The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Vladimir Nabokov · a family chronicle in five parts of steeply diminishing length · the memoir of Van Veen, with Ada’s remarks in its margins and an editor’s bracketed notes · McGraw-Hill, New York, 1969 · scored on Nabokov’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Family chronicle as memoir; idyll, erotic comedy, satire, tragedy and philosophical treatise in one narration, with the lovers’ quarrels in its margins
Mythos
Paradise and its loss, twice: Ardis as Eden; brother and sister as twin souls under a forbidden union, with Chateaubriand and Byron behind it; the drowned girl; a counter-world whose mad believe in the other earth as others believe in heaven
Phase
From the births of Van in 1870 and Ada in 1872, through the Ardis summers of 1884 and 1888, a long separation and a drive across Switzerland, to the old lovers writing the book in the 1960s
Presentation
Fiction; five parts, the first by far the longest and each after it much shorter, the fourth the treatise “The Texture of Time”, the fifth a coda; first person, with Ada’s interjections and an editor’s bracketed notes
Register
From lyric description and the ecstasy of memory to farce, pastiche, erotic inventory, literary jab and essay, threaded with French and Russian and with puns and anagrams across all three languages
Scale
One consciousness, three generations of one family, a whole invented world’s history and geography, and the nature of time
Governing Proposition
Van Veen, in his nineties, writes the memoir of his love for Ada, the girl he grew up believing his cousin and who is his sister: from a first summer at Ardis when he is fourteen and she twelve, through a second summer, separations, a world’s worth of travel and quarrel, to their old age together, with Ada’s remarks in the margins of his pages. Their younger half-sister Lucette loves them both, is drawn into their games, is refused, and drowns herself from a liner in the night. The wager of the novel is that a paradise can be remembered at the full pitch of a great prose and the reader still made to see who paid for it, and that a book’s proportions, its parts shrinking as they near the present, can be the shape of remembered time.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike.” The book opens by taking the most famous first sentence in the Russian novel and turning it inside out, and the turn is a declaration of what follows. The subtitle calls the book a family chronicle, the form of the nineteenth-century novel at its most settled, and the first page announces that this chronicle will be told by a writer in total command of his means, who will keep the inheritance and reverse its terms. The family will be happy, after its fashion, and its happiness will be the most dissimilar thing in it.
The family runs across three generations. Demon Veen is the father; the twin sisters Marina and Aqua stand beside him; there are three children. Van is born in 1870 and Ada in 1872, and the two grow up believing themselves cousins, when they are brother and sister. The younger Lucette is half-sister to both. The prohibition that follows from it, and Demon’s enforcement of it, run under everything the lovers do, and so does the third child, who is shut out of what they share.
The world they live on is not ours. It is Antiterra, a counter-earth with its own history and geography: electricity is banned, North America is an Amerussian continent where Russian and French are spoken beside English, and Tartary lies beyond. Of another earth, Terra, there is rumour, and the mad believe in it as others believe in heaven; Van, grown up, becomes a psychologist of Terra-madness. The dorophones of Antiterra are a running farce. The joke has a purpose. A world in which the past is a different place lets the past be a place, which is what a remembered childhood is.
Movement II
In the summer of 1884 Van, fourteen, comes to Ardis and finds Ada, twelve. The book gives the summer its own title, “Ardis the First”, and spends on it a length that no other season in the story receives. The children explore the house, its library and its park; Ada knows her orchids and her butterflies; they discover each other. The prose of these chapters is written at a pitch few English novels sustain, exact in its naming of plants, insects and light on water, and rapt in its memory. Ardis is Eden, and the old man writing knows it as Eden, which is to say as lost.
Behind the lovers stand older lovers, named: Chateaubriand and Byron, and the long literary history of a brother and a sister whose love is the twin soul and the forbidden union in one. The myth is not decoration. The bond of Van and Ada, the prohibition their parents’ secret puts on it, and Lucette’s exclusion from it all run on it. Four years later comes the second summer, which the book calls “Ardis the Second”, and with it the fall. The fall from Ardis is the plot of the book.
There is a witness. Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy at Ardis, has a camera, and his album of the lovers is the evidence the Eden did not know it was leaving. What Van does to him for it is a blinding, and it is told in the same voice that has told the orchids. The book records it and moves on, as its narrator does. The reader is not obliged to move on with him. With Kim the second book inside the first begins: the book of those who stood outside the lovers’ paradise and paid for it.
