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Brian Boyd on Scatology in ADA
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" <chtodel@cox.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:58 PM
Subject: RE: Scatology in ADA
From Brian Boyd:
As Abdel Bouazza notes, I have referred to the “structurally perfect stool”
example in Nabokov’s ADA (2001 ed, p. 197). There is more that could be said
about this, but (pace Jansy de Souza) I don’t think it has anything to do
with Lucette.
Let’s look at exhibit B, from Ada II.3: 355:
Cherry, the only lad in our next (American) floramor, a little
Salopian of eleven or twelve, looked so amusing with his copper curls,
dreamy eyes and elfin cheekbones that two exceptionally sportive courtesans,
entertaining Van, prevailed upon him one night to try the boy. Their joint
efforts failed, however, to arouse the pretty catamite, who had been
exhausted by too many recent engagements. His girlish crupper proved sadly
defaced by the varicolored imprints of bestial clawings and flesh-twistings;
but worst of all, the little fellow could not disguise a state of acute
indigestion, marked by unappetizing dysenteric symptoms that coated his
lover’s shaft with mustard and blood, the result, no doubt, of eating too
many green apples. Eventually, he had to be destroyed or given away.
I will offer two kinds of answers, a quick pointer for those who want to
find their own way, and a long explanation for those who prefer a tour
guide.
The pointer: the central and right-hand panels of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly
Delights.
Now don’t read any further, if you want to explore and think things through
for yourself.
The tour guide:
Disgust is a key human emotion, one of seven recognized cross-culturally as
one of the seven basic human emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear,
surprise, contempt and disgust). Art aims to elicit response, and Nabokov,
like other writers and artists, avails himself from time to time of disgust
as one note in his emotional keyboard. (A rare exception like Swift can make
it the central emotion in his whole oeuvre.)
Feces produce a reaction of disgust in humans, and Nabokov occasionally uses
them in ways that make them fresh and unappetizing, not mere “shit” that has
become dry and odorless through long exposure but, for instance, the “bright
pat of dog dirt somebody had already slipped upon,” which the New Yorker
censored out of the first publication of Chapter 3 of Pnin. In that case,
it’s simply a vivid—unpleasantly vivid, but for that reason highly
evocative—detail. But the case of Cherry whose “dysenteric symptoms . . .
coated his lover’s shaft with mustard and blood” is an affront to the
imagination, and, when it leads to the flip but brutal “Eventually, he had
to be destroyed or given away,” to the moral sense.
Throughout Ada Nabokov plays on the tension between, on the one hand, Van
and Ada’s belief that Ardis is their private paradise of love and sex, and
on the other, their awareness, and his own, that love and sex are rather
more complicated. The very repetition of lovemaking makes Ardis blissful for
the young lovers, but the repeatability of the act of love also has its
sordid side, as Van finds out in 1888, when he discovers Ada’s infidelity,
or as we see here in the Villa Venus chapter, which replays Ardis’s rampant
sexuality in much darker tones.
Remember that according to Eric Veen’s stipulations a Villa Venus patron can
avail himself of a boy only “between two sequences of three girls each, all
possessed in the course of the same week.” The frantic repetitiveness of sex
in the Villa Venus, and the ghastly and nightmarish consequences in the case
of Cherry, make it seem not one of the “parodies of paradise” Eric and his
grandfather have planned, but hellish. And in that Nabokov is building on
and evoking Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which he introduces
explicitly in Ada II.10, to which he compares Ada as a whole (SO 306), and
which, I argue (in “Ada, The Bog and the Garden,” in the next Nabokov
Studies), he had in mind as a structural foundation for the novel before he
began writing Ada.
Cherry has eaten too many green apples. The fruits recalls the hundred or so
fruits (including many cherries) in the central panel of Bosch’s triptych
(Demon lingers on just one detail from the painting, a fruit: “the
woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with” one of the figures in the
foreground, II.10: 437). That central panel evokes a world of repetitive
sensual and sexual pleasure that seems both paradisiac (a garden, like Eden
in the left panel) and yet by its focus on the fruit—sweet and succulent but
also reminding us of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and Adam and Eve’s
expulsion from paradise for tasting it—also implying the consequences of
sin, which become explicit in the Hell on earth of the right-hand panel. And
there is good reason to think that the Villa Venus chapter comes as close to
Bosch’s vision of hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights or The Last
Judgment (also evoked in detail by Demon) as Nabokov could without merely
transposing. The paragraph on Cherry alone can be read in conjunction with
the right-hand panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights: the shafts of
various kinds penetrating many a rectum, the unsavory anal and oral
discharges, the “bestial clawings.”
