In the Kalugano hospital, where he recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper, Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Ada, 1969) mentally calls Ardis Hall (the estate of his uncle Daniel Veen) “le Château de la Flèche, Flesh Hall:”
On Monday around noon he was allowed to sit in a deckchair, on the lawn, which he had avidly gazed at for some days from his window. Dr Fitzbishop had said, rubbing his hands, that the Luga laboratory said it was the not always lethal ‘arethusoides’ but it had no practical importance now, because the unfortunate music teacher, and composer, was not expected to spend another night on Demonia, and would be on Terra, ha-ha, in time for evensong. Doc Fitz was what Russians call a poshlyak (‘pretentious vulgarian’) and in some obscure counter-fashion Van was relieved not to be able to gloat over the wretched Rack’s martyrdom.
A large pine tree cast its shadow upon him and his book. He had borrowed it from a shelf holding a medley of medical manuals, tattered mystery tales, the Rivière de Diamants collection of Monparnasse stories, and this odd volume of the Journal of Modern Science with a difficult essay by Ripley, ‘The Structure of Space.’ He had been wrestling with its phoney formulas and diagrams for several days now and saw he would not be able to assimilate it completely before his release from Lakeview Hospital on the morrow.
A hot sunfleck reached him, and tossing the red volume aside, he got up from his chair. With the return of health the image of Ada kept rising within him like a bitter and brilliant wave, ready to swallow him. His bandages had been removed; nothing but a special vest-like affair of flannel enveloped his torso, and though it was tight and thick it did not protect him any longer from the poisoned point of Ardis. Arrowhead Manor. Le Château de la Flèche, Flesh Hall. (1.42)
In Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856) the beadle in the Rouen Сathedral exclaims “la Flèche! la Flèche!” (“the steeple! the steeple!”):
Mais Léon tira vivement une pièce blanche de sa poche et saisit Emma par le bras. Le Suisse demeura tout stupéfait, ne comprenant point cette munificence intempestive, lorsqu'il restait encore à l'étranger tant de choses à voir. Aussi le rappelant :
— Eh ! monsieur. La Flèche ! la Flèche !…
— Merci, dit Léon.
— Monsieur a tort ! Elle aura quatre cent quarante pieds, neuf de moins que la grande pyramide d'Égypte. Elle est tout en fonte, elle…
But Leon quickly produced a piece of silver and grasped Emma by the arm. The beadle looked completely dumbfounded, quite unable to understand this premature munificence when there were still so many things to show the stranger. So he started shouting after him.
'Hi! Monsieur. The steeple! the steeple!'
'No, thanks!' said Leon.
'Oh, but Monsieur, what a pity! It's four hundred and forty feet high – only nine feet less than the Great Egyptian Pyramid. It's all made of cast iron, it...' (Chapter 25)
The Great Egyptian Pyramid brings to mind the pyramids of Ladorah (visited by Van mainly because of its name):
He traveled, he studied, he taught.
He contemplated the pyramids of Ladorah (visited mainly because of its name) under a full moon that silvered the sands inlaid with pointed black shadows. He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. From a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary, young Lady Scramble. On another terrace, overlooking another fabled bay, Eberthella Brown, the local Shah’s pet dancer (a naive little thing who thought ‘baptism of desire’ meant something sexual), spilled her morning coffee upon noticing a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping, along the balustrade and curled up in a swoon when picked up by Van — who for hours, after removing the beautiful animal to a bush, kept gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips with the girl’s tweezers.
He learned to appreciate the singular little thrill of following dark byways in strange towns, knowing well that he would discover nothing, save filth, and ennui, and discarded ‘merrycans’ with ‘Billy’ labels, and the jungle jingles of exported jazz coming from syphilitic cafés. He often felt that the famed cities, the museums, the ancient torture house and the suspended garden, were but places on the map of his own madness.
