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.
|
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. . . about the rapture of her identity. The asses who
might |
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really think that in the starlight of
eternity, my, Van Veen's, |
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and her, Ada Veen's, conjunction,
somewhere in North Amer- |
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ica, in the nineteenth century represented
but one trillionth of |
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a trillionth part of a pinpoint planet's
significance can bray |
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ailleurs, ailleurs,
ailleurs (the English word would not supply |
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the onomatopoeic element; old Veen is
kind), because the rap- |
[ 220 ]
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ture of her identity, placed under the
microscope of reality |
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(which is the only reality), shows a
complex system of those |
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subtle bridges which the senses
traverse—laughing, embraced, |
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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 |
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of its perception. I am weak. I write
badly. I may die tonight. |
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My magic carpet no longer skims over crown
canopies and |
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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.