “anthropomorphic deity.” At the moment of Krug’s death, Nabokov withdraws from his invented world to disclose himself as its inventor, sitting among a chaos of written and rewritten pages, looking out through the night at a special spatulate puddle on the ground outside, “the one Krug had somehow perceived through the layer of his own life.”

Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, Brian Boyd

If we are in any doubt that this “I” is Nabokov (and not some character in the world of Padukgrad: for example Ember, or Paduk, or Krug himself): “At one stage Bend Sinister was to have been called The Person from Porlock, in honor of the visitor who interrupted Coleridge in the midst of his dream of “Kubla Khan” (“the most famous of unfinished poems,” as Nabokov called it)”. The interruption is intended to come from outside the fantasy.

Nabokov’s Fictionalism

The purpose of move in these works is twofold:

  1. As a humane reprieve of grace for characters exhibiting Nabokovian virtues of curiosity, tenderness and bravery, rendering suffering unreal (compared to banality, cruelty, etc).
  2. As a metaphor for death and its transcendence

Despite there being a clear metaphor at work here, it is critical to understand that Nabokov considered metaphors to be “a connection between two real things”. The collapse and visions of our world are as real as the world of the novel. So while Krug’s suffering is relieved by the grace of his being led to understand his existence is a work of fiction when meeting his maker in Nabokov – in no way is this meant to suggest that the (appalling) suffering his son has endured when tortured to death has not literally happened within the world of the novel. In fact, such a reading would render what has come before essentially pointless. Likewise, however absurd the world of Invitation to a Beheading, at no point are we expected to believe that Cincinattus was not sentenced to death (whether he dies or “dies” is of course part of the artistry of the ending).

Auerbach explicitly denies this: “Cincinnatus C, Kinbote, and others, the fantasy bears more on the book’s contents than the reality.”. Are we supposed to believe that Cincinnatus is imagining his own execution in a tyrranical regime? Out of what, masochism? The book won’t help us – we’re essentially inventing our own novel here. I think we can see that this reading is not fertile.

In these cases, the artistry – and I do think this is successful – comes out of the collapse of the world of the novel as the characters become – dimly, transiently – aware of the “real” world where they are creations of Nabokov. This revelation – so “unlikely” in real life – in the world of the novel makes us gasp because we know it is actually, literally true: they are in a work of fiction, it is all artistry. It does not invalidate (usually the bulk of) the work that has come before, rather it is a moment of transcendence revealing the narrative and patterned texture of life: not flimsy nonsense but a web of sense.

That narrative and aesthetic beauty can be a hidden, organising force of “real” life is something Nabokov makes clear he believes (for example in Speak, Memory when he talks about folding his magic carpet). He is also fixated on the assassination of his father, and the the unthinkableness of extinction of consciousness after death. For the entirely irreligious Nabokov, the metaphor of his characters release from fiction is the closest he suggests we can get to transcendence of death.

Auerbach (like me) is an atheist, and perfectly justifiably this theme could be distasteful or not of interest to him. But I think presence of the theme is undeniable in Nabokov, and Auerbach has simply not seen it. Auerbach ponders that the date of 1922 for Van and Ada’s reunion is significant because it is the formal foundation of the USSR. As far as I know this fact (unlike the 1917 revolutions) would be totally meaningless to Nabokov: rather 1922 is of resounding significance because it is the date of VD Nabokov’s death, when he courageously stepped in front of an assassin’s bullet meant for another man. The assassination of his father haunts Nabokov’s work. Ada Veen shares a birthday with VD Nabokov (21st July), and the denouement of Pale Fire exactly recapitulates the wrong man being shot by an assassin – and occurs on that same date.

Some Supporting Evidence

Actually I think Auerbach misses the two works outside Pale Fire that provide most support to his thesis: where the protagonists do invent a fantasy which they attempt to persuade the reader. These are The Eye (which I see he is an appreciator of) and Despair. Arguably Lolita falls into this category as well.