The casual horror of Van’s “Eventually he had to be destroyed or given
away”—the smartness, the indifference, the disproportion between his
unruffled self-concern and the damage that has been done—compound the
hellishness even for a first-time reader. Is Nabokov as offhand about
Cherry—admittedly only an incidental character, coming to life and facing a
grisly death within the space of a paragraph—as his hero is?
Not at all. In fact he links Cherry repeatedly with others much more central
to the novel who are wrecked by sex, especially Lucette.
The redness of a cherry (and the boy’s “copper curls”) and the greenness of
the apples bring to mind the red-green combination associated with Lucette
throughout the novel: her red hair, the green clothes she wears to
complement it. Indeed, Lucette too has “copper curls” (I.36: 226) and the
green-red combination recurs in reference to her in the one further “copper
curl” in Ada (“a pair of green eyes and a copper curl,” II.8: 421).
Cherry is slang for “virginity,” and Lucette’s virginity is a key focus in
the novel: her technical virginity (no “intromission of the male member,” to
echo Joyce), but her actual initiation into sex in various ways by Van and
Ada, from eight (visually), at twelve (her being fondled and kissed by Van
as an ostensible sop to Lucette and decoy for Marina and Mlle Larivière but
mostly as an escape route for Ada to meet Percy), and at fourteen, her
lesbian relationship with Ada. Lucette describes her entanglements with Ada
in intimate and gymnastic terms; it is the most detailed description of
homosexual activity in the novel, and an Opheliac Lucette’s thrusting on Van
such a description in such a way itself shows how unbalanced she has already
become. The other most elaborate description of homosexual sex in the novel
is here, in Van’s damaging encounter with Cherry.
Cherry has a “girlish crupper”; that word occurs once elsewhere in the
novel, referring to Lucette’s “little crupper” (I.32: 198). Nabokov here
focuses on another link. Van takes Ada repeatedly from behind, and Lucette,
who has seen them love-making again and again, naively wonders, after
sitting on his knee on the return from the 1888 picnic, if she has been
impregnated by him. There is in fact a “behind” motif associated with sex
and its dangers throughout Ardis (see Nabokov’s Ada 2001: 134-44), and here
in the Villa Venus it reaches its sickest form. Part of the “behind” motif
is Lucette’s nickname “Pet” (from the French for “fart,” but with a play on
the sexual petting used to appease and confuse Lucette); Cherry disappears
from the novel as if he had been no more than a pet (“had to be destroyed or
given away”).
Cherry appears to have eaten “too many green apples”—unripe apples, as if
the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge have been savored before they are ready.
Cherry and Lucette both taste the fruits of sex too early, and to fatal
effect. Ada may begin with Ardis’s “parod[y] of paradise,” but like the
Garden of Earthly Delights, it grades into the hellish as we move from left
to right.
Lucette’s suicide as a result of her being embroiled in the love of Van and
Ada repeats Aqua’s suicide as a result of her being caught up in Demon and
Marina’s amours. Cherry is “a little Salopian,” a little lad from
Shropshire, echoing A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, with its wistful songs
in praise of dead “lads.” (No wonder Kinbote rates it so highly.) (Nabokov
also plays on the French salope, “slattern, slut.”) There is one other
allusion to A Shropshire Lad in Ada, as part of Aqua’s decline into madness,
as she hears water speak, echoing, perhaps, “a bit of poetry heard at a
lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity” (A Shropshire Lad, V: “Be
kind, have pity, my own, my pretty”). Before she sank into madness, Aqua
believed in “sweet Terra” as a kind of heaven, unlike those who saw it as
full of “vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of
carnivora and the fangs of serpents, reviler and tormentors of female souls”
(I.3: 21). But she slips into her own private hell, and Nabokov keeps her in
mind when he places the “pretty” “Salopian” in an infernal Villa Venus. Van
may have pity for Aqua, but he seems to feel none for Cherry; Nabokov
invites our pity for them both, and for all for whom the heaven of love
becomes a personal hell.
