Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
Jun. 18th, 2009 15:22![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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I have never read Nabokov, and it strikes me that starting with this book (1969) is entering the master's oeuvre through the back door. Well, I liked it, though having scraped it up out of Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, in which Chabon calls it "proto-steampunk" or something similar, I came to it with perhaps unusual expectations.
The book follows the exploits of one Van Veen, and his cousin (secretly sister) Ada Veen, and their eight-decade love affair, around the world by aeroplane, helicopter, zeppelin, ship, and practically every other manner of transportation possible, including clockwork carriage. On Nabokov's "Antiterra," Louis XVI emigrated to England, which annexed France in 1815; the predominant religion in America is apparently Hinduism; Judaism is a recently-invented offshoot of Christianity (which is mostly Greek Orthodox); Russia has mostly upped stakes to America, while what we think of as "Russia" is the province, roughly equally, of Tartars and Mongols; President Lincoln remarried after his first wife's death late in his second term; the black discoverers of Mississippi form the establishment in the South; our "Terra" is the collective dream (or nightmare) of psychiatric patients and prophets, madmen all; and clockwork technology was perfected by the eighteenth century and rejected in religious fervor by the nineteenth, so that in 1888 Van and Ada's mother films a movie at their ancestral home of Ardis Hall.
Describing the book in these terms is disingenuous: Nabokov throws all these dizzying inventions onto the
background of his tale as casually as a monkey might fling poo (or bananas), because his real concern is Van and Ada--particularly Van, since the entire book takes the form of the manuscript of his memoirs, written at ninety-three, with some marginalia by Ada. Were this truly a genre book, or the ur-steampunk text I had hoped for, all these alternatives would be foregrounded rather than backgrounded, and Nabokov would lavish equal time on explicating them as he does on chronicling Van and Ada. But Ada is not a steampunk book--it's far more Love in the Time of Cholera than The Court of the Air or any other steampunk book I could name (not many, actually).
What Nabokov does love about his fantasy world is that it allows him to poke fun at (or somes just poke in the eye) various hypocrisies, injustices, and particularly sacred cow writers, of ours. T.S. Eliot, Tolstoy and Guy de Maupassant (whose works, in Nabokov's telling, were written by Ada's spinster governess under the pseudonym "Monparnasse") come off none too well in these pages, but above all the hallowed Russian literary giants I think Nabokov is throwing down the gauntlet to Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time seems to have had a huge influence on this book, and who is name-checked implicitly and explicitly the most in these pages, usually to be disagreed with--the entire fourth part of the novel, in which I am currently mired, is an extended meditation (an extract from Van's book on the subject, in point of fact) on the nature of Time versus that of Space, and how Space is illusory while Time's reality is absolute. In this obsessive poking at his predecessors and fellows, Nabokov seems to be doing what Van does in Ada's arms: "Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws--in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness)."
I feel like I almost might leave unmentioned the incandescent fireworks of wordplay in which Nabokov indulges on every page--indeed, it's his stock in trade, and since I speak neither French nor Russian, I estimate that I am missing perhaps half the puns in the book; I think many of the writerly allusions are passing me by as well, though I am better at those than at Russian--but I also think that Nabokov really isn't writing for an audience (despite the allusions to Lolita and lolitas) beyond himself. He's doing what Van does when Van walks on his hands:
"Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the idea-mongers and so forth. 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."
I could say something, I suspect, about the motif of tentacles that runs through this book (so that in the end, Van is wrestling with "the octopus of his brain"), but I shall leave that to Nabokov scholars and merely conclude that wordplay and loveplay, no matter how often enjoyed by author and protagonist, of course do not avail against death, but by using the one to depict the other, Nabokov masterfully constructs his own monument against (and for) Time.
I have never read Nabokov, and it strikes me that starting with this book (1969) is entering the master's oeuvre through the back door. Well, I liked it, though having scraped it up out of Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, in which Chabon calls it "proto-steampunk" or something similar, I came to it with perhaps unusual expectations.
The book follows the exploits of one Van Veen, and his cousin (secretly sister) Ada Veen, and their eight-decade love affair, around the world by aeroplane, helicopter, zeppelin, ship, and practically every other manner of transportation possible, including clockwork carriage. On Nabokov's "Antiterra," Louis XVI emigrated to England, which annexed France in 1815; the predominant religion in America is apparently Hinduism; Judaism is a recently-invented offshoot of Christianity (which is mostly Greek Orthodox); Russia has mostly upped stakes to America, while what we think of as "Russia" is the province, roughly equally, of Tartars and Mongols; President Lincoln remarried after his first wife's death late in his second term; the black discoverers of Mississippi form the establishment in the South; our "Terra" is the collective dream (or nightmare) of psychiatric patients and prophets, madmen all; and clockwork technology was perfected by the eighteenth century and rejected in religious fervor by the nineteenth, so that in 1888 Van and Ada's mother films a movie at their ancestral home of Ardis Hall.
Describing the book in these terms is disingenuous: Nabokov throws all these dizzying inventions onto the
background of his tale as casually as a monkey might fling poo (or bananas), because his real concern is Van and Ada--particularly Van, since the entire book takes the form of the manuscript of his memoirs, written at ninety-three, with some marginalia by Ada. Were this truly a genre book, or the ur-steampunk text I had hoped for, all these alternatives would be foregrounded rather than backgrounded, and Nabokov would lavish equal time on explicating them as he does on chronicling Van and Ada. But Ada is not a steampunk book--it's far more Love in the Time of Cholera than The Court of the Air or any other steampunk book I could name (not many, actually).
What Nabokov does love about his fantasy world is that it allows him to poke fun at (or somes just poke in the eye) various hypocrisies, injustices, and particularly sacred cow writers, of ours. T.S. Eliot, Tolstoy and Guy de Maupassant (whose works, in Nabokov's telling, were written by Ada's spinster governess under the pseudonym "Monparnasse") come off none too well in these pages, but above all the hallowed Russian literary giants I think Nabokov is throwing down the gauntlet to Proust, whose In Search of Lost Time seems to have had a huge influence on this book, and who is name-checked implicitly and explicitly the most in these pages, usually to be disagreed with--the entire fourth part of the novel, in which I am currently mired, is an extended meditation (an extract from Van's book on the subject, in point of fact) on the nature of Time versus that of Space, and how Space is illusory while Time's reality is absolute. In this obsessive poking at his predecessors and fellows, Nabokov seems to be doing what Van does in Ada's arms: "Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws--in a world where independent and original minds must cling to things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or death (which is the master madness)."
I feel like I almost might leave unmentioned the incandescent fireworks of wordplay in which Nabokov indulges on every page--indeed, it's his stock in trade, and since I speak neither French nor Russian, I estimate that I am missing perhaps half the puns in the book; I think many of the writerly allusions are passing me by as well, though I am better at those than at Russian--but I also think that Nabokov really isn't writing for an audience (despite the allusions to Lolita and lolitas) beyond himself. He's doing what Van does when Van walks on his hands:
"Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation in the sense utterly and naturally unknown to the innocents of critical appraisal, the social-scene commentators, the moralists, the idea-mongers and so forth. 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."
I could say something, I suspect, about the motif of tentacles that runs through this book (so that in the end, Van is wrestling with "the octopus of his brain"), but I shall leave that to Nabokov scholars and merely conclude that wordplay and loveplay, no matter how often enjoyed by author and protagonist, of course do not avail against death, but by using the one to depict the other, Nabokov masterfully constructs his own monument against (and for) Time.