In each case the character formulate an absurd and more-or-less solipsistic and comical delusion, and attempt to persuade the reader. There are quite a few differences with what Auerbach is proposing, however:

  • In each case, the fantasy is more or less clear to the attentive reader early in the work. We are reading behind the backs of the narrators, not wholly mislead by them.
  • These stories do not take place in entirely fantastic worlds: rather they are realistic novels where the tension between the narrators secret fantasies and reality provide much of the interest.
  • The fantasies do not discredit the basic facts or structure of the works. Hermann does kill a man, Smurov does attempt to kill himself and is in love with Vanya, and Humbert is a pervert who absconds with Dolores Haze.

A Surprising Range of Fantasies

What about the other (tentative) claim that “all Nabokov’s alternative worlds are explicit fantasies within the text”. Auerbach has missed quite a few that are not, I think:

  • The short story Lance is really the key precursor to Ada: it is essentially science fiction in much the same way as Ada, and describes many of the same features (e.g. the banning of electricity). Lance is an abstraction of the exploits of Nabokov’s son Dmitry (mountain climbing and racing, rather than opera singing): but it is at no point revealed to be an explicit fantasy.
  • The solid world of the campus in Pale Fire might seem totally naturalistic: but it’s actually set in a mash-up of Appalachia and New England, with complex merging of the flora and fauna (paying attention to the natural world – like John Shade and his German friend Hentzner – is always indicative in Nabokov). Of course, this is a direct precursor to the kaleidoscopic mixture of North America and Russia on Antiterra. In fact, Zembla as a distant land that has undergone a revolution (even if we are very dubious that Kinbote has anything to do with it) appears to be known on the campus of Wordsmith as well.2
  • The world of Tyrants Destroyed seems fairly concrete. Are we just to accept it just “being” Nazi Germany and thus not a fantasy? It has many fantastical elements, and Nabokov indicated it was a blend of various tyrannies. The author might be a “boneless shadow” – surely a reflection of his fear, or hope, that his words and spirit fight future tyrants. Cloud, Castle, Lake might fall into a similar category
  • Nabokov could write complete, if unconventional fantasies in many of his short stories. The Wood Sprite, The Dragon, and particularly Wingstroke have an almost gothic sensibility. In Wingstroke the supernatural creature possessing airborne Isabel is horribly, sensuously real – as it gets its wings shoved in a closet.
  • A precursor to Lolita and The Enchanter, A Nursery Tale involves the Devil appearing! In a newly unearthed story, The Word, is almost magical realism: swarming with angels.
  • What about A Visit to the Museum, where the narrator is teleported into Soviet Russia?
  • Solux Rex is actually a better candidate for Auerbach here: a “fantastic” world and as a precursor to Zembla we do strongly suspect is the invention of the narrator of Ultima Thule.

Conclusive Evidence?

If we cannot rule the fantastic world of Ada‘s Antiterra out tout court, then we have a much harder time deciding what is “unlikely” in a world of “skimmer” flying carpets, dorophones and Amerussians. Here are some of the things Auerbach doesn’t buy:

  1. That Van’s idea in The Texture of Time that “when postulating the future, is to expand enormously the specious present causing it to permeate any amount of time” is “not a serious idea (of course)”.

But Nabokov was serious about this, and returned to the theme again and again – what Robert Gross Smith calls the “future perfect” perspective on time: his characters are fond of imagining themselves in the future looking backwards in time and recollecting the present moment, thus conflating past, present and future”. In a wonderful passage in Speak, Memory he does this when at the beginning of his exile:

The idea consisted of parodizing a biographic approach projected, as it were, into the future and thus transforming the very specious present into a kind of paralyzed past as perceived by a doddering memoirist who recalls, through a helpless haze, his acquaintance with a great writer when both were young. For instance, either Lidia or I (it was a matter of chance inspiration) might say, on the terrace after supper: ‘The writer liked to go out on the terrace after supper,’ or ‘I shall always remember the remark V. V. made one warm night: “It is,” he remarked, “a warm night” ’; or, still sillier: ‘He was in the habit of lighting his cigarette, before smoking it’ – all this delivered with much pensive, reminiscent fervor which seemed hilarious and harmless to us at the time; but now – now I catch myself wondering if we did not disturb unwittingly some perverse and spiteful demon.