He liked composing his works (Illegible Signatures, 1895; Clairvoyeurism, 1903; Furnished Space, 1913; The Texture of Time, begun 1922), in mountain refuges, and in the drawing rooms of great expresses, and on the sun decks of white ships, and on the stone tables of Latin public parks. He would uncurl out of an indefinitely lengthy trance, and note with wonder that the ship was going the other way or that the order of his left-hand fingers was reversed, now beginning, clockwise, with his thumb as on his right hand, or that the marble Mercury that had been looking over his shoulder had been transformed into an attentive arborvitae. He would realize all at once that three, seven, thirteen years, in one cycle of separation, and then four, eight, sixteen, in yet another, had elapsed since he had last embraced, held, bewept Ada.
Numbers and rows and series — the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time — seemed bent on mechanizing his mind. Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon. Terra waited. (3.1)
Sidra is Ardis in reverse. In a letter to Van Ada (now married to Andrey Vinelander) mentions Van’s book Reflections in Sidra:
It would seem indeed that continued ignorance of each other’s existence might have looked more suspicious than the following sort of note:
Agavia Ranch
February 5, 1905
I have just read Reflections in Sidra, by Ivan Veen, and I regard it as a grand piece, dear Professor. The ‘lost shafts of destiny’ and other poetical touches reminded me of the two or three times you had tea and muffins at our place in the country about twenty years ago. I was, you remember (presumptuous phrase!), a petite fille modèle practicing archery near a vase and a parapet and you were a shy schoolboy (with whom, as my mother guessed, I may have been a wee bit in love!), who dutifully picked up the arrows I lost in the lost shrubbery of the lost castle of poor Lucette’s and happy, happy Adette’s childhood, now a ‘Home for Blind Blacks’ — both my mother and L., I’m sure, would have backed Dasha’s advice to turn it over to her Sect. Dasha, my sister-in-law (you must meet her soon, yes, yes, yes, she’s dreamy and lovely, and lots more intelligent than I), who showed me your piece, asks me to add she hopes to ‘renew’ your acquaintance — maybe in Switzerland, at the Bellevue in Mont Roux, in October. I think you once met pretty Miss ‘Kim’ Blackrent, well, that’s exactly dear Dasha’s type. She is very good at perceiving and pursuing originality and all kinds of studies which I can’t even name! She finished Chose (where she read History — our Lucette used to call it ‘Sale Histoire,’ so sad and funny!). For her you’re le beau ténébreux, because once upon a time, once upon libellula wings, not long before my marriage, she attended — I mean at that time, I’m stuck in my ‘turnstyle’ — one of your public lectures on dreams, after which she went up to you with her latest little nightmare all typed out and neatly clipped together, and you scowled darkly and refused to take it. Well, she’s been after Uncle Dementiy to have him admonish le beau ténébreux to come to Mont Roux Bellevue Hotel, in October, around the seventeenth, I guess, and he only laughs and says it’s up to Dashenka and me to arrange matters.
So ‘congs’ again, dear Ivan! You are, we both think, a marvelous, inimitable artist who should also ‘only laugh,’ if cretinic critics, especially lower-upper-middle-class Englishmen, accuse his turnstyle of being ‘coy’ and ‘arch,’ much as an American farmer finds the parson ‘peculiar’ because he knows Greek. (3.7)
As pointed out by Mlle Larivière (Lucette’s governess), Ardis means in Greek “arrowhead.”
A month later, in March 1905, Demon Veen (Van’s and Ada’s father) perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific. Van does not realize that Ada (who could not pardon Demon his forcing Van to give her up) managed to persuade the pilot to destroy his machine in midair. A couple of months after Demon’s death Van meets Ada in Mont Roux and, in a conversation with her, mentions “that minor poetry of flesh:”
‘My upper-lip space feels indecently naked.’ (He had shaved his mustache off with howls of pain in her presence). ‘And I cannot keep sucking in my belly all the time.’
