JM to JA: I stand corrected: you
are not referring to ordinary reality, but to how VN's
characters handle or wave it away and also to Nabokov's observation that he tends "more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as
a form of impure imagination" (SO 154). Still,
I don't think that VN, like his heroes, is "waving reality away", but
striving to enhance his consciousness about the "infinite number of
variations" he may experience.
Perhaps he was only speaking from
a natural-scientist's point-of-view, or using a mystic
intuition. Social life feeds on discourse, propaganda,
gossip and lies (Cesar's wife knew that she also needed to look
like an honest woman: to be honest is never enough or even...
necessary.) to engender visible, palpable effects on "reality" which
one cannot wave away without becoming mad (btw: I see your point
qua P.Roth's "grayness", with brilliant
exceptions).
The central issues of "Ada" follow Van's
musings and one of these is, indeed, similar to VN's:
Van Veen: "In
every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual
sharpening and strengthening of the backbone of consciousness, which is the Time
of the strong[...] (A, 559)because unconsciousness "envelops both the Past and the Present from all conceivable
sides."
VN :"The cradle rocks above an abyss,
and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness." (SM,19)
"Flesh and blood existence, wispy dreams, shadows and
books" happen in linear calendric time, whereas I always
understood "Ada" as a book that was
structured self-referentially (there is a suggestion that the
albums Ada and Van investigate in the attic, with inkblots,
maidenhair and pressed flowers, is the book they will have - and
already had - "died into.").
Nabokov reader's choices always reveal a
little about who they are: singularities. There's no available common-sense
reality to unite their points of view...
........................................................................................................................................................................................................
J.A: "the made up world turns out
to be more durable than reality".
JM: "reality" is also
made-up, although 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"?
J.A.: I do not mean "consensus" when I speak of reality,
but merely the concrete limitations in the facts of material mamalian existence,
which seem so overwhelming, heavy and immovable by comparison to the fantasies
of books. Nabokov and his heroes at times try to wave this sort of thing
away--there is no "reality", "reality" is just the invention of philistines and
bourgeois journalists,[...]but experience tells us you can't wave those things
away[...] The central issues of the book are about the real world vs. the inner
creation through imagination, and also mortality[...] Van wants his creation to
stand in for flesh and blood existence, but it can't. Yet oddly, that's all we
have in the end, wispy dreams and shadows and books[...]
....................................................................................................................