Speak, Memory

and it is present in a number of short stories, most strikingly A Guide to Berlin, and later in Transparent Things (“the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought”). The word “spurious” links these two passages directly: I feel Auerbach may unaware of the connection to Speak, Memory (the autobiography is surely neither ironic, nor a fantasy). Actually, Nabokov stated in an interview that:

“My conception of the texture of time somewhat resembles its image in Part Four of Ada. The present is only the top of the past, and the future does not exist”.

Strong Opinions, Swiss Broadcast (1972)

As for serious, in fact Einstein believed something quite similar: “the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” (letter, 1955).

I do agree that it is uncompelling in Van’s rendering and that Texture of Time is rather dreary!

  1. That the idea of The Texture of Time becoming a best seller is unbelievable. I agree! But the core idea of Texture of Time (ToT) is the same as Speak, Memory: that the author can fold the “magic carpet” of their own life to establish the patterns, and thus defeat the uneluctable loss and grief of time (“I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another.”). Auerbach rightly cites Nabokov as hating novels based on ideas: but this isn’t quite right (and it’s one of the places where taking Nabokov pronouncements, especially from Strong Opinions, is worth a pinch of salt). Nabokov hated the “literature of ideas”, but he absolutely incorporated philosophical musings such as time, death, (Aubrey Mc)fate, and chance into his novels; and wrote directly about ideas like Hegelian thesis-antithesis-sythesis in his autobiography. ToT is (much) less successful than SM here: but Speak, Memory deservedly sold well and Ada itself was a bestseller too, and probably flummoxed many of those that bought it.
  2. That Van has “mysterious access to the world of Terra”. It isn’t particularly mysterious, at least on its face: it seems clear that Van is an academic psychologist who spends his professional life studying the unbalanced who claim to see Terra (important to note that in the world of the novel, it is the existence of Terra which has doubt cast upon it, and which comes through a glass darkly).
  3. The blurb is a “fatuous description of Ada itself in trite, sarcastic prose”. It is! Is this Demon’s sentimentality coming out?
  4. That Van is rather more unreliable than “ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely”. I agree: this is almost certainly the case (more below).
  5. I agree that when Van shifts to the first person something interesting is happening. As a compositional detail it is too rare to be a marker of the “real plot” I think: surely it would be more widespread if there is a large cleavage between the “real” and “fantastic” evens retold by Van?
  6. I’m not sure the order of composition of Van’s fictional novel really means anything (even if we could establish it clearly from the text). Sure Van could have composed chapter 5 first – but so what? So could Nabokov. If anything, non-linear index-card composition would bring Van’s art closer to Nabokov’s.

I think I can agree that these features of the novel can be unsatisfying. But none of them seem to demand that we rewrite the basic facts of the story. Isn’t it more parsimonious to conclude that Ada just doesn’t succeed on all the levels we hope?

Vinelander

There’s just not much in the fabric of the novel itself to suggest such a radical re-reading. When it comes to Van actually being Andrey Vinelander as far as I can tell this shrinks to zero.

The only thing Vinelander and Van have in common are they speak Russian and are monied – but then so are nearly all the other characters in the book (maybe “Van” is actually Marina, sleeping with her own daughter?).

If “Van” is so hypersensitive, why does he depict himself as the banal Vinelander? Why invent a Vinelander at all? Is Ada even Vinelander’s sister? Why and how does Vinelander’s sister Dorothy blackmail them if they’re actually man and wife?

