[ C.M.Carnot:I have
found that the Terra/Antiterra doubling works similar to the unreliable narrator
which is used throughout VN's work[...]My contention is that Terra is in fact
Earth (gasp!) but the method by which Van and others access information about
Terra is a greatly flawed science. Back on Earth we are accessing a
document that reports information from Antiterra. The final document (Ada)
is just as flawed through a similar method of access and, as it were,
translation..
J. Aisenberg : I
like the idea that the book is a kind of flawed scientific report on the real
world or Terra viewed through a flawed perspective[...] I had always taken the
book to be an extended folie a deux, a willful delusion [...] There is, I think
Nabokov suggests, a real and terrible world which thwarts and cuts down Van. So
Van erects a fantasy that skews the "real" place. Yet still that fantasy world
becomes skewed by whatever "actual" circumstances spawned him [...] then at the
end he pole vaults over his problems and lives happily ever after. Material
"reality" has lost, died, faded away, and now, in the long run, all that remains
is the fantasy left behind. In the end strangely, the made up world turns out to
be more durable than reality[...].
JM:Incongruity is
spacio-temporal... "two chess games with identical openings and
identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one
board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging
development" (A,18)[...] two chess games, or characters, represent a single
one, now doubled because it is apprehended by the two different brains that are
exercising themselves on only one board. Reader and book. Past and
present...]
Chase Carnot: Instead of two chess
games or two different brains overlooking the same game. It could also be
that the "spacio-temporal" split of Terra/Antiterra could simply be simply a
split in consciousness, Van's. He could well be the psychotherapist
drawn into madness by the "texture of time" that is so palpable for his
patients.
JM: I can agree with you about Van and "a
split in consciousness" ( but why not also include the readers
in "Ada"? VN once wrote something like "the reader is my
favourite fiction"...).
I remember arguments about the entire novel having been written solely by
Van, Ada's comments being an "invention" of his ( his feminine
counterpart butting in). Nevertheless I often found Ada's marginal contributions
too Adaish and matter-of-fact to accept this hypothesis
whole-heartedly.
(Like Van's "memoirs", I must now rely only on what I still remember
about the book... and I'm well aware how unreliable Mnemosyne can be
and how dangerous it is to argue out of context.)
JA observed that "the made up world turns out to be more durable than
reality". Since, for me, "reality" is also made-up, although it
was built by a consensus ( or, as a colleague of Van's
once stated,"reality is a shared delusion") what seems to have been
"lost, died, faded away" in "Ada" is...a consensus about
"Ada"?