Dear Jansy and the List,

First, Rider Haggard is the author of She - a book I plan to buy and read asap (I doubt it is in any but university libraries these days).

Ada is, we should always remember, firstly a fictional character, and two, doubly a fictional character as she is portrayed to us by another fictional character.

As a player of chess, Nabokov is of course intrigued by the play of symmetry (the chess board) and asymmetry (the position of the pieces on the board - in other words, the white king looks at the red queen, not at the red king). If this were not so, the game of chess would be boring indeed.

Now what has this to do with your question? anti-Terra is a distortion of Terra (the world that the reader lives in and knows). But is it a mirror image? I don't think so. Anti-terra is an invention of Van's. And Van is an invention of VvN - now that may be significant or not.

Who is Ada? Ah, da! Ada (literally 'Hell') and everyone knows that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Is Ada scorned? Well, perhaps. Why does she need to murder so many of her lovers? Is she a black widow spider -- probably not. She does not eat her victims, but at least one (her mentor, whose name escapes me - ah, da - Krolik, the white rabbit) is fed to her larvae.

At this point it becomes too confusing to speak of clearly. Larvae are literally 'white things' - sometimes taken to be ghosts (of what? of whom?) - scientifically the true name is 'instar' - the seed of a worm or caterpillar. And now we are in the land of Lepidotery. Well you see we have gone round in a circle. And we can keep on doing this ad infinitum - but what is the point of that?

I no longer read the Nabokov novels I have already read and re-read. What's the point? There are so many I have yet to read - and then there are the plays and the poetry.

Carolyn

p.s. I didn't respond to the last part of your query. The answer is that as far as we know Van may be impotent. Ada, like most novels, is fiction within fiction within fiction. Does Van have a mother? Does he have siblings? These are all false questions. The work of art is bit of fluff, a bit of nothing formed into a shape that we can perceive. According to some, including Alan Watts and Shakespeare, all the world's a stage and our little lives are rounded with a sleep. By the way, if not too late please see the film (poorly translated title) A Royal Affair - much there to explain how a King can be both a fool and an admirer of Shakespeare; how a physician can be a brilliantly enlightened man and a total idiot; how a woman scorned as a lover can be worshipped as a mother. Hitchcock understood it best - fictional characters, just like real characters, are driven by a desire for something - Hitchcock called it the 'McGuffin' - it does not matter at all what it is. It only matters that it drives the story. At this point theater, art and psychology dissolve together. That's as best I can explain it.

Van fantasizes everything - that is Ada.