Aeternus

Enviada por jansy em Wednesday, November 02 @ 20:50:51 BRST

MASCODAGAMA´S MANY-FACETED TRICKS

Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello,2005

“…only a white face with a trick mustache”

Aqua Veen[1]

I

Van was fourteen and a half when he joyfully exhibited his acrobatic talents during his cousin Ada´s birthday picnic in Ardis. His father Demon´s wrestling instructor, King Wing, had given him his first lessons and Van was a dedicated pupil. He wished to master some striking stunt that would give him an immediate and brilliant ascendancy in the eyes of his schoolmates[1]. (A,81) These were the initial days when Van and Ada fell in love with each other, and Lucette with Van. On “that summer afternoon, on the silky ground of the pineglade, in the magical heart of Ardis, under Lady Erminin’s blue eye, fourteen-year-old Van treated us to the greatest performance we have ever seen a brachiambulant give(…)Now and then, when he detached his organs of locomotion from the lenient ground, and seemed actually to clap his hands in midair, in a miraculous parody of a ballet jump, one wondered if this dreamy indolence of levitation was not a result of the earth’s canceling its pull in a fit of absentminded benevolence”. (A,82)

Slowly Van started to learn more about revolutions and revelations :“it was the standing of a metaphor on its head not for the sake of the trick's difficulty, but in order to perceive an ascending waterfall or a sunrise in reverse: a triumph, in a sense, over the ardis of time. Thus the rapture young Mascodagama derived from overcoming gravity was akin to that of artistic revelation”. (A,184/5) His vertical “vertebrate thoughts” (A,421) were probably informed by Nabokov´s own experience while bending over to look at the sky and by his fascination with the physics of Gogol's upside down world: “This constant shift of the viewpoint conveys a more varied knowledge, fresh vivid glimpses from this or that side. If you have ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your knees, with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally different light” (LEL,228).

His hands became scarred and his thumb deformed by his constant exercises. Soon these “oriental gymnastics” (A,229) encouraged him to turn his juvenile stunt into a public performance. “Mascodagama” became his stage name and his act was transformed into masked acrobatics.

Van´s exuberant hand-walking became a dark harlequinesque stunt. The work of a poet, and only a poet (‘especially of the Black Belfry group,’ as some wit said), could have adequately described a certain macabre quiver that marked Van’s extraordinary act. (A,183). Something dreadful had always been present and on stage it became more refined: “in the dark of sobbing insomnias, in the glare of violent nightmares, nervous little boys and girls relived, with private accretions, something similar to the ‘primordial qualm,’ a shapeless nastiness, the swoosh of nameless wings, the unendurable dilation of fever which came in a cavern draft from the uncanny stage.”(A,183/4)

Van “was not supposed to combine his university studies with the circus”(A,181/6). His last presentation as Mascodagama took place in London where, for the tango “he was given a partner, a Crimean cabaret dancer”[2].

After being wounded in a duel, Van had to undergo surgery and he stayed with Cordula, one of Ada´s former roommates. When, “after a month´s abstinence” he attempted to walk on his hands, he fell “sprawling on his back”. His first operation had not been successful and twelve years after his debut in Ardis ‘a precious sinistral sinew’ ceased to function.

Van´s memoirs defy the reader to discover how his feats as Mascodagama were reproduced by stylistic reversals. Besides, he and Ada kept adding corrections to the freshly typed work, incessantly intertwining their past and present recollections. Brian Boyd remarks that Nabokov made Van and Ada “not only brother and sister but almost male and female variants of a single design.” (NA,257), a conclusion that might encompass the privileged occurrences where they seem to merge to form a platonic hermaphrodite of the written word.

As a name, “Ada” represents a compressed alphabet that circles back from alpha to alpha where it pictures two rounded extremities like heads placed at the opposing ends of the body, or like two crowns in a Queen of Hearts playing card. This image also serves to describe the two-headed monster Mascodagama who hangs topsy-turvy on a stage before he translates himself from a terrifying giant into a terry-furred boy. There are dolls that bear the face of a girl on one side of the body and another face at its opposite end, both protected by enormous reversible skirts that hide one of the faces at a time. They mimic a double monster, similar to the one which surprised the chambermaid who stumbled into the room where Lucette and Ada were sharing kisses[3]: ‘— I took my pillow to Ada’s bedroom (…) and she was a dream of white and black beauty, pour cogner une fraise, touched with fraise in four places, a symmetrical queen of hearts.’(…) She kissed my krestik while I kissed hers, our heads clamped in such odd combinations that Brigitte, a little chambermaid who blundered in with her candle, thought for a moment, though naughty herself, that we were giving birth simultaneously to baby girls, your Ada bringing out une rousse and no one’s Lucette, une brune. Fancy that’. (A,375)

The mask behind which Van hid his identity as Mascodagama was, by malice or a simple misprint, linked to Vasco da Gama by a series of comic displacements. As a stage-artist Van impersonated even himself (and was not very good at it) to divert attention from who he really was. After being invited to Windsor Castle by a “bilateral descendant of Van’s own ancestors “who addressed him as ‘Dear Mr ‘Vascodagama’, he suspected “(incorrectly, as it later transpired) the misprint to suggest that his incognito had been divulged by one of the special detectives at Chose”. (A,182) Nevertheless, it was the writer Jack Chose who had revealed his name and “botched his thespionym”[4]. Exchanges of names and roles such as these continue and lead us to movie director Yuzlik, who greets Van as Vasco da Gama after Van on his turn had mistaken him for Ada´s husband, Andrew Vinelander. Yuzlik, the director of the fatidic movie “Don Juan´s Last Fling, receives Van with the words: “Vasco da Gama, I presume”, a quip that can be easily recognized as referring to Africa and Dr. Livingstone.(A,512)

