Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0012204, Sat, 10 Dec 2005 12:07:22 -0800

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Fwd: A Response to Rosenbaum
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----- Forwarded message from CGuerin@aol.com -----
Date: Sat, 10 Dec 2005 11:18:18 EST
From: CGuerin@aol.com
Reply-To: CGuerin@aol.com
Subject: A Response to Rosenbaum
To:

As one of those who claimed that "literary history has more of a claim on an
unfinished work than its author," let me offer the following, the ending of
Chapter 35 of Ada, or Ardor, as evidence.

. . . about the rapture of her identity. The asses who might really
think that in the starlight of eternity, my, Van Veen's, and her, Ada
Veen's, conjunction, somewhere in North America, in the nineteenth century
represented but one trillionth of a trillionth part of a pinpoint planet's
significance can bray ailleurs, ailleurs, ailleurs (the English word would
not supply the onomatopoeic element; old Veen is kind), because the rap-
[ 220 ] ture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality
(which is the only reality), shows a complex system of those subtle bridges
which the senses traverse?laughing, embraced, throwing flowers in the air?
between membrane and brain, and 221.05 which always was and is a form of
memory, even at the moment of its perception. I am weak. I write badly. I
may die tonight. My magic carpet no longer skims over crown canopies and
gaping nestlings, and her rarest orchids. Insert.


While Ada may be a complete work, it is perhaps, as has been written
elsewhere, one of VN's weakest. It is weak only as a whole. A passage of
such ineffable beauty as the one just quoted, is worth any number of
"completed novels," because it says something that has never been said before,
or at least never so well. (VN was conscious of this, I think, hence the
concluding disclaimer and the ruse that it is almost an afterthought written
on a "writing pad" for insertion.) If The Original of Laura, as I suspect,
contains even a few pages that can stand with this, the world deserves to read
them.

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