NPPF - Ada's mirroring

[David Morris]

>From the N-list:

"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 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 birth dates 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.

                            Notes

1.  Charles Nicol, "Ada or Disorder," in _Nabokov's Fifth Arc_, eds.
    J. E. Rivers and C. Nicol (Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1982), 240.

2.  Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York:
     McGraw Hill, 1969), 244.

3.  ibid 196


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