Two Good Reasons

[David Morris]

--- Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:
> 
> Didn't you think it was ingenious how Van and Ada were both secretly fathered
by Demon out of Marina, true brother and sister. Their half sibling was
Lucette.

Right.  And the heads of the two families are obvious mirrored exagerations. 
Movie Star Marina's husband being a nearly impotent idiot.  Dashing Demon's
wife, Marina sister, Aqua (Aqua-Marina, get it?) spending most of her life in
nut-houses and hospitals.  Here's a take on it from the Nabokov archives (I'm
not convinced about his take on Lucette):


> #341. FAMILY/ANTIFAMILY IN NABOKOV'S WORK
> 8:30-9:45, Lanai 152, Sheraton Washington
> Arranged by the Vladimir Nabokov Society
> Presiding: Eric Hyman, Fayettesville State Un.
>      ---------------------------------------
>       -------------------------------------------------
> 1.         "The Mirrored Self: Incestuous Fictions in Nabokov's _Ada_"
>
>                         Claudia Rattazzi Papka,
>                           Columbia University
>                         <crp4 at 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
> novel recounts.  If one examines more closely the mirrorings,
> 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 birthdates 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.


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