‘Oh, I like you better with that nice overweight — there’s more of you. It’s the maternal gene, I suppose, because Demon grew leaner and leaner. He looked positively Quixotic when I saw him at Mother’s funeral. It was all very strange. He wore blue mourning. D’Onsky’s son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. Then a robed person who looked like an extra in a technicolor incarnation of Vishnu made an incomprehensible sermon. Then she went up in smoke. He said to me, sobbing: "I will not cheat the poor grubs!" Practically a couple of hours after he broke that promise we had sudden visitors at the ranch — an incredibly graceful moppet of eight, black-veiled, and a kind of duenna, also in black, with two bodyguards. The hag demanded certain fantastic sums — which Demon, she said, had not had time to pay, for "popping the hymen" — whereupon I had one of our strongest boys throw out vsyu (the entire) kompaniyu.’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Van, ‘they had been growing younger and younger — I mean the girls, not the strong silent boys. His old Rosalind had a ten-year-old niece, a primed chickabiddy. Soon he would have been poaching them from the hatching chamber.’
‘You never loved your father,’ said Ada sadly.
‘Oh, I did and do — tenderly, reverently, understandingly, because, after all, that minor poetry of the flesh is something not unfamiliar to me. But as far as we are concerned, I mean you and I, he was buried on the same day as our uncle Dan.’
‘I know, I know. It’s pitiful! And what use was it? Perhaps I oughtn’t to tell you, but his visits to Agavia kept getting rarer and shorter every year. Yes, it was pitiful to hear him and Andrey talking. I mean, Andrey n’a pas le verbe facile, though he greatly appreciated — without quite understanding it — Demon’s wild flow of fancy and fantastic fact, and would often exclaim, with his Russian "tssk-tssk" and a shake of the head — complimentary and all that — "what a balagur (wag) you are!" — And then, one day, Demon warned me that he would not come any more if he heard again poor Andrey’s poor joke (Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich) or what Dorothy, l’impayable ("priceless for impudence and absurdity") Dorothy, thought of my camping out in the mountains with only Mayo, a cowhand, to protect me from lions.’
‘Could one hear more about that?’ asked Van. (3.8)
A person with only one arm, D’Onsky’s son brings to mind the one-armed custodian (a banal pensioner with an empty sleeve) of the Montisert museum in VN’s story Poseshchenie muzeya (“The Visit to the Museum,” 1939). In VN's story the narrator curses the spire of a long-necked cahedral, always the same one, that keeps popping up at the end of every street.
On Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set) Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is known as Floeberg’s Ursula:
On Sunday mornings the mail came late, because of the voluminous Sunday supplements of the papers from Balticomore, and Kaluga, and Luga, which Robin Sherwood, the old postman, in his bright green uniform, distributed on horseback throughout the somnolent countryside. As Van, humming his school song — the only tune he could ever carry — skipped down the terrace steps, he saw Robin on his old bay holding the livelier black stallion of his Sunday helper, a handsome English lad whom, it was rumored behind the rose hedges, the old man loved more vigorously than his office required.
Van reached the third lawn, and the bower, and carefully inspected the stage prepared for the scene, ‘like a provincial come an hour too early to the opera after jogging all day along harvest roads with poppies and bluets catching and twinkle-twining in the wheels of his buggy’ (Floeberg’s Ursula). (1.20)
At the beginning of Joyce's Ulysses (1922) Buck Mulligan mentions Ursula:
Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.
- I pinched it out of the skivvy's room, Buck Mulligan said. It does her all right. The aunt always keeps plain-looking servants for Malachi. Lead him not into temptation. And her name is Ursula.
Laughing again, he brought the mirror away from Stephen's peering eyes.
- The rage of Caliban at not seeing his face in a mirror, he said. If Wilde were only alive to see you. (Chapter 1)
In the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) Oscar Wilde (a master of paradoxes) says:
The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
In his poem The Sphinx (1894) Oscar Wilde mentions the Pyramid:
Or did you while the earthen skiffs
Dropt down the gray Nilotic flats
At twilight, and the flickering bats
Flew round the temple's triple glyphs
Steal to the border of the bar
And swim across the silent lake
And slink into the vault and make
The Pyramid your lúpanar,
Till from each black sarcophagus
Rose up the painted, swathèd dead?
Or did you lure unto your bed
The ivory-horned Trageophos?
