Abstract

Lucette's suicide left me indifferent. This time I knew it was coming, but years ago, when I first read Ada, or Ardor, I also felt relatively indifferent (apart from the element of surprise) to learn about her sudden death. I was aware of my indifference at the time and was surprised at my (non)reaction. It surprised me yet again in my recent rereading of the novel. Manipulating and withholding the reader's engagement with the text and empathy toward a character may have been part of the author's intention, of course. But for me, this lack of emotional engagement with Lucette's fate is emblematic of what I find problematic in Nabokov's admittedly brilliant novel: though intellectually challenging and aesthetically pleasing, Ada (unlike Lolita, for example) is not emotionally engaging. Of course, not all readers find such engagement an important feature of the reading experience, but I do. For this reader, its absence makes Ada (both with and without the italics) a gorgeous but empty shell.Ada's reader, activated by an urge to dig out buried clues, finds that deciphering a clue—aside from the joy to which it may give rise—contributes little to the characters’ reality, to the breadth and depth of their fictional humanity. Instead, Van and Ada remain, throughout the novel, more superhuman than human, endowed with almost supernatural excellences and perfections (their intellect, their looks, their way of life, their unique capacities and skills). Nabokov's heroes indeed bring to mind Nietzsche's Übermensch and the philosopher's critique of traditional ethics. It seems to me that his view of what constitutes human greatness is echoed in the charismatic figures of Van and Ada, whose outlook—an outlook privileging virtues such as aestheticism, intelligence, individuality, and human “greatness”—appears to embody a Nietzschean revaluation of values, privileging an aesthetic outlook on morality. As an amateur of Nabokov, therefore, I was surprised to see that very little has been written about this Nietzschean presence in Ada. An aesthetic revaluation of values is, however, what Ada delivers. As Michael Wood observes, “Nabokov would have hated the association [of his own name with Nietzsche's], but... the connection is not arbitrary.”While this association—whether it was intentional or not—surely contributes to the novel's intellectual breadth and complexity, it adds nothing to the psychology of its main characters. Instead, Van and Ada's übermenschliche qualities—their human “greatness”—seem to be inborn, part of their aristocratic nature, rather than acquired through transformative struggle. I suspect that it is this lack of transformation in the characters that undermines the reader's engagement with their fate. This lack makes Nabokov's family chronicle much less memorable than Tolstoy's.In the first sentence of Ada (“All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike”), Nabokov parodies by reversing the famous first sentence of Anna Karenina and thereby, as Robert Alter argues, reverses “the major thematic movement of the novel as a genre”: whereas Tolstoy's novel concerns lost illusions, Ada “is an attempt to return to paradise.” Nabokov's swing away from Tolstoy is startling and impressive but fails to convince me that the paradise inhabited by the happy Veens is superior to the lost illusions of the Karenins. Even in death, Anna is more alive than Ada.