1. The Riddle
I loathe Van Veen.
Vladimir Nabokov
Ada, or Ardor (1969) (
full text available here)
is Nabokov’s very long novel about brother-sister incest in an
alternate reality. Most people don’t consider it one of his best.
The
book declares itself as the memoirs of Van Veen, spoiled and successful
aristocrat, describing his upbringing on the family estate of Ardis,
his long-running love affair with his sister Ada, his
other sister
Lucette’s unrequited love for him, and the family’s other affairs and
intrigues on the planet Antiterra, a variant of our Earth. After many
delayed reunions, they finally reunite for good in their 50s and live
out nearly another half-century together in incestuous bliss.
The riddle of
Ada is explaining these two facts:
- The novel is off-putting and unlikable, as are its main characters Van and Ada Veen.
- Nabokov must have been aware of Fact #1.
At
the time, John Updike wondered in his negative review whether Nabokov
was aware of just how unpleasant the self-satisfied Van Veen was, and
how he lacked any of the sinister charm of Humbert Humbert or the insane
desperation of Charles Kinbote (
or whomever).
The quote at the top should answer that question, but even that quote
is unnecessary: Nabokov was a narrow writer in many ways, but he was not
stupid as to how his characters would appear to people.
So, the question: why has Nabokov put us in the company of two characters, Van and Ada, who are both unappealing
and
uninvolving, and why for so long? Why has he made the trappings so
uninviting? Even the opening paragraphs are clearly designed to turn
away a reader:
“All happy families are more or less
dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,” says a great
Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina,
transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880).
That pronouncement has little if any relation to the story to be
unfolded now, a family chronicle, the first part of which is, perhaps,
closer to another Tolstoy work, Detstvo i Otrochestvo (Childhood and Fatherland, Pontius Press, 1858).
Van’s
maternal grandmother Daria (“Dolly”) Durmanov was the daughter of
Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d’Or, an American province in the
Northeast of our great and variegated country, who had married, in 1824,
Mary O’Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion. Dolly, an only child, born in
Bras, married in 1840, at the tender and wayward age of fifteen,
General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country
gentleman, with lands in the Severn Tories (Severnïya Territorii), that
tesselated protectorate still lovingly called “Russian” Estoty, which
commingles, granoblastically and organically, with “Russian” Canady,
otherwise “French” Estoty, where not only French, but Macedonian and
Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under our Stars and Stripes.
Compared to the opening of
Lolita, Pnin, or really any other Nabokov novel, this is not only repellent, but boring.
Brian
Boyd has stressed the moral character of the novel and focused on the
character of Ada’s sister, Lucette. Lucette falls in love with Van, but
Van and Ada treat her like garbage, and she eventually commits suicide.
And certainly I see no reason not to condemn Van and Ada both for their
treatment of Lucette, over which both express some tepid regret. But
this answer is far from sufficient.
First, Lucette’s story just
doesn’t take up that much of the book, certainly not enough to make her
the heart of the book. Second, as
Nicole at Bibliographing has observed,
Lucette is a bit too much of a lamb to the slaughter to bring out one’s
sympathy, and a brat as well. Van and Ada are terrible, but Lucette’s
infantile and cringeworthy behavior doesn’t exactly set her in stark
relief. Poor Charlotte Haze is far more touching than the vaguely
sketched Lucette. Boyd also fails to explain the fundamentally
uninvolving character of the book, which I think cannot be denied. What
then?
2. Don Juan and Don Quixote
I want to attempt a structural explanation because working at the level of characters and plot
cannot produce a satisfactory explanation for the alienating effect of the book.
As Nabokov tells us very early on in Chapter 3 of Part 1,
Ada is
Russian for hell, or more precisely “of hell” (ада, genitive of
ад). Antiterra is also called Demonia, Van’s father is nicknamed Demon,
and infernal references abound. It’s a peculiar hell though, since it’s
devoid of the major catastrophe of Nabokov’s life, the Russian
Revolution, and despite some tormented drama, Van has it pretty good,
eventually ending up with Ada in blissful love for quite a number of
years. The memoirs mostly do not cover this, however, though they do
mention the eventual and seemingly hard-to-fathom success of his book
The Texture of Time, a rather uninvolving philosophical treatise which is forms the penultimate section of the book.
Here is one key to the nature of this hell:
When,
in the middle of the twentieth century, Van started to reconstruct his
deepest past, he soon noticed that such details of his infancy as really mattered (for the special purpose the reconstruction pursued) could be best treated, could not seldom be only treated,
when reappearing at various later stages of his boyhood and youth, as
sudden juxtapositions that revived the part while vivifying the whole.