Van arrives at the site of his duel with Tapper (of Wild Violet Lodge) in Johnny's Paradox, a cheap 'semi-racer:'
He shaved, disposed of two blood-stained safety blades by leaving them in a massive bronze ashtray, had a structurally perfect stool, took a quick bath, briskly dressed, left his bag with the concierge, paid his bill and at six punctually squeezed himself next to blue-chinned and malodorous Johnny into the latter’s Paradox, a cheap ‘semi-racer.’ For two or three miles they skirted the dismal bank of the lake — coal piles, shacks, boathouses, a long strip of black pebbly mud and, in the distance, over the curving bank of autumnally misted water, the tawny fumes of tremendous factories.
‘Where are we now, Johnny dear?’ asked Van as they swung out of the lake’s orbit and sped along a suburban avenue with clapboard cottages among laundry-lined pines.
‘Dorofey Road,’ cried the driver above the din of the motor. ‘It abuts at the forest.’
It abutted. Van felt a faint twinge in his knee where he had hit it against a stone when attacked from behind a week ago, in another wood. At the moment his foot touched the pine-needle strewn earth of the forest road, a transparent white butterfly floated past, and with utter certainty Van knew that he had only a few minutes to live. (1.42)
To Demon's wife Aqua (who thought that she could understand the language of her namesake, water) bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly:
She developed a morbid sensitivity to the language of tap water — which echoes sometimes (much as the bloodstream does predormitarily) a fragment of human speech lingering in one’s ears while one washes one’s hands after cocktails with strangers. Upon first noticing this immediate, sustained, and in her case rather eager and mocking but really quite harmless replay of this or that recent discourse, she felt tickled at the thought that she, poor Aqua, had accidentally hit upon such a simple method of recording and transmitting speech, while technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’ Soon, however, the rhythmically perfect, but verbally rather blurred volubility of faucets began to acquire too much pertinent sense. The purity of the running water’s enunciation grew in proportion to the nuisance it made of itself. It spoke soon after she had listened, or been exposed, to somebody talking — not necessarily to her — forcibly and expressively, a person with a rapid characteristic voice, and very individual or very foreign phrasal intonations, some compulsive narrator’s patter at a horrible party, or a liquid soliloquy in a tedious play, or Van’s lovely voice, or a bit of poetry heard at a lecture, my lad, my pretty, my love, take pity, but especially the more fluid and flou Italian verse, for instance that ditty recited between knee-knocking and palpebra-lifting, by a half-Russian, half-dotty old doctor, doc, toc, ditty, dotty, ballatetta, deboletta... tu, voce sbigottita... spigotty e diavoletta... de lo cor dolente... con ballatetta va... va... della strutta, destruttamente... mente... mente... stop that record, or the guide will go on demonstrating as he did this very morning in Florence a silly pillar commemorating, he said, the ‘elmo’ that broke into leaf when they carried stone-heavy-dead St Zeus by it through the gradual, gradual shade; or the Arlington harridan talking incessantly to her silent husband as the vineyards sped by, and even in the tunnel (they can’t do this to you, you tell them, Jack Black, you just tell them...). Bathwater (or shower) was too much of a Caliban to speak distinctly — or perhaps was too brutally anxious to emit the hot torrent and get rid of the infernal ardor — to bother about small talk; but the burbly flowlets grew more and more ambitious and odious, and when at her first ‘home’ she heard one of the most hateful of the visiting doctors (the Cavalcanti quoter) garrulously pour hateful instructions in Russian-lapped German into her hateful bidet, she decided to stop turning on tap water altogether. (1.3)
After leaving the hospital in Cordula's car, Van makes love to her in the car:
As soon as they reached a suitable area he transferred Cordula to his lap and had her very comfortably, with such howls of enjoyment that she felt touched and flattered.
‘Reckless Cordula,’ observed reckless Cordula cheerfully; ‘this will probably mean another abortion — encore un petit enfantôme, as my poor aunt’s maid used to wail every time it happened to her. Did I say anything wrong?’
‘Nothing wrong,’ said Van, kissing her tenderly; and they drove back to the diner. (1.43)
This episode seems to be a parody of a famous scene in Madame Bovery when Léon and Emma make love in a coach that tears along the streets of Rouen.