While describing the young boy´s hand-walking, VN spoke of Van´s legs “hoisted like a Tarentine sail”, but the mention of the “tarentine sail” connects these joyful exercises to the chapter of Joyce´s “Ulysses” where Tarentum implies a "pyrrhic victory", that is, a victory so costly as to be ruinous (A,68). It is difficult to access what kind of damage resulted from Van´s physical and rhetorical reversals. Interpretations about the nature of Van´s actions take us from the incest-theme to the deceitful quality such as is engendered by the marriage of nature and art, as we find in Demon´s words: “how incestuously – c´est le mot – art and science meet in an insect” [5].(A,436)

Nabokov transmuted substantives into flowers and insects or turned places into people in disguise to test the limits of metaphors and metonymic displacements, especially by emphasizing their apparent insubstantiality. He invited the reader to share with Mascodagama a fate similar to Hamlet´s: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw”(Hm,II,2), while the orientation by the course of stars, winds and magnetic needles was substituted by other instruments, such as broken watches and barometers, subtly interwoven with Van´s texture of time.

There is a quality of the buffoon (the original meaning in Italian for the word “mask”) in Mascodagama. Baudelaire, “On the Essence of Laughter”, described an 'absolute comic' who “can only be absolute in relation to fallen humanity” (…). For him “an artist is only an artist on condition that he is a double man and that there is not one single phenomenon of his double nature of which he is ignorant”. Van´s memoirs were not intended as a self-portrayal, and he felt painfully aware of his artistic shortcomings with the exception of his passion for Ada, which led him to explore his “double nature” against the background of his decaying worlds. Charles Nicol, writing about “Ada or Disorder” has a different point of view. He considers Van as “the most fiercely subjective of Nabokov´s long list of subjective narrators; his enormous distortions and inaccuracies, while no doubt partially due to senility, seem primarily due to defiance – Van´s intention to record his reality, and no other”. And yet, Nicol concedes that “the games and playfulness will properly be seen as part of Van´s character, not his author´s[6]”.

The word translation may describe what takes place during a mascodagama reversal and as an analogy it adds a different meaning to Van´s “upside-down” metaphors. Probably Nabokov was warning us about the distortions that happen when his works, or any other authors´, are translated from one language into another. The problems that arise during the translation of any literary work were extensively elaborated in “Ada” who, herself, applied her talents as a “versionist” until her old age[7]. Besides classic translations, Nabokov was apparently alluding to a different sort of metamorphosis when he construed his novel on Van´s faulty reminiscences and dreams: “Hammock and honey: eighty years later he could still recall with the young pang the original joy…(…) At ninety-four he liked retracing that first amorous summer not as a dream he had just had but as a recapitulation of consciousness to sustain him in the small gray hours…(A,70).

In the notes added at the end of “Ada”, Vivian Darkbloom mockingly invited Freudian translators of dream symbolism to opine: “note p.72. horsecart: an old anagram. It leads here to a skit on Freudian dream charades (‘symbols in an orchal orchestra’), p.73”(A,594). Following this indication we meet Van lying in a hammock “where a former summer guest, with an opera cloak over his clammy nightshirt, had awoken once because a stink bomb had burst among the instruments in the horsecart, and striking a match, Uncle Van had seen the bright blood blotching his pillow”(A,72). The second link brought up once again the hammock, but transformed anagrammatically the “horsecart” into “orchestra” and its “symbols”: “His nights in the hammock (where that other poor youth had cursed his blood cough and sunk back into dreams of prowling black spumas and a crash of symbols in an orchal orchestra — as suggested to him by career physicians)…”. (A,73) Suddenly, no more hammock and no more crashes. The reader is now led to Van disguised as Mascodagama: “A Karakul cap surmounted his top. A black mask covered the upper part of his heavily bearded face. The unpleasant colossus kept strutting up and down the stage for a while, then the strut changed to the restless walk of a caged madman, then he whirled, and to a clash of cymbals in the orchestra and a cry of terror (perhaps faked) in the gallery, Mascodagama turned over in the air and stood on his head” (A,183/4). Leopards and (s)pumas were a part of Lucette and Ada´s sexual repertoire of imitated sounds and various sexual allusions became the manifest expression of the hidden terrors which Van had incorporated to his act. There is a final hint of failure by the recurrence of these two themes: hammock and Mascodagama: “Ada examined the pattern of the hammock through a magnifying glass (…) ‘By the way, you have quite a collection of black masks in your dresser’./ ‘For masked balls (bals-masqués),’(…)‘That’s finished,’ said Van, ‘a precious sinistral sinew has stopped functioning. I can still fence and deliver a fine punch but hand-walking is out (…) Ada is not going to sniffle and wail. King Wing says that the great Vekchelo turned back into an ordinary chelovek at the age I’m now, so everything is perfectly normal.” (A,400/01).

I wonder if the “Viennese Quack”, so often remembered by VN, was only invoked because of Sigmund Freud´s earlier works on dreams and hidden sexual symbolism, VN having been unacquainted with Freud´s later books on the “compulsion to repeat”, and the “death instinct”, where erotism and violence become inextricably linked, as they do in Ada, mainly through Mascodagama. Masco would also carry Nabokov´s own mask for his experiments in style, specially by his failure to “metaphorise” or “invert” the particularly cruel dimension Van´s acrobatics added to sexuality.

We can follow the steady development of the uncanny dimension in Van´s stunt after its first expression during the 1884 festivities: ‘Why did you cry?’ he asked, inhaling her hair and the heat of her ear. She turned her head and for a moment looked at him closely, in cryptic silence.