Movement III
After Ardis the parts grow shorter and the years pass faster. Van and Ada are parted, under Demon’s prohibition, and the middle of the book is full of Van’s performances. As Mascodagama he is a dancer on his hands, a fine conceit spent at length; the Villa Venus chapter, the chain of floramors, is an entertainment of its own; the puns, the anagrams and the literary jabs, Tolstoy parodied and Eliot mocked, come thick. Much of this is comic and decorative, ornament the book enjoys rather than needs. Through it runs the younger sister.
Lucette has loved both of them since the Ardis years, when she was drawn into their games as a child. She grows up still asking to be let in, and she is refused. On a liner, the Tobakoff, she and Van watch a film, Don Juan’s Last Fling, in which Ada has a small part. Van flees from Lucette to his cabin. That night Lucette drowns herself in the sea, and the book renders her drowning from inside her failing consciousness, the last thing she knows given to her and not to him.
The chapter is the summit of the novel, terrible and beautiful at once, and it turns everything before it. Brian Boyd’s reading of the book, published in 1985, made it the centre: the cost of the lovers’ bliss is Lucette, and the Eden of Ardis was built on a third person’s ruin. The book lets the reader see this; its narrator half refuses to. The comedy of genius and the tragedy of its cost stand side by side in the middle parts, and the book leaves the join to the reader, who must hold the floramors and the night sea in one law.
Movement IV
Part Four is a treatise. Under the title “The Texture of Time”, Van argues that time is not a dimension and not a passage to be measured: it is the texture of consciousness, felt in its intervals. As essay it states what the rest of the book has enacted. Its argument would be the weakest thing in the novel if it were only essay.
It is not only essay. The treatise is set inside a journey: Van drives across Switzerland to meet Ada at Mont Roux, after years apart, and the essay on the felt interval runs beside the road towards her. The argument becomes an experience, an interval lived with an arrival at its end, and the arrival is the reunion that the whole long separation has deferred. The drive is the book’s second height after Lucette’s last night, and the one place where its philosophy and its love story are the same thing.
The proportions of the book bear the treatise out. Part One, a few summers, is by far the longest; each later part is much shorter; Part Four, decades in its reach, is a single meditation and a single drive. Memory dilates the remote and compresses the near, and the reader has lived that from the start, a summer taking hundreds of pages and the later years a few. The meeting at Mont Roux closes the part, and the lovers are together again.
Movement V
Part Five is a coda. Van, in his nineties, is writing the book the reader holds, and Ada, beside him, reads it as he writes: her remarks stand in its margins, correcting, teasing and quarrelling, so that the past becomes a thing two people dispute and write together. An editor, Ronald Oranger, adds bracketed notes, and the brackets remind the reader that the lovers are old and dying as they write. The memoir that began as one man’s rapture ends as a joint work, with its witnesses visible in its margins.
The close is the old lovers’ death, and it is told as a passage out of life into art: they die, the book says, “into the finished book”. The phrase is the novel’s last claim and its largest: that the paradise of Ardis, lost in the world, is kept in the book, and that the lovers become what they have written. It is a third height after Lucette’s night and the drive to Mont Roux, and it is a height that the reader who has read Lucette’s chapter cannot take on its own terms. She is in the finished book too, and she did not choose to be.
Around the novel stand texts that are not scored with it: the “Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom”, which Nabokov supplied under an anagram of his own name for a paperback edition; the French version of 1975, which he revised; and the Russian translations. The novel is the English book of 1969, written by Nabokov at seventy, his longest. It was received with division, and has been read since mainly by his readers and in the academy, where its patterns are still being recovered, chapter by chapter, and where the question it puts to every reader is still open: how far to stand with Van, and how far with the third child.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is the book’s weakest ground, and the reason this is its lowest axis. The design argues for its proportions: Part One dilates because Ardis is the paradise memory lingers in, and the later parts shrink as remembered time contracts, so the length of the first summer is compelled. Inside that frame much is permitted rather than required. The Villa Venus chapter, the chain of floramors, could go with no loss of knowledge; Van’s career as Mascodagama, the dancer on his hands, is a fine conceit spent at length; the puns, anagrams and literary jabs run far denser than the meaning needs, and the erotic inventories repeat. Lucette’s chapters, the Kim Beauharnais album and “The Texture of Time” are required. Perhaps a fifth of the text is ornament the book enjoys rather than needs.
