Dias, Nathalia Saliba. Embodied Memories in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory. 2020

Nathalia Saliba combines Proust’s notion of embodied memories and Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of erotohistoriography to explore how memories are a bodily and sexual phenomenon in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory. According to her, in both works, one sense is particularly highlighted: touch. In the novel, she verifies how the narrative is organized around the protagonist’s Eden of erotic recollections, which are transposed into the treatise Texture of Time, as a sadomasochistic persecution of time. In the autobiography, however, Nabokov presents his memories evoking a bodily feeling of being in a warm, humid and protected place, where he can feel secure and happy.