This is nonsensical I think: but the decisive flaw here is by all accounts Vinelander has no literary ability, and that is something that even under radical scepticism about Ada’s author we have evidence of. Would Vinelander be able to translate Coppée?

Van’s Talents

Auerbach is motivated, I think, by something quite similar to Boyd and Wood – in wanting to see the familiar Nabokov “cuffing sin, and affording primacy to tenderness”. Being haunted by “teasing Lucette to death” isn’t enough moral interest for him.3

Ada and Van are not tender. They are however – and this sets them apart from sadists and cruel mediocrities elsewhere in Nabokov who are nearly always vulgar and banal – absolutely brilliant. Nabokov has loaded them with gifts, material, physical – but most importantly, intellectual abilities that accord exactly with Nabokov’s fascinations. Ada as a novel is different, and I believe he intended it to be different – yes, loathing Van (and Ada) Veen but not taking an easy way out of making them intrinsically flawed, or doomed to a (rather pat) unhappy ending.

The problem for Auerbach’s thesis is even if we are radically sceptical and don’t believe Ardis Hall, Ada, Antiterra or Van even exist – we have something like a Cartesian cogito in the words that “Van” (or the real author) provide us with. And even if completely fabricated, there are parts of the book – like Ada’s real things, bridges, towers and fogs – that would be wonderful in any context. Van and Ada’s love story is supposed to be affecting I think, and often is (indeed, I think it’s supposed to be erotic, and there are some serious failures there).

Of course the name Ada has “of hell” associations: but also “ardour”, “Oh, yes!” (“Ah, Da!”) and is a gender-swapped version of Adam (Ada) and Eve (Veen). Paradise, heaven on earth and the fortunate fall, and hell are important themes in Ada, but they are not easily disentangled: as Boyd brilliantly describes with relation to Bosch’s famous Garden of Earthly delights tryptich (which I am becoming more and more convinced is in fact the intended scheme underlying the novel).

At base, the radiance of some of Ada‘s remembrances – even if they were completely synthetic – would in Nabokov’s view render them “real things”. For Nabokov, deception and mimicry – even (especially) if pure invention – was as an important part of nature as anything “honest” or literal.

However unpleasant, Van is actually a genius linguist. with far greater skills than Humbert, Kinbote, Hermann, or Nabokov’s other villains and unfortunates

More concretely, Van is actually a genius linguist: far more so than Humbert, Kinbote, Hermann, or Nabokov’s other villains and unfortunates. Kinbote is totally incapable of faking couplets of Shade’s poem (and his lame versions are very funny – a critical argument against the Kinbotean authorship of the poem).

Van’s literary skills reside oddly in the novel because it isn’t really in Van’s character or profession and he actually insists that he has never contributed to (English) verse – perhaps this is narrative unreliability, perhaps simply a failing of the book. But it was a core concern of Nabokov, who at this point after 10 years of translating Eugene Onegin was obsessed with translation, mistranslation and literalism. I think Auerbach misses this theme entirely: when he states that the opening chapters are a parody of Anna Karenin and is thus meant to be ironical, the irony is at the expense of bad translators (or “transfigurations”). I would contend this theme is one of the clunkiest in Ada (“for the snake of the rhyme!”) but I don’t for a second think that Nabokov was not literally expressing his views on translation and that he agrees with his characters, uses them to make his arguments (and grind his axes) and has given them at least part of his powers: he even uses the novel to attack real translators by mangling their names.

The apex of this is the translation Van makes of Coppée’s Matin d’Octobre, correcting Ada’s non-literal distortion (“woodchopper”) but incorporating the rare trouvé “leavesdropper” to retain both literalism and the rhyme. Van may not be Nabokov, but he gives him significant artistic power:

Original

Leur chute est lente. On peut les suivre
Du regard en reconaissant
Le chêne à sa feuille de cuivre,
L’érable à sa feuille de sang. 