From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" <chtodel@cox.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 5:58 PM
Subject: RE: Scatology in ADA
From Brian Boyd:
As Abdel Bouazza notes, I have referred to the “structurally perfect stool”
example in Nabokov’s ADA (2001 ed, p. 197). There is more that could be said
about this, but (pace Jansy de Souza) I don’t think it has anything to do
with Lucette.
Let’s look at exhibit B, from Ada II.3: 355:
Cherry, the only lad in our next (American) floramor, a little
Salopian of eleven or twelve, looked so amusing with his copper curls,
dreamy eyes and elfin cheekbones that two exceptionally sportive courtesans,
entertaining Van, prevailed upon him one night to try the boy. Their joint
efforts failed, however, to arouse the pretty catamite, who had been
exhausted by too many recent engagements. His girlish crupper proved sadly
defaced by the varicolored imprints of bestial clawings and flesh-twistings;
but worst of all, the little fellow could not disguise a state of acute
indigestion, marked by unappetizing dysenteric symptoms that coated his
lover’s shaft with mustard and blood, the result, no doubt, of eating too
many green apples. Eventually, he had to be destroyed or given away.
I will offer two kinds of answers, a quick pointer for those who want to
find their own way, and a long explanation for those who prefer a tour
guide.
The pointer: the central and right-hand panels of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly
Delights.
Now don’t read any further, if you want to explore and think things through
for yourself.
The tour guide:
Disgust is a key human emotion, one of seven recognized cross-culturally as
one of the seven basic human emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear,
surprise, contempt and disgust). Art aims to elicit response, and Nabokov,
like other writers and artists, avails himself from time to time of disgust
as one note in his emotional keyboard. (A rare exception like Swift can make
it the central emotion in his whole oeuvre.)
Feces produce a reaction of disgust in humans, and Nabokov occasionally uses
them in ways that make them fresh and unappetizing, not mere “shit” that has
become dry and odorless through long exposure but, for instance, the “bright
pat of dog dirt somebody had already slipped upon,” which the New Yorker
censored out of the first publication of Chapter 3 of Pnin. In that case,
it’s simply a vivid—unpleasantly vivid, but for that reason highly
evocative—detail. But the case of Cherry whose “dysenteric symptoms . . .
coated his lover’s shaft with mustard and blood” is an affront to the
imagination, and, when it leads to the flip but brutal “Eventually, he had
to be destroyed or given away,” to the moral sense.
Throughout Ada Nabokov plays on the tension between, on the one hand, Van
and Ada’s belief that Ardis is their private paradise of love and sex, and
on the other, their awareness, and his own, that love and sex are rather
more complicated. The very repetition of lovemaking makes Ardis blissful for
the young lovers, but the repeatability of the act of love also has its
sordid side, as Van finds out in 1888, when he discovers Ada’s infidelity,
or as we see here in the Villa Venus chapter, which replays Ardis’s rampant
sexuality in much darker tones.
Remember that according to Eric Veen’s stipulations a Villa Venus patron can
avail himself of a boy only “between two sequences of three girls each, all
possessed in the course of the same week.” The frantic repetitiveness of sex
in the Villa Venus, and the ghastly and nightmarish consequences in the case
of Cherry, make it seem not one of the “parodies of paradise” Eric and his
grandfather have planned, but hellish. And in that Nabokov is building on
and evoking Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, which he introduces
explicitly in Ada II.10, to which he compares Ada as a whole (SO 306), and
which, I argue (in “Ada, The Bog and the Garden,” in the next Nabokov
Studies), he had in mind as a structural foundation for the novel before he
began writing Ada.
Cherry has eaten too many green apples. The fruits recalls the hundred or so
fruits (including many cherries) in the central panel of Bosch’s triptych
(Demon lingers on just one detail from the painting, a fruit: “the
woman-sized strawberry that you embrace with” one of the figures in the
foreground, II.10: 437). That central panel evokes a world of repetitive
sensual and sexual pleasure that seems both paradisiac (a garden, like Eden
in the left panel) and yet by its focus on the fruit—sweet and succulent but
also reminding us of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and Adam and Eve’s
expulsion from paradise for tasting it—also implying the consequences of
sin, which become explicit in the Hell on earth of the right-hand panel. And
there is good reason to think that the Villa Venus chapter comes as close to
Bosch’s vision of hell in The Garden of Earthly Delights or The Last
Judgment (also evoked in detail by Demon) as Nabokov could without merely
transposing. The paragraph on Cherry alone can be read in conjunction with
the right-hand panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights: the shafts of
various kinds penetrating many a rectum, the unsavory anal and oral
discharges, the “bestial clawings.”