(Did I? I don’t know — it upset me somehow. I can’t explain it, but I felt there was something dreadful, brutal, dark, and, yes, dreadful, about the whole thing. A later note.)

‘I’m sorry,’ he said as she looked away, ‘I’ll never do it again in your presence.’

(By the way, that ‘for all the world,’ I detest the phrase. Another note in Ada’s late hand.)( A,86)

Revelations and revolutions keep changing places while the masks used to hide the face of paradisiacal Terra are torn off to reveal wars and burning fires in both planets. Eros develops its “sores in the roses”. Verses and versions are turned into anagrams mounted as perverse coded messages and scrabble-board games.

While he was dancing with his hands splayed on the earth, Van imitated the stance of the giant Atlas, whose feet had no standing point on Earth. By referring to a “dislocation of the caryatics” by a “special play of the shoulder muscles” Nabokov introduced an invented word, caryatics, which describes two inversions: by Van´s bodily position and by his sexual disposition through a reference to a feminine kind of pillar. The “caryatids” were represented in Greek or neoclassical temples as columns carved in the shape of a woman while the male figures were called “telamon” and “atlantes”, all of them upright and firmly grounded. Atlas inspired the name of the first of the seven cervical vertebrae because it directly bears the weight of the skull, like this mythological giant who bore the world on his shoulders. By choosing the term “caryatics” Van deliberately ignores the atlantes and the atlas vertebrae. He is then transformed into an insignificant hero who, with his upturned legs looks as dislodged, amidst a vast expanse of earth, as the falling image of Icarus in a small corner in the painting by the Dutch master Brueghel, or as Don Quixote when he madly imitated a madman and turned cartwheels to drop “feet over head” on the earth[8](LDQ,16-17).

But Van himself could not perceive that. When he realizes what his sister had already wordlessly felt, that they were inevitably separate because their perspectives are as distinct as the store of their memories, we encounter him as an old man whose present perceptions have been swallowed by the past. And yet, Van continues to court eternity through his love for Ada “…because the rapture of her identity, placed under the microscope of reality (which is the only reality) shows a complex system of those subtle bridges which the senses traverse — laughing, embraced, throwing flowers in the air — between membrane and brain, and which always was and is a form of memory, even at the moment of its perception.” (A,220)

Van challenges common-sense rationality craving immortality. In his youth he would “perform organically what his figures of speech were to perform later in life — acrobatic wonders that had never been expected from them and which frightened children”(A,185) [9]. Years later he would defy death and time to achieve a final epiphany with Ada.

Van is confident that he will become an immortal[10] and yet, this is when the parallel lines, “Memoirs” and “Nabokov”, converge, instead of Van’s and Ada´s who, as a composite Vaniada, can “only die into the finished book”.(A,467 ) The tricks ancient Mnemosyne played on Nabokov´s characters wore a black cover that veiled what she simultaneously intended to reveal. Perhaps this Goddess also induced Nabokov to disclose more about himself than what he had originally intended[11].

II

Vladimir Nabokov was born in the city of St. Petersburg, placed at the upper-right end of a map of Europe in a school-boy Atlas, with Lisbon at its lower-left. Most of his life was spent in the northern hemisphere (“Ada´s” “Severnïa Territorii”): what lay below the line of the equator, or was found at the extreme East (Tartary) became a representation of “hell”[12].

When Mascodagama indicated the Earth´s antipodes through Van´s maniambulatory inversion, the name his “thespionym” revealed was navigator Vasco da Gama´s, who traveled from the northern continents towards the “netherworlds” rounding Africa at its southern tip[13]. An equivalent route down the Atlantic Ocean led Magellan to discover a strait at the extreme end of South America but Van chose Vasco da Gama probably because his voyage accomplished the maritime link that was needed to re-establish commercial ties between Europe and India[14].

Although there were two pairs of opposites vertically marked in “Ada”: Artic Alaska/ Antartic Tierra del Fuego and Artic Europe/antipodal Africa, we may also find the outline of two other hemispheres with their particular hells and linguistic particularities created by a split between East and West in contrast to the equatorial division that isolated North and South. Nevertheless, Mascodagama´s antipodes plastically represented only the vertical axis (North/South) achieved by this reference to the route chosen by navigator Vasco da Gama. The travel plans Van outlined, while still on his twenties, mention South America and Africa before they reach India (and Nabokov specifically mentions India, not Asia) following the maritime route initiated by Vasco da Gama in the 15th century. But these projects did not mention ships: “He decided that after completing his medical studies at Kingston[15] (which he found more congenial than good old Chose) he would undertake long travels in South America, Africa, India. As a boy of fifteen (Eric Veen’s age of florescence) he had studied with a poet’s passion the time-table of three great American transcontinental trains that one day he would take(…)It is not clear, when you are falling asleep, why all continents except you begin with an A”’.[16](A,345)

Since the earliest centuries fabulous tales were narrated and written about the adventurous explorers and greedy predators which competed along the routes that linked Russia to Alaska, or Portugal to India. In the 15th century, after the Mediterranean access through Constantinople was blocked by the Turk-Ottoman Empire, Europeans were impelled to discover novel routes to reach the Indian spices that were needed to preserve food from decay by traveling southward. In later years, a maritime route for the fur-trade with China became important to Russia, running opposite to Van´s emphasis on “Kurland and Kuriles” for the spread from west to east of the Soviet Union, but in the same direction as chosen by Ada´s husband Ivan G.Vinelander´s fabulous ancestors travels[17]. This other East/West orientation along a spherical Earth was only indirectly linked with Mascodagama by a very thin connection with the epic that described Vasco da Gama´s voyage (more about this later). The East/West direction was identified with Uncle Dan who “set off in a counter-Fogg direction on a triple trip round the globe, adopting, like an animated parallel, the same itinerary every time[18].