Ada

Their fall is gentle. The woodchopper
Can tell, before they reach the mud,
The oak tree by its leaf of copper,
The maple by its leaf of blood.

Van

Their fall is gentle. The leavesdropper
Can follow each of them and know
The oak tree by its leaf of copper,
The maple by its blood-red glow.

Happiness

There is another problem here too, and it brings us to a rather contradictory part of Auerbach’s argument, namely:

  1. “I am inclined to be extremely skeptical of the mostly unchronicled decades of happiness with Ada, as well as of the success of Van’s book. The happier the events, the more dubious I am. The tragic events–Lucette’s death being the central one–most likely hold greater reality.”
  2. “From the beginning Van is protecting himself and not being straight … he will avoid unpleasantness as much as possible, even at the cost of making himself unpleasant.”

How does Auerbach’s argument cash out here? That Van exclusively (falsely) writes about happiness, or that he is incapable of writing about happiness? It isn’t at all clear.

This issue is – and I don’t think this is ambiguous – if we accept that Van (or his proxy) is totally in control of the narrative, that it is a “sealed coffin” in Auerbach expressive phrase, then there’s little reason for him to include anything that undermines his narrative: and quite simply, he does, all the time. Why even include the death of Lucette if he is determined to avoid psychic pain? Especially in such detail, and clearly implicating himself directly? Why make Demon separate him and Ada?

Auerbach is, I’m afraid, just plain wrong when he asserts that Van will “avoid unpleasantness as much as possible”. Ardis the first is recounted as an idyll; but in Van’s own account (surely written decades later, and surely polished and unreliable) it then pretty much immediately goes to shit. He has two unsatisfying meetings with Ada; he is jealous of everyone; he is marginalised and ignored by the film crew in the household, and continually suspects she is cheating, which she is – and not even only with the dashing soldier, but with the pathetic Rack! Moreover, the scenes which he and Ada make iconic of their love in Ardis the first: her sitting on his lap at the picnic, the picnic itself, having sex in the shooting gallery with or without the tartan laprobe – are all repeated in with an off-note in Ardis the second, with dirt and suspicion and things going wrong.

Van is in fact creating an extremely elaborate structure in which he and Ada experience both the extremes of heaven and hell. This seems very counter to Auerbach’s account.

We naturally want to read to undermine Van, and I an encouraged by such an effort. Certainly he and Ada are unpleasant characters, and I don’t think Van’s account is as air-tight as Auerbach thinks – he happily present himself and Ada as infuriatingly precocious and unpleasant, and seem to be getting off on their own aristocratic brilliance.

Schematising

Auerbach is a little fixated on schematics. I can relate: I am a software engineer too, of course – and I really like his structure-building approaches in many essays.

I’ve spent so long going through this because I think Auerbach is onto something interesting that I am sympathetic to, and that Boyd doesn’t really deal with. There are clear indications that Van is unreliable, and we should be very doubtful of his reliability of reproducing dialogue decades later. The question is what the point of that is. I would actually love for something like Auerbach’s thesis to be correct – it would transform the novel for me, and open some fascinating avenues. I just don’t think anything in the novel can support such a massive re-engineering.

Rather I am inclined to think that Nabokov’s intention was not to make us doubt the whole history of Ada in toto, but to make it clear that Ada the novel is Van’s (and partly Ada’s) construction, and their work of art – and he is no mean artist. In this way, Ada is comparable to The Gift.

I think where Auerbach has gone wrong here is to take a faulty premise – that Nabokov would not allow an unpleasant protagonist to prosper – and built a system on top of that. This leads him to the idea that Nabokov cannot have meant to do what the book so plainly does, so there must be a hidden meaning that restores the moral status quo.

But this ignores an equally important strain in Nabokov where he insists he has no moral in tow; that he is not here to teach us how to be good; and that his characters are props he moved around in the game between author and reader.

