Two Good Reasons
Paul Mackin
paul.mackin at verizon.net
Thu Feb 20 14:23:03 CST 2003
On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 14:27, David Morris wrote:
> --- 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):
>
Interesting. I'll have to give this reader's views some thought. Perhaps
I should reread the whole book. The reader is certainly misleading about
Lucette's suicide. Poor, good Lucette is deperately in love with her
half brother (she may still think they are only cousins).. She kills
herself because she is going to be shut out of his and Ada's life.Van
rejects her. They had almost arranged to be sleep together and Van backs
off. It was not quite like being stood up on a blind date (as was poor
Hazel in Pale Fire but close). Frankly I don't remember Van and Lucette
actually having one on one sex (there was earlier group sex play I
guess) before the final breakup but in any event such was not the reason
for her suicide.
On the other hand perhaps the reader sees things I missed. I'll have to
mull things over.
Don't think I'm saying anything additional here that might be considered
a spoiler for the book. All the secret relationships are clear to the
reader very early on.
P.
> > #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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