Most probably Nabokov´s choice for Van´s stage name not only reflected his knowledge of these first European navigators but also of the written testimonial of Gama´s voyages in “The Lusiads”, Luís de Camões´s famous epic[19]. Although it is impossible to ascertain that Nabokov read this poem in its entirety, he might have been acquainted with some of its more famous excerpts, if only because he lectured on another writer who lived in the Iberian Peninsula, Miguel de Cervantes. According to Guy Davenport, Nabokov´s lectures on “Don Quixote” were “an event in modern criticism” but, at that time, Nabokov dismissed the Portuguese writers[20].

There is a reference to Camões in one of Pushkin´s verses:

Surovyi Dant ne preziral soneta,

V nyom zhar liubvi Petrarka izlival,

Igru ego liubil tvorets Makbeta,

Im skorbnu mysl' Kamoens oblekal[21].

Pushkin´s work merited Nabokov´s loving dedication and yet, again, Nabokov´s comments about the boom of sonnet-writing are far from sympathetic. Nabokov did mention in “Ada” a Portuguese king called Alphonse the First and his son, a blue-clad naval officer who was courting and later married the actress Lenore Raven[22]. Nabokov also described a “bourbonian-chinned” concierge dubbed Alphonse Cinq and two hotels: the Alphonse Trois in Auteil and the Alphonse IV, in Paris, favored by Lucette. There were several kings from different countries who were called “Alphonse” and the Portuguese kings named Afonso usually descended from, begat or married ladies named Leonor (which adds a curious detail to the over-determined references to E.A.Poe). And yet, the 15th century King Alphonse V of Portugal was dead at the time Vasco da Gama reached India. Brian Boyd judges that “Nabokov´s historical precision is teasingly ludicrous” (NA,23) but, using Camões as a point of departure we might discover that there were other enchanted and enchained allusions behind Nabokov´s serendipitous historical finds.

Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890), perhaps the greatest of the soldier-scholars of the early 19th century, translated works in six different languages and mastered at least twenty four. “The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night”(…) in “plain and literal translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments”, with extensive annotations is the product of one of his labors that received an ironical reference in “Ada”: “Herr Mispel(…) discerned in Letters from Terra the influence of Osberg (…)as well as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben Sirine, thus transliterated by Captain de Roux, according to Burton in his adaptation of Nefzawi’s treatise on the best method of mating with obese or hunchbacked females (The Perfumed Garden, Panther edition, p.187, a copy given to ninety-three-year-old Baron Van Veen by his ribald physician Professor Lagosse)”.(A,344) Sir Richard Burton, who translated “The Perfumed Garden” was also one of the translators into English of “The Lusiads”, and he lectured on his extensive travels all over the world (one of these lectures,on El Medinah, Meccah, Harar, and Dahomé, was given to the Emperor and Empress of Brazil in Rio in 1866). If Vladimir Nabokov was acquainted with “The Lusiads” he must have read them in Burton´s translation[23].

Mascodagama imitated a giant, Atlas. There were many generations of mythic titans and giants in Greek mythology but the sorrowful monster Adamastor, who menaced Vasco da Gama, was a creation of Camões´s, when he shaped him from the dark clouds storming the stony tip of Africa´s Cape of Good Hope, a place famous for its shipwrecks. Differently from Adamastor (also translated as “Adamaster”), Atlas held the world like St. Christopher carried Christ who carried the world, although his feet found no place to stand except, perhaps on Terra, like Van´s[24].

In the worlds of H.G.Wells, a favorite author when Nabokov was a young boy, while it was possible to find instead of modern gravitons an imaginary cavourite for space-travel[25] Jules Verne´s Captain Grant had to find more realistic ways to explore the seas. Nabokov´s Terra and Antiterra not only represent two different planets as seen by two distinct authors (Verne and Wells), but they also converge to form a single one, like his characters Van and Ada. Two fictional explorers “of the Americas” are directly mentioned in “Ada”: the Tobakoffs and the Vinelanders. A third one could be the historical Christopher Columbus, as Brian Boyd pointed out, and Vasco da Gama in Van Veen´s topsy-turvy disguise would be a fourth[26]. A similar mixture between fictional and real characters in “Ada” is to be found in a reference to Nicot, introduced close to navigator Tobakoff[27].

When he described Demon Veen´s interest in a Pacific island, Nabokov inserted a discrete reference to the Russians who traveled around the world by the sea, with a stop at Macao, where Camões started to write his epic. In 1803-06, Captain I. F. Kruzenshtern and Commander Lisianski became the first Russians to circumnavigate the globe and we can find an “Atlas of Kruzenshtern's Circumnavigation”, published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1813, in St. Petersburg. This Atlas includes maps of Kruzenshtern's route and 109 plates based upon the drawings of V. G. Tilesius, a naturalist who worked as the official artist of the expedition, with a “View of the Camões Grotto in Mr. Drummond's garden” among them. Kruzenshtern and his deputy commander Lisianski Urey were separated at the Hawaiian Islands and Lisianski continued his voyage to the island that carries his name in the Hawaiian Chain. The indication made by Nabokov for the Kruzenshtern and Lisianski travels was inserted in a paragraph about Van´s father Demon Veen, who died after the “gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille region”(A, 504)[28].