This is why his first love has precedence here over his first bad hurt
or bad dream. (31)
What is the special purpose, and
what really matters? Van, in constructing his memoir, is picking out
pleasing experiences which “really matter,” rather than the painful
ones. He means the whole to be love, not hurt or dream. That should be
enough to tell us that Van is an unreliable narrator. The book is all
hurt and dream, none of it love. The special purpose is some sort of
delusion, some kind of avoidance of reality.
Consider the key
scene in Part 3, just before Lucette commits suicide, when Van refuses
Lucette’s advances after he happens to see a film that conflates Don
Juan and Don Quixote (the character is Don Juan, but he and Leporello
are riding past windmills). Ada plays a part in the movie that was not
in the original book, a character named Dolores (also Lolita’s real
name). She embraces Don Juan and causes him to climax, and this turns
out to be the revenge of the Stone Cuckold, the statue that drags Don
Juan down to Hell. Ada is of Hell.
After seeing Ada, Van flees from Lucette, masturbates twice, then brushes her off when she calls him on the phone:
In
a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into
extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is
right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the door (it swung open at
once, but then closed of its own accord) and using a temporary expedient
less far-fetched than that hit upon by Father Sergius (who chops off
the wrong member in Count Tolstoy’s famous anecdote), vigorously got rid
of the prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years
ago. And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the
screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door swung open again with
the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the recent and
pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck
and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush.
No
doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at hand to keep
her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a gentleman and an artist,
that the lump of words he brought up was trite and cruel, and it was
only because she could not accept him as being either, that she believed
him:
“Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?” asked Lucette.
“Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),” answered Van.
A small pause followed; then she hung up. (490)
Then Lucette drowns herself.
For
all the fuss about memory, Van’s real purpose is clear here: to forget,
to “grind into extinction.” Ignoring Lucette for the image of Ada was
the most consequential avoidance of reality for projected fantasy, but
even in chronicling the event, here he is doing it again, projecting
himself into the third person after a very brief detour back into the
first (a rare event in the book). Lucette is a victim, mostly forgotten
by Van, reduced to stale caricature as an infantile masochist. Ada is
the seemingly innocuous agent of punishment,
and an inserted character who is just a pretense for solitary masturbation
. Van is both Don Juan and Don Quixote.
3. Hell
I’m
won’t attempt to figure out precisely what is real and what is not in
the book because I don’t think I stand much of a chance, but I will make
some broad guesses. 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. Ada’s intrusions throughout, but especially at the end
of the book, seem more likely to be a voice within Van, not an actual
person. I think it highly unlikely that Van and Ada are ever happily
reunited. Nabokov did not intend to redeem Van Veen through suffering,
but particularly in the later novels, Nabokov’s rotten characters do
tend to be spared any real happiness. I strongly suspect that to be the
case here.
The idyllic, hermetic, and very long Part 1 is a
pastiche or a parody of the 19th century Russian novel. Inverting
Tolstoy’s maxim turns it into a joke. Hence from the beginning Van is
protecting himself and not being straight, and the offputting nature of
the whole text is a reflection of Van’s solipsism. He is building a
sealed coffin for himself that he intends no one to penetrate. He will
avoid unpleasantness as much as possible, even at the cost of making
himself unpleasant.
With each subsequent section things get more
miserable, the length gets shorter, and different strategies of
avoidance are invoked. The late years of happiness with Ada are more
likely years of self-torture, any success in love or life a delusion on
Van’s part. By Part 4, he has abandoned plot in favor of mere allusions
to wish-fulfillment and philosophical self-indulgence. At his supposed
happiest he is least able to describe anything that happened to him.
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,” and Padukgrad in
Bend Sinister. It
is unlikely that Antiterra is any different, even more unlikely that it
is some kind of afterlife. It is the fantasy world of someone. Van has
mysterious access to our world Terra, which he writes a novel about. It
is unsuccessful; Antiterra doesn’t want to hear about the real world.
There is probably some greater significance to that failed novel, but I
have not figured that out.
Instead, his dreary, solipsistic treatise
The Texture of Time (which forms Part 4) becomes a bestseller, unlikely enough in
any world.
It is a reality-denying book in which ideas take precedence over
people. Nabokov loathed this appraoch, dismissing ideas as worthless to
writing. And so they are; they only distract Van Veen for a while before
the voice of Ada interrupts him at the very end of the section to drag
him back down to his own private hell.
One idea of
The Texture of Time is significant though, which is Van’s insistence that the Future is nothing more than a part of the Present.