The casual horror of Van’s “Eventually he had to be destroyed or given
away”—the smartness, the indifference, the disproportion between his
unruffled self-concern and the damage that has been done—compound the
hellishness even for a first-time reader. Is Nabokov as offhand about
Cherry—admittedly only an incidental character, coming to life and facing a
grisly death within the space of a paragraph—as his hero is?
Not at all. In fact he links Cherry repeatedly with others much more central
to the novel who are wrecked by sex, especially Lucette.
The redness of a cherry (and the boy’s “copper curls”) and the greenness of
the apples bring to mind the red-green combination associated with Lucette
throughout the novel: her red hair, the green clothes she wears to
complement it. Indeed, Lucette too has “copper curls” (I.36: 226) and the
green-red combination recurs in reference to her in the one further “copper
curl” in Ada (“a pair of green eyes and a copper curl,” II.8: 421).
Cherry is slang for “virginity,” and Lucette’s virginity is a key focus in
the novel: her technical virginity (no “intromission of the male member,” to
echo Joyce), but her actual initiation into sex in various ways by Van and
Ada, from eight (visually), at twelve (her being fondled and kissed by Van
as an ostensible sop to Lucette and decoy for Marina and Mlle Larivière but
mostly as an escape route for Ada to meet Percy), and at fourteen, her
lesbian relationship with Ada. Lucette describes her entanglements with Ada
in intimate and gymnastic terms; it is the most detailed description of
homosexual activity in the novel, and an Opheliac Lucette’s thrusting on Van
such a description in such a way itself shows how unbalanced she has already
become. The other most elaborate description of homosexual sex in the novel
is here, in Van’s damaging encounter with Cherry.
Cherry has a “girlish crupper”; that word occurs once elsewhere in the
novel, referring to Lucette’s “little crupper” (I.32: 198). Nabokov here
focuses on another link. Van takes Ada repeatedly from behind, and Lucette,
who has seen them love-making again and again, naively wonders, after
sitting on his knee on the return from the 1888 picnic, if she has been
impregnated by him. There is in fact a “behind” motif associated with sex
and its dangers throughout Ardis (see Nabokov’s Ada 2001: 134-44), and here
in the Villa Venus it reaches its sickest form. Part of the “behind” motif
is Lucette’s nickname “Pet” (from the French for “fart,” but with a play on
the sexual petting used to appease and confuse Lucette); Cherry disappears
from the novel as if he had been no more than a pet (“had to be destroyed or
given away”).
Cherry appears to have eaten “too many green apples”—unripe apples, as if
the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge have been savored before they are ready.
Cherry and Lucette both taste the fruits of sex too early, and to fatal
effect. Ada may begin with Ardis’s “parod[y] of paradise,” but like the
Garden of Earthly Delights, it grades into the hellish as we move from left
to right.
Lucette’s suicide as a result of her being embroiled in the love of Van and
Ada repeats Aqua’s suicide as a result of her being caught up in Demon and
Marina’s amours. Cherry is “a little Salopian,” a little lad from
Shropshire, echoing A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, with its wistful songs
in praise of dead “lads.” (No wonder Kinbote rates it so highly.) (Nabokov
also plays on the French salope, “slattern, slut.”) There is one other
allusion to A Shropshire Lad in Ada, as part of Aqua’s decline into madness,
as she hears water speak, echoing, perhaps, “a bit of poetry heard at a
lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity” (A Shropshire Lad, V: “Be
kind, have pity, my own, my pretty”). Before she sank into madness, Aqua
believed in “sweet Terra” as a kind of heaven, unlike those who saw it as
full of “vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of
carnivora and the fangs of serpents, reviler and tormentors of female souls”
(I.3: 21). But she slips into her own private hell, and Nabokov keeps her in
mind when he places the “pretty” “Salopian” in an infernal Villa Venus. Van
may have pity for Aqua, but he seems to feel none for Cherry; Nabokov
invites our pity for them both, and for all for whom the heaven of love
becomes a personal hell.