Vasco da Gama´s nautical expedition to India, as told in the epic “Os Lusíadas” by Luís de Camões, had the wine deity, Bacchus, as his chief opponent when he incited the Olympic gods against Gama, wary of the Christian influence at the birthplace of his cult and fearing that immortality itself was in danger. Masco/Vasco da Gama, in an intriguing annotation by Vivian Darkbloom, suggests a connection between Van and his rival Andrey Vinelander by mentioning wine, vines and carte des vins as “cart de van”. The bouteiller (butler) Bouteillan is often associated with wine and vines, but his frequent interferences were usually helpful to Van, so this Dionysian link between “Ada” and the epic by Camões becomes nothing but an interesting coincidence. Dionysus (Bacchus) was directly mentioned in the second chapter of the first part of “Ada”, during a burlesque pantomime that took place soon after Marina, Van´s biological mother, had been seduced by Demon between the two acts of a play: “At an invisible sign of Dionysian origin, they all plunged into the violent dance called kurva or ‘ribbon boule’ in the hilarious program whose howlers almost caused Veen (tingling, and light-loined, and with Prince N.’s rose-red banknote in his pocket) to fall from his seat”.(A,12). Bacchus makes a ludicrous appearance probably because Van is already playing with stylistic inversions by making a tropical moon shine amid a wintry scenery, while fiction and reality play alternate roles[29].

III

“Ada” can be read side by side with Camões´s epic because the two independent narratives (and two distinct worlds) running along parallel lines in “The Lusiads” seem to be exemplary models for the duplicate planets present in “Ada”. Ana C. César observed that in “The Lusiads” “the meta-subject (‘a blind ego’) acquired a definite position after the poet announced not only that ‘his lyre had lost its edge’ but by inverting the terms of his language to play stylistically with that inversion”[30]. She thought that the kind of duplicity engendered in The Lusiads and its two worlds, peopled by deities and humans, whose pace was set by the interfering Olympic gods, was more complex than a simple metaphorical game derived from the image of two universes running along parallel lines. To develop her ideas, she departed from both Borges´s imagery in his short-story “The Aleph” (in which an apparatus similar to the “machine of the world” invented by Camões was rejected and destroyed) and from Antônio José Saraiva´s works on Camões[31]. Her “decomposition” of the epic relied on a play with “mascodagama-like inversions to demonstrate how the poet criticized the Portuguese crown without robbing Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese navigators of their glories.

Nabokov did not restrict his composition of “Ada” to the interaction between Terra and Antiterra, neither did his “otherwordly” interferences play a preponderant role in giving a push to the narrative. In “Ada” the two twin planets, Terra and Antiterra are seen mostly through the eyes of Van Veen who, as a psychiatrist wrote the novel “Letters from Terra” (later made into a movie) under the pseudonym Voltemand (Voltimand or Mandalatov) and who, at the age of fifty-two wrote “The Texture of Time”, an essay later incorporated as the fourth chapter of his memoirs that constitute “Ada”.

In the first part of the novel we are informed about split time and space “because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths”. Two paragraphs later we read that “two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development” (A,18) - an assertion that might be as true for chess matches as for the convergence of the parallel spaces of Terra and Antiterra (and of the incestuous pair), if we accept that these two chess games, or characters, represent a single one, now doubled because it is apprehended by the two different brains that are exercising themselves on one board. In that case, when the novel is closed or the players depart, the game is over and planets and siblings disappear along with pawns and kings[32]. We are expected to discover what Van could not.

Alfred Appel Jr. noted that, in using the tactics of involution, Nabokov not only created a story within a story, or transported his characters from one novel to another, but also transformed his characters into readers/spectators of the book where they appear. At this point, Appel quoted Jorge Luís Borges when he commented the play within the play in Hamlet: “if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers and spectators, can be fictitious”. This effect was elevated to a high potency in “Ada” by the demand that readers become independent explorers of its universes and follow different timelines to their turning points.

There is a difference of more than fifty years between Vasco da Gama´s voyages and the entirely fictional story of his exploits told in “The Lusiads”. This discrepancy is similar to what we find between “Terra and Antiterra” in “Ada”. The mythological dimension of time as distinct from mankind´s also plays an important part in both works: nevertheless, whereas “The Lusiads” expresses the classic preoccupation with universals and a-temporality by bringing to life culturally determined stereotypes instead of a naturalistic description, Van´s search relies on a modern author´s profound knowledge of diversity in nature to instruct his metaphors. His theory about the texture of time required the dissociation of time and space in his philosophical search for a transcendental point. His inquiries modulated his style by filmic effects that present static images against a backdrop of time and break the automatic linearity of written memoirs. Both in “Ada” and in “The Lusiads” we find heterogeneous elements which interrupt the flow of the narrative, and only the subtle indication of branching patterns and time-forks measured by a special “machine” seem to hold together their apparently disparate allusions[33].

When a character recalls former episodes that have taken place in the novel he shares a developing conscious memory with the reader thus bringing unity to the text. This happens “when the reader can feel that the characters remember and know events that we remember and know about them”(LDQ), but that sense of familiarity and cohesion is deliberately shattered by Nabokov´s addition of new structural devices to extract “Ada” from its “initial semblance of chaos”. He insistently confronts the reader with recollections that were not his characters´s actual remembrances, but memories of dreams, delusions or present-day reconstructions of past events altered by imagination. His play with anagrams introduces long deceased kings and their battles. To write down his criticism of Romantic and Parnassian poets, or to the Arcadian and Chivalry themes, he parodies their poems and insertes them as parts of his narrative. The album found by Van and Ada in the attic or the photographs taken by Kim Beauhearnais, that could be considered as structuring insets in “Ada”, retain a deceptive quality by the way their information is spread in the novel.