It is perhaps simpler to ask – why not? Certainly the ugliness (pissing, shitting, wanking) and cruelty (“trembling Adada”) would be unthinkable in early Nabokov (say, the Russians). But Nabokov had form for amazing metamorphoses. There was a long gap and a lot happened between Pale Fire (1962) and Ada (1969) – most prominently, his colossal effort in translating Eugene Onegin – which shows up in Ada in pervasive ways. The protagonists of the work following Ada, Transparent Things and Look At The Harlequins are rather corporeally unpleasant too – consider Hugh Person’s whoring or perving over underage photographs. Their fate is equally morally ambiguous.

While I think Ada is a failure in several ways, I actually think Nabokov’s foregrounding of an almost wholly unlikable but dauntingly talented pair of characters, without an obvious moral payoff, is a kind of brilliant innovation in his work. It is Nabokov pushing that strain where he believes that aesthetics and narrative really are prior to ethics, and that identifying with or sympathising with characters is a vulgarity. I would point to some forerunner characters like Mukhin in The Eye (Nabokov though him a “horrid prig”, but he certainly comes out on top), Berg from An Affair of Honor, and most notably Clair Quilty – surely an even bigger pervert than Humbert, but who essentially runs rings around him and can’t die in a satisfying way.

This makes Ada quite perverse (not to say perverted) and frankly decadent. It may be no coincidence that the best essay I’ve read on Ada since my re-reading is this one in the wonderful Decadent Review, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the novel’s release – When Nabokov Went Roccoco.

We may say he is unsuccessful: I think he is – but Ada is a fascinating experiment.

Final Family Resemblances

Alexey Sklyarenko has a similar problem: wanting to infer great changes in the novel’s world without them doing any great work to explain the details of the text. His is an opposite motivation though, I think: he wants to make the world of Ada even richer and more interconnected (and indeed incestuous) rather than removing what we consider “real”.

He proposes that Ada has children with Andrey Vinelander, and they then produce grandchildren that are: Ronald Oranger and Violet Knox, Van’s editor and secretary respectively. Since those two get married, this would be another instance of cousinage in the by now very inbred Veen/Durmonov family.

As far as I can tell there isn’t a single thing to support this in the text. Am I missing something? Some children are fleetingly mentioned with respect to Demon, but aren’t actually identified as Ada and Andrey’s (it’s just as likely they are his mistresses). Wouldn’t Van be curious about Ada’s children? I don’t think Sklyarenko has much here – only noting that Van doesn’t realise because “love is blind”. I’ve not yet reached re-reading this section of the novel so will evaluate if I think there’s anything that could support this idea.

Notes

  1. We may insist that this Nabokov is in fact some sort of character and in some way distinct from the flesh-and-blood Vladimir Vladimirovich. I don’t think this distinction would really change anything. ↩︎
  2. See the note to line 894, where the faculty appear to discuss the revolution in Zembla in detail. “Pictures of the King had not infrequently appeared in America during the first months of the Zemblan Revolution … A visiting German lecturer from Oxford kept exclaiming, aloud and under his breath, that the resemblance was “absolutely unheard of,” … I had [he added] the honor of being seated within a few yards of the royal box at a Sport Festival in Onhava … Professor Pardon now spoke to me: “I was under the impression that you were born in Russia, and that your name was a kind of anagram of Botkin or Botkine?”. We should probably be sceptical of Kinbote’s reported speech (“and everybody laughed”) but the inclusion of the deeply uncomfortable “Botkin” reference seems to mean that this whole sequence isn’t invented by Kinbote totally out of whole cloth. ↩︎
  3. I disagree that Lucette is not touching or is poorly sketched. In fact my objections are far more the rampant sexualisation of Lucette, along with everyone else in Ardis Hall: Lucette’s nubile body is all too well sketched. Quick, what colour are Lucette’s eyes? “Angry green” of course! ↩︎