Ada or Ardor

If Ada or Ardor (most commonly known as Ada) is about people—it is subtitled "A Family Chronicle," and Nabokov supplies a detailed family tree that precedes the novel—it is also a book about literature, a parody. The difficulty for the reader is to judge correctly the proportions of the two. To what extent is it a book about people—above all about two lovers, Ada and Van—and to what extent is it a book about literary works and traditions? Clearly the novel is both. It is an interesting love story about two cousins who fall in love and consummate that love, when Van is fourteen and Ada twelve. The novel follows the vicissitudes of this love affair until the protagonists’ old age. It is also a "chronicle" of the nineteenth and twentieth century novel, with almost as many literary references as James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). It is a love story and a roman a clef—or rather aux cles. It can be confidently predicted that graduate students and critics will want to write articles and books about Ada’s literary allusions well into the future. It is questionable, however, whether readers will also continue to come to Ada because of its love story and family chronicle. Interest in the novel will be generated by its literary complexity on the one hand, and by interest in its explicitly erotic passages on the other. Like Joyce scholars, Nabokov scholars will probably continue to say that the general reader cannot appreciate the novel without understanding its multiple literary references. Ada will probably have as few readers who enjoy it without reference to a literary tradition as Ulysses. The erotic passages will attract the curious, yet it is difficult to imagine such an audience reading the novel from beginning to end with satisfaction.
Nevertheless, reading Ada provides a unique kind of experience. The novel can be appreciated as a work of imagination about people, without reference to other books or literary traditions. There are obstacles to this, just as there are similar obstacles inUlysses, but they are not insuperable. The parody can be understood on the level of personalities and word play; above all, the major imaginative act of the novel can be clearly grasped by a Russianless reader.
Ada does not take place on the familiar Earth; it is set neither in Russia (or the literal context of Russian literature) nor in America. The novel takes place in "Antiterra," sometimes called Demonia. Terra—our Earth—is a myth, a distant world about which the characters in the book dream; it is an unattainable Utopia. This basic premise of the novel should give pause to the seekers of literary influences. Antiterra has its own laws and its own elements, which are different from those on Terra. Consequently the novel’s protagonists are also different; they are not human in the normal sense, nor is the love of Ada and Van a normal human love. It is their inhuman qualities that are central to the novel. The reader’s recognition of these is central to an understanding of Ada.
On the planet of Antiterra, not only Van and Ada but also all other people are possessed by the fury of erotic love. To the exclusion of almost everything else, the characters are obsessed with the "dementia" of ardor. The Veens are not Demonia’s only libertines; nearly every minor character in the book is either inspired or victimized by passion. As the Greeks distinguished between searing Eros and Agape—the warm affection that exists in families or among friends—so Nabokov distinguishes between Antiterra and Terra. The world of Ada is entirely the world of Eros, with other types of love methodically excluded. No characters in the book are left unscathed by the "ardent" practices of pederasty, nympholepsy (the novel frequently harks back to Lolita, 1955), lesbianism, or simple promiscuity and adultery. As the critic Ellen Pifer has remarked in Nabokov and the Novel (1980),nearly everyone, from servants to stealthy heads of state, is busy fondling someone else behind a convenient tree or in a handy corner. More often than not, the object of such ardent caresses is another man’s lover or spouse, a child decades younger than her (or his) adorer, or a triptych of prostitutes who have turned up for the occasion. On Antiterra, young "whorelets," beautiful and diseased, are offered to the highest bidder by their mother or older brother.
The repellent effect of these episodes is deliberate.
As the novel proceeds, the reader quickly discovers that Van, Ada, Van’s father Demon, and other characters are quite unpleasant. The reader might be legitimately puzzled by this unpleasantness, and shortly after the novel appeared in 1969 several critics attributed it to Nabokov, the author. Matthew Hodgart reviewed Ada for The New York Review of Books (May 22, 1969), assuming that Van and Ada’s love affair was modeled after Nabokov’s own marriage. Nabokov’s indignant response to the reviewer (published July 10, 1969) was:
I do object violently to your seeing in reunited Van and Ada (both rather horrible creatures) a picture of my married life. What the hell, Sir, do you know about my married life? I expect a prompt apology from you.
Clearly Hodgart had made a mistake. The novel is a sustained exercise in the description of "inhuman" desire that transcends or obliterates the "restraints, principles and consolations" of everyday life on the Earth. Questions of intention or consequence—of whether human life is preserved or destroyed—are irrelevant to that ecstasy; Nabokov attempts to apply this psychological principle to all the relationships in the book. It is the across-the-board premise of the fictitious world of Antiterra, which is both beautiful and cruel. The powerful and privileged practice every form of aesthetic and erotic indulgence at the expense of the weak.
What is the ultimate goal of this allegorical or fictitious world? The novel traces the passion of Van and Ada from its inception to their old age, when they are more than ninety years old. The reader is informed that when Van is eighty-seven he becomes impotent, but that does not substantially change the nature of his relationship with Ada, and Antiterra remains Antiterra. Van writes a treatise on time and space, he attempts to "caress time." As Nabokov (or rather, Van) writes, "To be eternal the Present must depend on the conscious spanning of an infinite expansure." Indeed, this conscious act is the writing of the novel Ada which has been composed, the reader learns, by Van himself. Ada is Van’s "treatise on the Texture of Time, an investigation of its veily substance, with illustrative metaphors."
The novel ends with a rapid history of the world in the 1920’s and 1930’s, of the conquest of Rus by the Golden Horde and the rise in 1933 of "Athaulf Hindler." The narrator mentions the "L.F.T. idea," which is "leaving from Terra" in a cosmic capsule. Nabokov’s "world" or allegory is consistent to the end.
Normally when irony is used in a work of art, it is signaled by a variety of devices—exaggeration, irreverent twists, understatement, or the unexpected joining of opposites. Ada contains an abundance of the first two devices, but there is very little of the latter two. As a result, "Antiterra" is disconcertingly a world unto itself. The parody lacks real bite, or mordancy. Is it a hypothetical world, or what the world has become? "Van" is incapable of answering this question. Nabokov declines to do so.