When he describes the particular lack of sequence and the muddled narrative he had found in “Don Quixote”, Nabokov outlines the contours of an almost invisible thread that keeps the book together when he counts the victories and defeats suffered by the Don to observe that the Knight had won and lost them in an equal measure. Such a comparison led Nabokov to the conclusion that, since the score was even in both component parts of Don Quixote (“13 to 13 and 7 to 7, respectively”), such perfect balance had to be a deliberate device introduced in a work that he had initially taken to be a “disjointed and haphazard book”. He also concludes that this came by from “a secret sense of writing, the harmonizing intuition of the artist”. In the same way the apparently disjointed style of the chapters of Joyce´s Ulysses is connected by a resource that does not actually belong to the structure of the novel, since it relies on the effects that the novel´s contrasting chapters have on its readers. In his lecture on “Ulysses” by James Joyce, Nabokov remarks that “each chapter is written in a different style, or rather with a different style predominating. There is no special reason why this should be – why one chapter should be told straight, another through a stream-of-consciousness gurgle, a third through the prism of a parody. There is no special reason, but it may be argued that this constant shift of the viewpoint conveys a more varied knowledge, fresh vivid glimpses from this or that side” and he interpreted “this trick of changing the vista, or changing the prism and the viewpoint” (such as looking at the world from the upside-down, like Van) would result from “Joyce´s new literary technique, to the kind of new twist through which you see a greener grass, a fresher world” (LEL289).

In “Ada”, Nabokov not only mingles linear and circular or self-referential temporality to break the directional thrust of verbal thought, the ardis of time, “obscurely related to the mysteries of growth and gravitation”(A184), but copiously applies literary mirrors and counterparts to modify the rhythm of his composition without disrupting its hidden design. In a different way, the abolition of a chronological order by the subtle interference of servants or shadows from Terra creates a parody of time that is close to the unconscious temporality proper to dream-thoughts, when the differences between past, present and future is abolished under the domination of sensuous wish-filled images. It is also when ghosts behave like deities which intervene in human history.

In his oeuvre, Nabokov teleported his characters from one novel to another and made abundant references to other writers. He also created a special chronology for the events keeping a foot in historical time but resting another on different places and epochs, as it occurs in the realm of dreams or in the ravings about Terra the Fair. There was no concrete “time-machine” in “Ada”, like the one that Camões brought into play in “The Lusiads”, but there are clues of another structure shining through the holes of Mascodagama´s mask, as a template that guides the cuttings for a patchwork of photograms, following the resources offered by another kind of “time-machine”, namely, the cinema[34].

In Canto X, the last of The Lusiads, Camões describes the cosmologic system that he named “the machine of the world” and which was given to Vasco da Gama by the goddess Thétis. Although it was presented as the totality of God´s creation Thétis also offered him a smaller duplicate which Gama could then carry and watch how Earth and Cosmos were united in an everlasting embrace. The machine of the world was based on the still prevalent Ptolemaic system and through it Gama could see into the future, which was Camões´s present. It was a rhetorical resource that enabled Camões to join events and people who had no other connection with Gama´s adventures.

The Lusiads, Canto X:

Thetis, graceful and grave, desiring to enhance the glories of such a felicitous day, spoke to happy Gama:

- “Baron, you deserve to see with your own bodily eyes the supreme wisdom which the vain science of wretched mortals cannot reach. Follow me stealthily and with prudent steps”[1].

“A crystalline globe was floating in the air and let the clear light traverse it to reveal at the same time center and surface. It is impossible to describe the stuff it was made of but one could discern that it had been most ingeniously mounted with various spheres, as ordained by the divine staff who established their common center that they might turn round themselves, lift or descend without themselves being lifted or lowered. Divine art devised that its even surface was spread like a face that manifested itself in every part while all its parts were simultaneously the beginning and the end, uniform and perfectly contained by itself, as established by the Archetype. And when Gama saw this globe he was touched and paralyzed with wonder and desire.

The Goddess spoke:

-“What you now see I shall also render to you in the shape of a small volume to help you perceive whence you are going, where you shall go and to guide you in the discovery of what it is that you aspire;

Look, this is the great machine of the World, elemental and ethereal, built by an infinite wisdom that has no beginning and no end”.

Even if Nabokov did not employ a clearly demarcated apparatus like Camões, his novel depends on the readers´ ability to share and develop Van and Ada´s explorations in his memoirs from a living external perspective. Ghostly interferences and subplots function as alarmclocks set to maintain them vigilantly aware lest they become fictions too[35]. Even the other instruments that Nabokov introduces in special nooks of the scenery, such as a mariner´s compass card or a watch, have a metaphorical function. The Cartesian diver and other sets of barometers that hung in the walls of “Ada” indicate not only weather changes or the time, but suggest a spiritual struggle related to death and separation.

In the engine created by Camões we find the Earth set in the centre of the Cosmos, surrounded by various spheres that can be viewed at one single glance. We know that an expanded consciousness also operates as a time machine by its reliance on memory and its constant reappraisal and re-signification of the past, such as Van and Ada construed from a place in the novel´s future. Nevertheless, even if we understand “Ada” as a “time machine”, what it shows cannot be encompassed in a single flash, since it requires constant revisions and various multi-angle “shots”[36]: “I, Van Veen, salute you, life, Ada Veen, Dr Lagosse, Stepan Nootkin, Violet Knox, Ronald Oranger. Today is my ninety-seventh birthday (…)This Part Five is not meant as an epilogue; it is the true introduction of my ninety-seven percent true, and three percent likely, Ada or Ardor, a family chronicle”. (A,567).

