Subject
Nabokov's ADA and Sololvyov: Query
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Just when the whole discussion of how to pronounce "Nabokov" seems to have keeled over on its side, it springs back up again!
I have a question--more of a wondering--concerning Ada. In part I, ch. 35, we encounter:
"What, then, was it that raised the animal act to a level higher than even that
of the most exact arts or the wildest flights of pure science? It
would not be sufficient to say that in his love-making with Ada
he discovered the pang, the ogon', the agony of supreme "real-
ity." Reality, better say, lost the quotes it wore like claws—in
a world where independent and original minds must cling to
things or pull things apart in order to ward off madness or
death (which is the master madness). For one spasm or two,
he was safe. The new naked reality needed no tentacle or an-
chor; it lasted a moment, but could be repeated as often as he
and she were physically able to make love. The color and fire
of that instant reality depended solely on Ada's identity as per-
ceived by him…”
“For the sake of the scholars who will read this forbidden
memoir with a secret tingle (they are human) in the secret
chasms of libraries (where the chatter, the lays and the fannies
of rotting pornographers are piously kept)—its author must add
in the margin of galley proofs which a bedridden old man
heroically corrects (for those slippery long snakes add the last
touch to a writer's woes) a few more [the end of the sentence
cannot be deciphered but fortunately the next paragraph is
scrawled on a separate writing-pad page. Editor's Note].
. . . 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 Amer-
ica, 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-
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
which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment
of its perception…”
Now, as we all know, the duplicity of "reality" (clawed and declawed) is a central theme in Nabokov's ouvre; but nowhere else in what I've read of Nabokov have I been struck by how this theme closely parallels that of philososopher Vladimir Solovëv. What strikes me, specifically, is how love, it's physical manifestation and passion (ardour) serve as the catalyst for the realization--even if just a glimpse--of reality in Nabokov; whereas for Solovëv the union of man and woman is what opens a divine wisdom. there are other strata of mystical unions: the union of God and Sophia, heaven and earth... Yet in Ada, heaven seems to be replaced by another earth (earth + earth, or should I say..."Terra") in what seems to me a complementary union.
Would anyone care to comment? A my just connecting random dots? Is Solovëv too Berdyaevesque for Nabokovian musings?
-Paco, Puerto Rico
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