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Re: reading ADA anagramatically
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On Mar 20, 2009, at 5:08 AM, Alexey Sklyarenko wrote: We have thus
bridged, in only three paragraphs,
several places in different parts of both our world and Demonia (aka
Antiterra, Earth's twin planet, on which
ADA is set), including the river that flows in Nabokov's (and mine)
home city. May be, my "anagramatic"
method is worth anything, after all? May be, a million
euros? :) ---Alexey Sklyarenko
Dear Alexey,
As one who has in the past found your anagrammatical excursions
disturbing, may I be the first to say, hmm, very interesting! In the
light of Pale Fire, this is reminiscent of one of Shade's
"spells" (possible fugue state). As you know Ada is not my favorite
but I have always been intrigued by Claudia Ratazzi Papka's theory
regarding that disturbing oeuvre.
All that is available is in the archives is an abstract of her thesis
[which I have appended below] which the author apparently defended at
an MLA convention, but I have not been able to induce anyone to
remember anything about it.
Any information about her that List members might contribute will be
greatly appreciated.
Carolyn Kunin
p.s. I'm afraid a million euros ain't worth what it used to be.
From the Archives:
001557 96/12/13 17:01 521 Re: Abstracts for VN Sessions
at MLA AATSEEL: Washington D.C..
"The Mirrored Self: Incestuous Fictions in Nabokov's Ada"
Claudia Rattazzi Papka,
Columbia University
<crp4@columbia.edu>
Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle takes
place around the turn of the century in a world called Antiterra, a
planet resembling our own as an mirrored image does. Reflection is
indeed one of the central images of the novel, most simply
explicable as a metaphor for the incestuous love of Van and Ada Veen
which the doublings, anagrams, and allusions which permeate the novel,
however, it becomes possible to argue that the incestuous relationship
itself is but a reflection, and a metaphor, in turn, for the fiction-
writing process.
The Veen family tree, presented in epic fashion at the novel's
beginning, conceals Van and Ada's true, shared parentage, but
reveals a suspicious mirroring in the names and birth dates of their
putative parents, which has led one critic to suggest that the two
sets of parents are simply one set "seen from different
perspectives."[1] That this creation of two from one may be the
central _modus operandi_ of the "sibling planet"[2] casts doubt upon
Antiterra's own reality, and thus upon the reliability, and sanity, of
the narrator himself, Van Veen. Led by this doubt, I examine the
scene of Van and Ada's adolescent consummation and find in its
refelections and doublings,including the narrative doubling in which
Van and Ada debate "in the margins" about Van's recreation of their
shared past, the foundation for another doubt: Does Ada herself
really exist, or is she but a creation of Van's mirroring mind?
The answers to these questions are found in the madness that
runs through the impossible mirrorings of Van's family tree; in the
echoes of Van's first summer with Ada in his second, where several
scenes are replayed with the crucial substitution of his real cousin,
Lucette, for Ada; and in the mirroring Antiterran parodies of literary
works by Paul Verlaine and Guy de Maupassant, as elucidated by the
anagrammatic alter ego of Nabokov himself in _Notes to_ Ada _by Vivian
Darkbloom_. The clues are scattered throughout Van's memoir,and lead
me to conclude that the metatextual analogy Van uses to describe his
youthful maniambulation act is indeed an accurate description of the
nature of Ada's existence--as Ada:
The essence of the satisfaction belonged rather to the
same order as the one he later derived from self-imposed,
extravagantly difficult, seemingly absurd tasks when V.V.
sought to express something, which until expressed had
only a twilight existence (or even none at all--nothing
but the illusion of the backward shadow of its immanent
impression).[3]
Van has had a incestuous encounter with his cousin, Lucette,
and this transgression has led not only to her suicide, but also to
Van's madness. This madness inspires the rewriting of Van's life, his
family, and his world through a series of doublings which create
Antiterra, Van's antifamily (which includes his sister and double,
Ada), and, finally, the novel itself.
Notes
1. Charles Nicol, "Ada or Disorder," in _Nabokov's Fifth Arc_, eds.
J. E. Rivers and C. Nicol (Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1982), 240.
2. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York:
McGraw Hill, 1969), 244.
3. ibid 196
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