Potter, David James. Ardor or Ada?: Authority, Artifice, and Ambivalence in Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor.

This thesis argues for a number of fresh readings of and perspectives on Nabokov’s Ada. I am, however, equally interested in how Nabokov is read more generally, and argue against some of the worst habits of Nabokov scholarship to date. Nabokov’s own authority over how his works are to be read “correctly” is largely unquestioned by a great number of influential Nabokovians, chief among them Brian Boyd. Still, at least since Michael Wood’s The Magician’s Doubts, there has been enough work to challenge the author’s total authority over his own texts. Reading Nabokov with doubt, ambiguity, and even insubordination (like Eric Naiman) reveals richer, more nuanced texts than a more “correct” approach. Despite its being generally recognized as having science-fiction elements, there is a great deal that still has not been unpacked about the more alien workings and history of Ada’s fictional world. With the help of the methodology in Naiman’s work on the novel, I have pieced together some overlooked evidence about Terra, Antiterra, and the L disaster. An episode in which Van, the narrator, describes an event as having had “a faint paramnesic tang” (3. 8. 510) also gives us striking insight into how he perceives his world. Time flows strangely in Ada. Instead of a one-way march towards the future, it behaves more like a tidal river, with events from all over the timeline paramnesically rippling backwards and forwards. An event as rupturing as Lucette’s death ripples backwards in time through both the novel as a piece of writing, and Antiterra as a world in and of itself. Because Van writes his memoir long after Lucette’s suicide, her signs (Naiman singling out the letters t, a, c, and l for particular attention) are scattered throughout the novel, and they do not mirror the linear progression of the plot. She often manifests despite, and at odds with, what Van as our narrator thinks is most important. The thesis concludes with an argument against Brian Boyd’s reading of Lucette, in the hope of drawing out fresh nuances of her role in the novel. I contrast it with Naiman’s deliberately “preposterous” reading of a Lucette frozen in a posthumous inferno of perpetual and unfulfillable lust. What emerges is a far more nuanced text, melancholic, enigmatic, and ambivalent where Boyd’s more author-sanctioned approach gives us false resolution and sentimentality.