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I have just read the beginning of Part 1, Ch. 3 of Ada, and I will not
even attempt to interpret the dizzying prose there to you experienced
Nabokovians, but I think I do have something to tell you about Nabokov's
usage of the term "ha-ha" there insofar as it is, as was noted by Alexey,
a thinly veiled allusion to Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.
I am away from the files I generated a few months ago when I first joined
this listserv, but from what I recall, I had noticed a very interesting
and striking parallelism between the incest theme in Mansfield Park
(which, unbeknownst to most Janeites, is quite extensive and provocative)
and the incest theme in Ada. Henry Crawford and Mary Crawford, Fanny Price
and Edmund Bertram, Mrs. Norris and Sir Thomas Bertram, the novel teems
with illicit, even perverted, incestuous energy.
And the Sotherton garden scene in Mansfield Park is one of the epicenters
of that theme, and also of the theme of forbidden sex, in Austen's novel.
And as to the "ha-ha" in that garden (of Edenic temptation), that ha-ha is
a symbol of female sexuality (the terra incognita to be discovered by an
adventurous man) but it is also a symbol of what I call the "shadow story"
of Mansfield Park, i.e., the double story hidden beneath the overt story,
which is not visible by normal observation, but which can only be seen
when the observer is viewing the novel from a special, (ironically) skewed
perspective, reading against the grain, as I explain more in this blog
post:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2011/01/jane-austens-anamorphism.html My gut feeling is that, whatever else Nabokov is doing in Ch. 3 of Part 1
of Ada, he is suggesting that there is a giant "ha-ha" in Ada, a zone of
concealed meaning which, however, can be perceived and understood if one
takes the correct skewed perspective that is not taken by the ordinary
reader.
And it is also possible that Nabokov, thorough literary scholar that he
obviously was, even was aware of Charlotte Bronte's playful word tricks in
putting the super-serious Henry Lewes on about Jane Austen:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2010/03/charlotte-bronte-slipping-ha-ha-past.html Cheers, ARNIE
P.S.: It is no coincidence that 21st century awareness of the pervasive
sexual subtext in Austen's novels was triggered by the notoriety of an
article (later expanded into a book) by Prof. Jill Heydt Stevenson
entitled "Slipping into the Ha-Ha: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane
Austen's Novels" in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Dec.,
2000), pp. 309-339