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        "The Mirrored Self: Incestuous Fictions in Nabokov's Ada"

                          Claudia Rattazzi Papka,

                            Columbia University

                        <crp4@columbia.edu>

         Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle takes

  place around the turn of the century in a world called Antiterra, a

  planet resembling our own as an mirrored image does.  Reflection is

  indeed one of the central images of the novel, most simply explicable as a metaphor for the incestuous love of Van and Ada Veen which the doublings, anagrams, and allusions which permeate the novel, however, it becomes possible to argue that the incestuous relationship itself is but a reflection, and a metaphor, in turn, for the fiction-writing process.

      The Veen family tree, presented in epic fashion at the novel's

  beginning, conceals Van and Ada's true, shared parentage, but reveals a suspicious mirroring in the names and birth dates of their putative parents, which has led one critic to suggest that the two sets of parents are simply one set "seen from different perspectives."[1] That this creation of two from one may be the central _modus operandi_ of the "sibling planet"[2] casts doubt upon Antiterra's own reality, and thus upon the reliability, and sanity, of the narrator himself, Van Veen.  Led by this doubt, I examine the scene of Van and Ada's adolescent consummation and find in its refelections and doublings,including the narrative doubling in which Van and Ada debate "in the margins" about Van's recreation of their shared past, the foundation for another doubt:  Does Ada herself really exist, or is she but a creation of Van's mirroring mind?

      The answers to these questions are found in the madness that runs through the impossible mirrorings of Van's family tree; in the echoes of Van's first summer with Ada in his second, where several scenes are replayed with the crucial substitution of his real cousin, Lucette, for Ada; and in the mirroring Antiterran parodies of literary works by Paul Verlaine and Guy de Maupassant, as elucidated by the anagrammatic alter ego of Nabokov himself in _Notes to_ Ada _by Vivian Darkbloom_.  The clues are scattered throughout Van's memoir,and lead me to conclude that the metatextual analogy Van uses to describe his youthful maniambulation act is indeed an accurate description of the nature of Ada's existence--as Ada:

        The essence of the satisfaction belonged rather to the

        same order as the one he later derived from self-imposed,

        extravagantly difficult, seemingly absurd tasks when V.V.

        sought to express something, which until expressed had

        only a twilight existence (or even none at all--nothing

        but the illusion of the backward shadow of its immanent

        impression).[3]

      Van has had a incestuous encounter with his cousin, Lucette, and this transgression has led not only to her suicide, but also to Van's madness.  This madness inspires the rewriting of Van's life, his family, and his world through a series of doublings which create

  Antiterra, Van's antifamily (which includes his sister and double,

  Ada), and, finally, the novel itself.

                              Notes

  1.  Charles Nicol, "Ada or Disorder," in _Nabokov's Fifth Arc_, eds.

      J. E. Rivers and C. Nicol (Austin: U. of Texas Press, 1982), 240.

  2.  Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York:

       McGraw Hill, 1969), 244.

  3.  ibid 196