When the last division of “Ada” is reached, the reader discovers that it represents Van´s introduction to the novel. He is then confronted by an enticing circularity as the arrow of time curves over itself and invites him to read it again and again. Paul H. Fry observed, “Ada is all. But what is “all”, world or book?[37]

Using the “machine of the world” as a unifying device, Camões employs it to speak about the future. A second structuring element appears when he makes Vasco da Gama describe the history of Portugal through the stories he tells during his voyage and which are inset like independent "novellas" among the body of his epic.

In one of these novellas, Gama described the 14th century romance between a pair of royal lovers, Pedro and Inês, whose fate was tragically decided by the Portuguese King, Afonso IV. Inês, born in Castille under the rule of Afonso XI (Spain), went to Lisbon in 1340 where she and Pedro fell in love, but he was then a married man and their affair had to be pursued in secrecy.

Besides Camões, Voltaire, Victor Hugo and Ezra Pound, among countless other poets, were touched by the sad destiny of Inês, who "after her death became a queen". The legend that describes two secretly connected mansions tells how the lovers met for their trysts. According to one of them, King Pedro the First fashioned his love letters into boats that he let float down the waters of a little channel connecting his abode with the abbey in which Inês had found a refuge.

During the Napoleonic wars, one of their descendants, Dom João VI, decided to leave Portugal and settle in a distant Portuguese colony, moving the capital city of his kingdom from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro. At that time we also find the Duke of Wellington fighting against the Napoleonic armies in Europe. Wellington had made a stop in Portugal at the same site where the story of Pedro and Inês took place. His aide-de-camp was named Antonio Maria Osório Cabral da Gama e Castro (a coincidental link to Cabral, who discovered Brazil, and with Gama, who reached the Indies) and owned the bucolic fields in the Mondego where Wellington was staying. The Duke was so touched by the legends that he ordered a stone to be laid close to the two sequoias (“Wellingtonias”) he planted in the site. He had this monument inscribed with lines selected from “The Lusiads”, Canto III, verse 135.

Is it possible to consider that VN was also acquainted with the story of "Pedro and Inês" as told in The Lusiads? There are two references to Wellington (as the “Wellington mountain” (A312) and “as far back as the days ‘when Washingtonias were Wellingtonias’”(A,81)[38], and the fires of the Napoleonic wars rise in the background of "Ada", with its romantic poets and Byronic castles, while further back we find brooks and shepherds in Nabokov´s playful references to arcadian poets and their valorous knights.

The 14thcentury Afonso IV´s son, Pedro (Peter), and his unfortunate love remind me of Lucette´s stay at the Alphonse IV hotel. There are hints in “Ada” about the story of other famous lovers, Princess Margaret and the photographer Peter Townsend, in the poem Lucette was deceitfully given to learn by heart. The entire scenery that surrounds Peter and Margaret was created by Nabokov as a parody of the Romantic and Arcadian themes with their heroes and milkmaids. The poem Peter and Margaret had been "composed in tears forty years ago by the Poet Laureate Robert Brown, the old gentleman whom my father once pointed out to me up in the air on a cliff under a cypress, looking down on the foaming turquoise surf near Nice, an unforgettable sight for all concerned. It is called "Peter and Margaret." This poem "Van (...)was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston(...)’ wrote: ‘I kept for years — it must be in my Ardis nursery — the anthology you once gave me ; and the little poem (...) Find it in Brown and praise me again for my eight-year-old intelligence as you and happy Ada did that distant day, that day somewhere tinkling on its shelf like an empty little bottle. Now read on: ‘Here, said the guide, was the field,/There, he said, was the wood./This is where Peter kneeled,/That’s where the Princess stood/ No, the visitor said,/You are the ghost, old guide./Oats and oaks may be dead,/But she is by my side.’ (A,146)

The legend about the two separate domains joined by the watery channels that carry love-letters written by Pedro to Inês de Castro also pervades “Ada” when Aqua imagines that she can hear water talking, or by the invented hydraulic dorophones. Lucette flushed her blank suicide note down the toilet before drowning and later sent “maybe, a mermaid message” to Ada[39].

IV

Even when a writer gives voice to various characters with whom he does not identify in any way, there remains a crowing noise that allows one to glimpse the shadows of involuntary truths left unstated, since there is always something that escapes from the most carefully crafted sentence. By refusing to consider the least similarity between himself and his creatures, especially unreliable narrators such as Humbert Humbert (Lolita) or Van (Ada), Nabokov indicates that his authorial interventions originate somewhere outside the novel and are to be taken as independent expressions, thus emphasizing the split between “Vladimir V. Nabokov” and his various anagrammatic voices. And yet, even if his deliberate apparitions in the novels were sparse, those shifting interferences still depart from his more public persona. The non-recognition that his point of enunciation is always distinct from what his authorial voice expresses caused new reversals in “Ada”[40].

In “Nabokov´s Garden”, Bobbie Ann Mason describes how Ada scrambled the letters that served to write insect, scient, incest. For Mason this is one of the several inversions that made metaphors stand on their heads. She thinks that “the anagram – insect to incest – provides a major key to the novel” when Ada moves from “innocent curiosity about insects into a dangerous curiosity about incest”. Mason maintains that Van is unable to recognize that his Mascodagama act is an “emblem of his solipsism, his inversion of reality” and that it signals the incest theme because he turns Ada´s “natural frame of reference upside down”. For her, “Van´s description of artistic revelation is impressive, and surely Nabokovian, but he is heedless of the significance of his butterfly metaphor, illustrated by his Mascodagama act”. She demonstrates how Van´s stunt can be compared to mimicry among insects when she compares Mascodagama´s reversions to the defensive behavior of the Hairstreak butterfly (Thecla togarna) and when she implies that Van´s adoration of Ada urge him “to reflect her as if he were a mirror”.

