According to Ada (the title character of VN’s novel Ada, 1969), the Night of the Burning Barn (when Van and Ada make love for the first time) is the apotheosis of “Ardis the First:”
‘Fine,’ said Van, ‘that’s certainly fascinating; but I was thinking of the first time you might have suspected I was also a sick pig or horse. I am recalling,’ he continued, ‘the round table in the round rosy glow and you kneeling next to me on a chair. I was perched on the chair’s swelling arm and you were building a house of cards, and your every movement was magnified, of course, as in a trance, dream-slow but also tremendously vigilant, and I positively reveled in the girl odor of your bare arm and in that of your hair which now is murdered by some popular perfume. I date the event around June 10 — a rainy evening less than a week after my first arrival at Ardis.’
‘I remember the cards,’ she said, ‘and the light and the noise of the rain, and your blue cashmere pullover — but nothing else, nothing odd or improper, that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument young ladies.’
‘Well, I did while you went on with your delicate work. Tactile magic. Infinite patience. Fingertips stalking gravity. Badly bitten nails, my sweet. Forgive these notes, I cannot really express the discomfort of bulky, sticky desire. You see I was hoping that when your castle toppled you would make a Russian splash gesture of surrender and sit down on my hand.’
‘It was not a castle. It was a Pompeian Villa with mosaics and paintings inside, because I used only court cards from Grandpa’s old gambling packs. Did I sit down on your hot hard hand?’
‘On my open palm, darling. A pucker of paradise. You remained still for a moment, fitting my cup. Then you rearranged your limbs and reknelt.’
‘Quick, quick, quick, collecting the flat shining cards again to build again, again slowly? We were abominably depraved, weren’t we?’
‘All bright kids are depraved. I see you do recollect —’
‘Not that particular occasion, but the apple tree, and when you kissed my neck, et tout le reste. And then — zdravstvuyte: apofeoz, the Night of the Burning Barn!’ (1.18)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): hument: inhale.
tout le reste: all the rest.
zdravstvuyte etc.: Russ., lo and behold: the apotheosis.
At the end of his essay Vlast’ idey (“The Power of Ideas,” 1903) included as an appendix in his book Apofeoz bespochvennosti ("The Apotheosis of Groundlessness," 1919) Lev Shestov quotes the first (De la musique avant toute chose) and the last (et tout le reste est literature) lines of Paul Verlaine’s poem Art poétique (“Art of Poetry,” 1885):
Подведу итог сказанному: идеи г. Мережковского хорошие, благородные, возвышенные идеи - не хуже, может быть, лучше других идей, обращающихся ныне в обществе. Беда в том, что идеи не нужны. De la musique avant toute chose - et tout le reste est littérature.
While Ada’s words et tout le reste seem to hint at et tout le reste est literature (and everything else is literature), de la musique avant toute chose (music before anything else) brings to mind Chose, Van’s English University:
In 1885, having completed his prep-school education, he went up to Chose University in England, where his fathers had gone, and traveled from time to time to London or Lute (as prosperous but not overrefined British colonials called that lovely pearl-gray sad city on the other side of the Channel). (1.28)
In Art Poétique Verlaine says that a poet should avoid la Pointe assassine, l'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur (the assassin Pun, the cruel Quip and the impure Laughter):
Fuis du plus loin la Pointe assassine,
L'Esprit cruel et le Rire impur,
Qui font pleurer les yeux de l'Azur,
Et tout cet ail de basse cuisine!
Run the farthest away from the murderous point,
The cruel spirit, and the impure laugh,
Which make the eyes of the Azure cry,
And all that garlic of low kitchen!
Le Rire (Laughter, 1900) is a book by Henri Bergson, the philosopher whose theory of time had a tremendous influence on Marcel Proust (the author of “In Search of Lost Time”). In his essay The Texture of Time (Part Four of Ada) Van Veen mentions the Proustian bed and the assassin pun:
But beware, anime meus, of the marcel wave of fashionable art; avoid the Proustian bed and the assassin pun (itself a suicide — as those who know their Verlaine will note).
Like Verlaine and Proust, Bergson is directly mentioned in Ada:
Van (crossly): 'I don't understand the first word... What's that? L'adorée? Wait a second' (to Lucette). 'Please, stay where you are.' (Lucette whispers a French child-word with two 'p's.). 'Okay' (pointing toward the corridor). 'Sorry, Polly. Well, is it l'adorée? No? Give me the context. Ah - la durée. La durée is not... sin on what? Synonymous with duration. Aha. Sorry again, I must stopper that orgiastic soda. Hold the line.' (Yells down the 'cory door,' as they called the long second-floor passage at Ardis.) 'Lucette, let it run over, who cares!'
He poured himself another glass of brandy and for a ridiculous moment could not remember what the hell he had been - yes, the polliphone.
It had died, but buzzed as soon as he recradled the receiver, and Lucette knocked discreetly at the same time.
'La durée... For goodness sake, come in without knocking... No, Polly, knocking does not concern you - it's my little cousin. All right. La durée is not synonymous with duration, being saturated - yes, as in Saturday - with that particular philosopher's thought. What's wrong now? You don't know if it's dorée or durée? D, U, R. I thought you knew French. Oh, I see. So long.