What
we do at best (at worst we perform trivial tricks) when postulating the
future, is to expand enormously the specious present causing it to
permeate any amount of time with all manner of information, anticipation
and precognition. At best, the “future” is the idea of a hypothetical
present based on our experience of succession, on our faith in logic and
habit. Actually, of course, our hopes can no more bring it into
existence than our regrets change the Past. (560)
This
isn’t a serious idea, of course. It is the bitterness of a man who has
no future, for whom no possibility of hope remains, and who has been
forced by desperation into attempting (and failing) to reimagine the
past as something less horrible than it was. Van’s attempt is more
successful than Charles Kinbote’s in
Pale Fire, as Kinbote had
to contend with the opposing force of Shade’s poem and his inability to
dispose of the vexing torments in any sort of convincing way. Van
succeeds rather well to a point, but this only exacerbates and prolongs
his ultimate failure. He is Kinbote triumphant, but in hell.
4. The End
The true end of
Ada is
not clear. If, as I suspect, Van Veen dies at the end of Part 4, just
as he is (supposedly) reunited with Ada, then the remainder of his life
after 1922 (please see
this Ada timeline)
may be entirely fantasy, a projection from the present into the (false)
future. Part 5, which announces itself as the “true introduction” to
Ada, may have been written by Van before the rest of the book, not after it.
This
is significant because by the order of Van’s writing, it would mean
that Part 5, having been written first, would be the most delusional of
all. Certainly the ebullient rapture of Part 5 marks a reversal from the
growing sadness that went before and a jarring break from both Part 3
and Part 4.
In Nabokov’s stories that concern alternate worlds,
the revelation of the fantasy tends to take place at the very end of the
tale, often only on the last page. (This is arguably true even of the
non-linear
Pale Fire. What does the last page bring us here? An aggressively fatuous description of
Ada itself in trite, sarcastic prose.
The
protagonist, a scion of one of our most illustrious and opulent
families, is Dr. Van Veen, son of Baron “Demon” Veen, that memorable
Manhattan and Reno figure. The end of an extraordinary epoch coincides
with Van’s no less extraordinary boyhood. Nothing in world literature,
save maybe Count Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and
Arcadian innocence with the “Ardis” part of the book. On the fabulous
country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen, an ardent
childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating scenes between Van
and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine, daughter of Marina, Daniel’s stage-struck wife. That the relationship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an aspect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages.
In
spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the story
proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take breath and
quietly survey the new surroundings into which the writer’s magic carpet
has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive girl, Lucette Veen,
Marina’s younger daughter, has also been swept off her feet by Van, the
irresistible rake. Her tragic destiny constitutes one of the highlights
of this delightful book.
The rest of Van’s story turns frankly and
colorfully upon his long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her
marriage to an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor
discovered our country. After her husband’s death our lovers are
reunited. They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling
in the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected
all over the Western Hemisphere.
Not the least adornment of the
chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a
painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of
a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the
romance; a misty view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the
ancestral park; and much, much more.
The distasteful,
dust cover copy about Lucette’s death is a pained joke. The whole thing
is painted not only as fictional, but as cliched and generic. It is as
delusional as the idea of
The Texture of Time becoming a
bestseller. And I believe this is what we are meant to take from it:
this is Van’s fantasy, not “ninety-seven percent true, and three percent
likely” as he protests at the beginning of Part 5, but something only
vaguely resembling cruel reality. This is the pulling back of the
curtain.
Only the final paragraph, which leaves behind the
fatuousness for a series of remembered images, rings true: these are
presumably bits of Van’s real memory that have attached themselves to
his fantasies.
5. Who Is In the Coffin?
One recurrent
theme in Nabokov’s novels–indeed, a typical principle of their
construction–is of a protagonist/narrator who struggles to sustain a
badly-desired fantasy, be it love, power, patriotism, or just having a
decent life. The struggle to assert this fantasy in the face of the
world’s rejection or malice constitutes the narrative, and the
inevitable failure of the fantasy comes at the end of the book. In most
cases the fantasy gives way to reality reasonably easily, as people like
Humbert Humbert and Pnin are not literally delusional. But in the case
of Cincinnatus C, Kinbote, and others, the fantasy bears more on the
book’s contents than the reality.
Ada is Nabokov’s most
extreme treatment of this theme, not the least because we don’t see
anything pushing back against Van Veen. All opposing forces tend to
dissolve away sooner or later. The marshaling of fantasy to defy reality
becomes a structuring principle of the book even to the point of
alienating readers from it, lest they crack open Van’s coffin and
discover his secrets. Where there is little reality, there is little
sympathy to be had, hence the uninvolving nature of so many of the
characters, not least Van himself. While Van puts up a good front to a
point, ultimately he knows he’s not fooling anyone with his “happy
family chronicle.” What starts off in Part 5 as the joyous introduction
ends with solipsistic torment in a self-fashioned hell. And what better
analogy for a solipsistic world than incest?