Van is a “creature of Nabokov´s imagination, Nabokov´s inverse image – living, not incidentally, in the inverse universe created by Nabokov” and Van and Ada are “the fictional counterparts of artist and scientist Nabokov – and as fictional reflections they are distorted by the funhouse mirror of art” since “classically, art is said to imitate nature, but in Nabokov´s fiction, art imitates nature mimicking art”, wrote Mason. Actually Nabokov´s “nature” in “Ada” is not natural but verbal[41]. Incest, as a literary theme, is not necessarily a demonic inversion of moral values and an indication of corruption, a satanic cross placed upside down in mockery of Christian values (should we trust Van when he compares brachiambulation to Terra, incest and metaphor?).

As Don B. Johnson observes, Nabokov´s comment about the meaning of incest in Ada “would seem to explode any hope of relating Ada´s sibling incest theme to the generalities of anthropology, psychology or philosophy – moral or immoral. The meaning of the novel´s central thematic metaphor must be sought elsewhere” (WR,131).He quotes Nabokov´s answer about the “incest theme”: “If I had used incest for the purpose of representing a possible road to happiness or misfortune, I would have been a best-selling didactician dealing in general ideas. Actually I don´t give a damn for incest one way or another. I merely like the ‘bl” sound in siblings, bloom, blue, bliss, sable.”(SO 122-23).[42]

While discussing her analogy of art/science and terra/antiterra, N.Katherine Hayles placed herself (and VN´s novel) as indicators of what is real and what is fictional in “Ada” by taking her own certainty of what reality is as her central reference. At the same time she suggests that it was not the metaphysical structure of the created universe that represented an obstacle to the reconciliation of art and reality, which lay “in the attempts of the protagonist to control completely what is only partially subject to his shaping imagination”[43]. Van´s “endeavor not to ignore the ‘real’ world, but to communicate with it” mirror N.K. Hayles’s thesis about “Ada”. She describes it as a novel that hints “that art and reality may be freed from the usual Nabokovian dialectic” – because, differently from the other protagonists, “Van´s attitudes are a compromise between the desire to retreat into the self-reflexive world of art (a closed circle) and the wish to connect art with reality (a straight line)”. It is N.K.Hayles´s own contention that art is not “real”, either in Terra or in Antiterra, but since for Nabokov reality is a very subjective affair, it might also include N.K. Hayes´s view[44].

Are the verbal wonders in “Ada” a product of Van´s or of Nabokov´s “orgy of epithelial alliterations”? Was the experience of “an unprecedent and unrepeatable event in the continuum of life or at least a thematic anthemia of such events in a work or art” something that only Van had experienced in his fictional world of art, while VN remained simply as an observer of human follies, illnesses, cruelties or bliss? Commentators may step into the slippers of some god to grant their pardon to VN´s perverse characters or to insist upon VN´s basic goodness or fundamental moral values. They are adding their private world-view to the novels, but there is no escape from that. Even when novels create new worlds, they still belong to the one in which their readers live.

The geocentric system creates a forceful visual representation for the Earth lying as an “ego” in the center of a world that is enveloped by sacred mysteries and gods. As H. Haydt observed, “even a panoptical view of the world with three-hundred-and-sixty degrees of horizon still constitutes a prison”[45] as is the writer´s, when he looks at his work from the center of a cosmic stage. Even though he may still add other visions to this self-referential scheme, as when he sees himself holding, like in Vasco da Gama´s machine of the world, the reduced volume of the Cosmos as a crystal sphere that holds the Earth, and himself in the center and holding a smaller crystal sphere, ad infinitum, there always remains an invisible spot from where the entire machinery can be seen. It is from this spot that a writer of genius writes (but we must not forget that this image is itself a part of the wider model). He knows that he is not at the center of the universe, nor is he slightly aside, nor even placed as an antipodal brachiambulator who watches the horizon from an unusual position.

By the transition from the Ptolemaic unitary voice to the four-dimensional stellar clues established by VN´s allusions we can perceive how his novels are directed from an orbital region lying external to his cosmicomic wordworlds[46]. Their diversity does not arise from the split Nabokov maintains as existing between himself and all his characters, nor by the creation of parallel worlds but it becomes possible once he avoids addressing the reader from a single, self-centered place.

There is a kind of game in which one applies a cardboard mask (the mask of the game) over a given text. It offers differently spaced orifices which, when the mask is pushed to slide over any given page, reveal alternate images, words or numbers[47]. A similar resource with punched holes was used in the first programming machines and it lay behind the project for the “Analytical Engine” created by Babbage and Byron´s daughter, Lady Ada Lovelace. Ada was a dedicated mathematician, and in the memoir she wrote she carefully described his innovative designs[48]. Without being, in itself, the key for any coding system, Mascodagama´s trivial masks and reversals may serve as an indication of a pattern in “Ada”, hidden texts that require a specific code to be unraveled. I see this “mask of the game” as something that suggests a device similar to a modern template mask that can bring a still mysterious unity to “Ada” and to its “true or false” words or monstrous composite “logogriphs”[49].

Special thanks are due to Jorio Dauster for his objective and creative criticism at all times.

Jacob Wilkenfeld, Donald B. Johnson and Carolyn Kunin gave me access to books and articles that were unavailable in Brazil. Their comments were invaluable not only to reorganize “Ada”´s “disordered memoir” (following the expression of Charles Nicot),but also my own.

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