Score: 7.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a consciousness of great gifts can remake its past as paradise, and the remaking is paid for by those it leaves outside. The rapture of Van and Ada is real, and so is Lucette, who loves them both, is drawn into their games, is refused, and drowns. The book lets the reader see what its narrator half refuses to: that Ardis was an Eden built on a third person’s ruin, and on the blinding of Kim, the kitchen boy with a camera. A second disclosure, of time as the texture of consciousness rather than a dimension, is argued in Part Four and enacted by the form. Held where it is because the first must be dug for against Van’s self-regard, and the second is stated as essay more than found in action.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Elevation comes often, mostly as beauty and the ecstasy of memory. The first Ardis summer, its orchids and butterflies and the children’s discovery of each other, is written at a pitch few English novels sustain. The summit is Lucette’s last night: the film Don Juan’s Last Fling, in which Ada has a small part, Van’s flight from Lucette to his cabin, and her drowning in the night sea, rendered from inside her failing consciousness; the chapter is terrible and beautiful at once. The drive across Switzerland in Part Four, the essay on time running beside the road to Ada, is a second height, and the close, where the old lovers die “into the finished book”, a third. Charged: long middle stretches are comic, satirical or decorative, and the Ardis rapture at times cloys.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The built myth is paradise and its loss. Ardis is Eden twice over, “Ardis the First” and “Ardis the Second” in the book’s own titles for the two summers, and the fall from it is the plot. The love of brother and sister, believed cousins, is the myth of the twin soul and of the forbidden union, with Chateaubriand and Byron named behind it, and it is load-bearing: the lovers’ bond, Demon’s prohibition and Lucette’s exclusion all run on it. The doubled world, Antiterra and the rumoured Terra, builds the myth of the other world into the novel’s physics, and Lucette carries Ophelia’s figure, the drowned girl, into the plot. Held a tenth below the gate because much of the archetypal matter is allusion layered for the pleasure of recognition, and Terra is left a rumour more than a structure.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the nineteenth-century family chronicle, the Russian above all, and the first sentence turns Tolstoy inside out: “All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike.” From there the departure is very wide: a counter-earth with its own history, electricity banned, an Amerussian continent and Tartary beyond; a memoir with the lovers’ quarrels in its margins; a philosophical treatise set inside a car journey; a prose that moves among three languages. The stake was real and paid: Nabokov at seventy, famous after Lolita, wrote his longest book in his least accessible manner, and many who had admired the earlier novels found it self-indulgent. Held below the top because its instruments, the unreliable memoirist and the annotated text, were his own from Pale Fire; the swerve is in scale and world more than in kind.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge changes. The diminishing parts are the knowledge: memory dilates the remote and compresses the near, and the proportions make the reader live it, a summer taking hundreds of pages and decades a short part. The memoir with Ada’s interjections makes the past a thing two people quarrel over and write together; the editor’s brackets remind the reader that the lovers are old and dying as they write. “The Texture of Time”, set inside a drive towards Ada, makes the treatise’s claim, that time is felt in its intervals and not measured in its passage, a lived journey with an arrival. The counter-world lets the past be a place, which is what a remembered childhood is. Held off the top because the counter-world’s apparatus often serves jokes rather than knowledge, and some of the form is a stage for Van’s performances.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence over half a century supports a high figure. Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (1985) argued that the book’s centre is Lucette and the cost of the lovers’ bliss, a reading that changed how the novel is read, and his annotations, chapter by chapter, still find new allusions and patterns. Questions stay open: how far the reader is meant to stand against Van; whether Antiterra is a parody of Terra, its dream or its afterlife; what Ada’s and the editor’s interventions undo. Charged: part of the yield is puzzle, the recovery of an anagram or a buried quotation, which is difficulty before it is depth, and the circle of readers who return to it is narrower than for Lolita or Pale Fire.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is the novel in English of the later twentieth century. The intrinsic force is real: the book showed that the family chronicle could be rebuilt as a counter-world and a machine of memory, that a novel could carry a treatise on time and three languages at once, and it pressed the invented-world novel towards the highest literary seriousness. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is modest for a book of its ambition. The influence of the late Nabokov on later fiction runs mostly through Lolita and Pale Fire; no school or line of novels can be shown to descend from Ada in particular, and none is supposed here. The book is admired and studied more than it is followed.