The exact nature of
Van’s real-life sins remains ambiguous to me. Lucette’s death is almost
certainly one of them, but there remains a greater question which I can
only guess at: who is Van Veen? Just as it appears Charles Kinbote was
himself a fantasy identity of the seemingly ancillary character V.
Botkin in
Pale Fire, I’m not at all certain that Van Veen, if he even exists in the “real world” of
Ada, is the author of
Ada as it appears to us.
Who
if not Van? Perhaps Andrey Vinelander, Ada’s husband for for almost 30
years. He is an Arizonan rancher, and a cuckolded rube. Van and Lucette
hold him in total contempt, yet Ada stays with Andrey through years of
sickness. Though she means to leave him for Van, she refuses to do so
until he is well. Yet he never recovers, and only with his death in
1922, mentioned at the end of Part 3
and Part 4, are Van and Ada finally reunited, just as Van finishes
The Texture of Time–and
perhaps when Van dies. This all seems very suspicious to me, enough to
suggest some deep link between Van and Andrey. If Van is Don Juan and
Don Quixote, is he also the Stone Cuckold himself?
1922 was also the year the Soviet Union was established. I do not think that is a coincidence either.
I’m
sure there are plenty of clues I have not found that will either
support or disprove aspects of my interpretation here. But I am done
with
Ada for now. Even under this interpretation, I’m not sure if the book justifies itself. But this is the best account I can manage.
Describing himself as "a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library," VN first learned English and then French from various governesses; his father, upon realizing that his son could read and write English but not Russian, employed an instructor from a local school to teach VN and his brother Sergei their native tongue. The Nabokov family habitually spoke a melange of French, English, and Russian in their household, and this linguistic diversity would play a prominent role in VN's development as an artist.
A series of tutors helped to provide a diverse education. In particular, the study of drawing and painting sharpened his powers of observation and imagination. A description of his colored pencils from the memoir,
Fleeing the advance of the Red Army in April 1919, the Nabokovs traveled through Constantinople to England, where VN and his brother Sergei enrolled in Cambridge. VN originally studied ichthyology, but, fatigued by academia, he switched to French and Russian literature. Well served by his own heritage and courses from the Tenishev School, he coasted to graduation in 1922 despite disaffection with University life. VN spent little time in the Library, and seems to have easily passed exams aided by his literary extraction and meticulous lecture notes. He continued to play soccer, and had an active social life. He composed poetry in English, and completed a Russian translation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland ("Not the first translation," he maintained, "but the best.") Carroll's precise, scientific background and zealous, sprightly paronomasia provide an interesting counterpart to VN's oeuvre. Indeed, Alice's signature elements of chess, playing cards, and a young girl in curious circumstances are themes that would occur and reoccur in VN's work.
A lifelong insomniac with a dedication to his art, VN wrote mostly at night, which enabled him to lead an aloof but active social life in Berlin. He continued to play soccer, participated in several literary groups, and gave numerous readings of his works. On April 15th, 1925, he married fellow �migr� 
In 1937, VN and his family left Berlin for Paris due to their disgust with the Nazi regime and Mrs. Nabokov's Jewish heritage. In Paris, VN continued to write in Russian, composed a few works in French, and also wrote his first novel in English,
During the 1940s, VN embarked upon a fruitful association with the New Yorker; in addition to his entomological work, he spent quite a bit of time preparing his lectures, and published a scholarly work on Gogol. It may be that his comparatively small output of fiction during this time was an adjustment to writing in English; VN would maintain that the Wellesley years were the happiest, and his scholarly pursuits were satisfying. In 1945, the Nabokov family became American citizens. He also compiled a memoir, published in 1951 as 
VN continued to pursue butterflies during his summer vacations, often in the Rocky Mountains. It was during these trips in the early 1950s that he composed the novel that would engrave his name in the American popular culture - 
The publication of Glory in 1971 completed the process of translating his Russian novels into English. Often collaborating with his son Dmitri, VN occasionally (but not always) revised and augmented his earlier works during the translation process. VN's magisterial linguistic finesse had long enabled him to compose literature and scholarly translations in Russian, English, and French. George Steiner admiringly summarized VN's philology thus: ". . . whereas so many other language exiles clung desperately to the artifice of their native tongue or fell silent, Nabokov moved into successive languages like a traveling potentate."
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