'My typist, a trivial but always available blonde, could not make out durée in my quite legible hand because, she says, she knows French, but not scientific French.'
'Actually,' observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope which a drop of soda had stained, 'Bergson is only for very young people or very unhappy people, such as this available rousse.'
'Spotting Bergson,' said the assistant lecher, 'rates a B minus dans ton petit cas, hardly more. Or shall I reward you with a kiss on your krestik - whatever that is?' (2.5)
In Opravdanie svobody (“Justification of Freedom,” 1924), a review of Berdyaev's book Filosofiya neravenstva (“The Philosophy of Inequality,” 1923), Zinaida Hippius (Dmitri Merezhkovski’s wife) mentions Bergson and la durée:
Революция не имеет дленья (la durée, по Бергсону), и когда мы говорим о "революции" -- мы говорим, в сущности, о временах, окружающих этот миг; о времени "послереволюционном", о революционных "эпохах"...
According to Hippius, Revolution does not have la durée. Describing the torments of poor mad Aqua (Marina’s twin sister), Van says that Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution:
Aqua was not quite twenty when the exaltation of her nature had begun to reveal a morbid trend. Chronologically, the initial stage of her mental illness coincided with the first decade of the Great Revelation, and although she might have found just as easily another theme for her delusion, statistics shows that the Great, and to some Intolerable, Revelation caused more insanity in the world than even an over-preoccupation with religion had in medieval times.
Revelation can be more perilous than Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’ but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded, had become nothing but vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls; while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits, inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of old creeds, with rearrangement for melodeon of all the cacophonies of all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world. (1.3)
The notion of Terra appeared on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth’s twin planet on which Ada is set) after the L disaster in the middle of the 19th century:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen. (ibid.)
The Antiterran L disaster (that led to the ban of electricity on Demonia) seems to correspond to the mock execution of Dostoevski and the Petrashevskians on Jan. 3, 1850 (NS) in our world. In “The Power of Ideas,” a review of the second volume of Merezhkovski’s book “Tolstoy and Dostoevski” (1902), Shestov quotes in full Hippius’ poem Elektrichestvo (“Electricity”):
Две нити вместе свиты,
Концы обнажены.
То "да" и "нет" не слиты,
Не слиты - сплетены.
Их тёмное сплетенье
И тесно и мертво;
Но ждёт их воскресенье,
И ждут они его:
Концы соприкоснутся,
Проснутся "да" и "нет".
И "да", и "нет" сольются,
И смерть их будет свет.
Two wires are wrapped together,
The loose ends naked, exposed
A yes and no, not united,
Not united, but juxtaposed.
A dark, dark juxtaposition --
So close together, dead.
But resurrection awaits them;
And they await what waits ahead.
End will meet end in touching
Yes -- no, left and right,
The yes and no awakening,
Inseparably uniting
And their death will be - Light.
Describing the difference between Terra and Antiterra, Van mentions the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark:
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.) (1.3)
One of Van’s Professors, old Paar of Chose (a play on “old pair of shoes”) brings to mind “art my foute,” a phrase used by Van when he and Ada watch Kim Beauharnais’s album:
In an equally casual tone of voice Van said: 'Darling, you smoke too much, my belly is covered with your ashes. I suppose Bouteillan knows Professor Beauharnais's exact address in the Athens of Graphic Arts.'
'You shall not slaughter him,' said Ada. 'He is subnormal, he is, perhaps, blackmailerish, but in his sordidity, there is an istoshnïy ston ('visceral moan') of crippled art. Furthermore, this page is the only really naughty one. And let's not forget that a copperhead of eight was also ambushed in the brush'.
‘Art my foute. This is the hearse of ars, a toilet roll of the Carte du Tendre! I’m sorry you showed it to me. That ape has vulgarized our own mind-pictures. I will either horsewhip his eyes out or redeem our childhood by making a book of it: Ardis, a family chronicle.’
‘Oh do!’ said Ada (skipping another abominable glimpse — apparently, through a hole in the boards of the attic). ‘Look, here’s our little Caliph Island!’
‘I don’t want to look any more. I suspect you find that filth titillating. Some nuts get a kick from motor-bikini comics.’
‘Please, Van, do glance! These are our willows, remember?’
‘"The castle bathed by the Adour:
The guidebooks recommend that tour."’
‘It happens to be the only one in color. The willows look sort of greenish because the twigs are greenish, but actually they are leafless here, it’s early spring, and you can see our red boat Souvenance through the rushes. And here’s the last one: Kim’s apotheosis of Ardis.’ (2.7)
In the Night of the Burning Barn Blanche (a French maid at Ardis) loses her miniver-trimmed slipper.
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): foute: French swear word made to sound ‘foot’.
p.320. ars: Lat., art.
p.320. Carte du Tendre: ‘Map of Tender Love’, sentimental allegory of the seventeenth century.
The main purpose of this brief note is to draw your attention to the updated full version of my previous post, “Carte du Tendre & apotheosis in Ada.”