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Form: the text survives whole as Nabokov published it, and has stayed in print in English since 1969. Presence: continuous but narrow. It is translated into the major languages, the French under Nabokov’s own revision, and it is taught and written on, but it is read mainly by Nabokov’s readers and in the academy, and in recent decades its standing has been charged, as Lolita’s has, by readers troubled by Van’s treatment of the young Lucette and by the book’s erotic register. At fifty-seven years a book of uncharged presence would stand higher; presence here is charged but not low, and the figure sits between the charged and the uncharged. Its surface is not tied to its moment: the counter-world has dated less than a realist 1969 would have.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Nabokov’s English, with no translation between. The command of the language is among the highest of any novelist of the century: the precision of description, orchids, butterflies, light on water; a syntax that carries wit and sorrow in one clause; the trilingual pun; and an architecture that times Lucette’s death and the last meeting at Mont Roux with a composer’s care. The opening inversion of Tolstoy announces a writer in total command of his means. Charged: the manner hardens into mannerism, the alliteration and wordplay are relentless, and many readers have found whole chapters airless and arch; the knowingness that serves Van’s character also tires the reader. The craft is load-bearing in the best chapters and decorative in the weakest, which sets it below Lolita and Pale Fire.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the farce of Antiterra’s dorophones and the comic sexual catalogues, and Lucette’s drowning. They obey one law: everything is seen through Van’s consciousness, which makes pleasure and play of everything and is shown, at the limit, unable to do so with Lucette. The counter-world’s physics holds: its banned electricity, its displaced geography and its Terra-madness recur consistently through the whole length of the book. Charged: the joke-logic of Antiterra sometimes overrides the human logic, dates and borders bending for a pun, and the shift of moral weight between the Ardis chapters and Lucette’s is real enough that the book can seem to obey two laws, the comedy of genius and the tragedy of its cost, with the join left to the reader.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held are many: consciousness above all; the family across three generations, Demon and the twin sisters Marina and Aqua, and their three children; sexuality and its cruelty; time, as the book’s philosophical subject; art; science, for Van is a psychologist of Terra-madness; the natural order in its orchids and butterflies; and a whole world’s history and geography, though invented. They are integrated through one consciousness and one family, and the book is wider than Lolita or Pale Fire. Held below the upper bands because the state, labour and society are present only as comedy or furniture, the servants are figures in the lovers’ landscape, and the counter-world’s displaced history, wide as it is, is a playground rather than a history that presses on the people in it.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.4 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.9, then The Swerve at 8.8, then The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 8.7. A command of English among the highest of the century, load-bearing in Lucette’s last night and the drive to Mont Roux; a family chronicle turned inside out from its first sentence and rebuilt on a counter-earth; a book whose diminishing parts are the shape of remembered time; and half a century of readers still finding Lucette, and new patterns, at its centre.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.4: the proportions between the parts are compelled, but inside them the Villa Venus chapter, the Mascodagama performances, the erotic inventories and a run of puns far denser than the meaning needs are ornament the book enjoys rather than needs, perhaps a fifth of the text. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.8: the force is real, but the late Nabokov’s reach runs through Lolita and Pale Fire, and no line of novels can be shown to descend from this one.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.9, The Living Form at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three axes: The Swerve at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.4, a tenth below 7.5, with Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 the next lowest; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.4, in the band of Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, written in English and first published by McGraw-Hill, New York, in 1969. It is scored as one novel as published: five parts of steeply diminishing length, presented as the memoir of Van Veen, composed in his nineties, with Ada’s marginal remarks and the bracketed notes of an editor, Ronald Oranger, all of which are part of the fiction. Every axis is judged on Nabokov’s English, which is the original, with no translation between. The “Notes to Ada by Vivian Darkbloom”, which Nabokov supplied for a paperback edition, are context and not scored; so are the French version of 1975, which he revised, and the Russian translations. Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Ada: The Place of Consciousness (1985) is cited as the record of the book’s reception and is not part of the work. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the first sentence, the titles the book gives the two summers and its fourth part, the title of the film in the third movement, and the phrase of the close. Facts that could not be verified, among them the chapter count of each part, the page count and proportions of the first edition, the dates the novel gives to Lucette’s death, the meetings at Mont Roux and the ages of the lovers at the end, the date of the Darkbloom notes, the book’s place in the magazines of 1969 and the history of its editions in print, are not given. Citations are by part and episode.