The Point of an Arrow: Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle – Manuel Marrero
March 3, 2025
Part One
“An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog.” When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “ruined bridges.””
I believe in meaning. I’m going to start writing these less for an imagined readership than for specific people and the books they cherish. You’ll know who you are. Vladimir Nabokov conceived and wrote Ada during a temporally misty decade, hybridizing a couple of big ideas and wrapping it in the impossible just for fun. It’s his longest work, a fin de siècle mythologized Russian novel concerning adolescence and forbidden love for the first half. By the second half and turn of the century, major events transpire mentioned in passing like afterthoughts. It is high fantasy and science fiction awash in ambrosial ambiguity and astir with euphoric invention, each page a surface to be pored over “gemmed with sweat,” synesthetic in an actual profound way. Nabokov, the last great white hope of international literary perverts, redeems every pervert who’s ever hurt you. You will feel insane reading this on the train. It will make you feel a little dumb at first, not with a learning curve so much as barrier or membrane into canal where you won’t know up from down for several chapters. It won’t feel elusive like Pale Fire, rather capacious and dense, and by the time its spell takes effect it’s having its way with you, piercing you imperceptibly and deeper than you perceive yourself. This is terrifying power in a Rilkean sense. Hostile and threatening to the unexamined personhood. Where Borges is emotionally distant or even vacant, ‘kov is sleeve-hearted, soul baring, and dramatic. Where Pynchon is cheeky, Nab’ meets him rakishly where the novel interrogates reality with an Orphic multisensory simultaneity that treats words like scrabble tiles and language like malleable hallucinogenic dye coating the extradimensional board. Quips, winks, callbacks, Easter eggs and the almost incidentally titillating “extrasensorial” details keep the burlesque moving, a living document of a century on an ersatz planet spawning annotations and stimulating active discussion on the internet and presumably elsewhere more than half a century later. The level of induction is so wild that its semblance of deduction breaks down into pure poesy. Nabokov dedicated every book to his lifelong lover Véra. He had about eight years left with her at the time of Ada’s publication in 1969. You can think of each chapter like a room or narrative module. Each one dazzles differently. A loose configuration of elastic tableaux vivants form a concatenation of styles that fractalize around a centrifuge, “the pressure of passionate obsession.” The ciphers and cryptograms and concordances, the social games, the irrepressible libido and irreproachable virtue of searching and engaging with half a mind to find yourself in is Ada, pronounced A-duh. I’m the type to drop everything and give up weekends to read a long book. Much can be said and has been said of it. Millionaires and their families can afford to live this luxury, and their long lives are judged in the final assessment, when the dust has settled and the chips are down, by how their time was spent. Its words are shaped and curved to penetrate literally (“feeling the mouth of steel violently push through tender skin and exploding bone,” “a stab of Ardis,” “arrow straight, abhorred and adored,” and “penetralium,” a word you never need to use). The effect is overwhelming in its exaltation of “the complete collapse of the past.” Its stethoscopic granularity for innuendo and nuance and its layered chronology like Proust with narrational agility and pointillist precision for abstraction and minutiae accordions into a nervous cathedral-like structure, distended light filtering apse into transept petering out into alcoves of nave and narthex. It time travels often mid-sentence or in silent clauses, with wonderfully serviceable congruity and worldly consilience across disciplines and histories in-universe. It is, at scale, difficult to put down or stop thinking about.
“Oblivion is a one-night performance; we have been to it once, there will be no repeat,” and “our awareness of being is not a dot in eternity, but a slit, a fissure, a chasm running along the entire breadth of metaphysical time, bisecting it and shining it—no matter how narrowly—between the back panel and fore panel,” “catching sight of the lining of time” to make more memories. Excited to get in bed with a lamp for three more hours to read it and have a lot to talk about later with another enthusiast. This is what a novel can do. Relish a “a set of coincidences slightly displaced; the artistry of asymmetry,” in which “death” is the “master madness” punctuated by the “shock of beauty.” Ada is total devastation in immersion. Part One comprises more than half the book and contains passages too arduously voluptuous to quote, a lot to take in, with a half life lasting about half a life. Life is pain like everything is like something, some other word, spanning a life’s convulsions and contractions. Tortured intensity and brilliance so potent you must catch your breath. Aristocrats on another planet hallucinate heaven or Las Vegas from a fairy tale twisted by incest, serving you nothing less than “that moment of total happiness, the complete eclipse of the piercing and preying ache, the logic of intoxication.” It is simply the novel outdone, leaving nothing undone except you (the reader). And it goes on. It “seemed to sink deeper and deeper in the quicksand of the dream-like, dream-rephrased, legend-distorted past.” To the mats “for thoughts are much more faintly remembered than shadows or colors, or the throbs of young lust, or a green snake in a dark paradise,” and, aspects never witnessed or experienced “remained within him more real than any actual memory.” The texture and force of memory’s full nature, “which penetrated him, through an eye in the back of his head, through his vitreous spinal canal, and could never be lived down, never—consisted of a selection and blend of such random images and expressions of hers that had affected him with a pang of intolerable remorse at various moments in the past,” is overexposed inside and out. Perhaps your feeling of living in an unreal world could be alleviated or exacerbated by medication, perhaps every day you pray for something a little more hyperrealistic: “her full lips, parted slightly in profile, show in the sun the red pollen of a remnant of salve drying in the transversal thumbnail lines of their texture.” Nabokov’s sensitivity is such that there’s a difference between “the sly demon smile of remembered or promised ardor” and “the exquisite human glow of happiness and helplessness.” Pained, “not so much haunted by the agony of his desire” or the “despair of passion,” “as by that meaningless space overhead, underhead, everywhere, the demon counterpart of divine time.” It pulses with affinity and affinal longing for the celestial sibling and it’s a place to spend “Pure Time” in, full of “nowness,” “a task now approaching its crucial stage, the flowering of the Present.” It nails callow love with its fumbling finesse, its awkward bravado that reads intimate, and time marches on whatever you believe, the maelstrom of “microfilmed last thoughts” roaring all around.
Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five
“[California ? 1890] I love only you, I’m happy only in dreams of you, you are my joy and my world, this is as certain and real as being aware of one’s being alive, but…oh, I don’t accuse you!—but, Van, you are responsible (or Fate through you is responsible, ce qui revient au même) for having let loose something mad in me when we were only children, a physical hankering, an insatiable itch. The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body. Now I have to pay for your rasping the red rash too strongly, too soon, as charred wood has to pay for burning. When I remain without your caresses, I lose all control of my nerves, nothing exists any more than the ecstasy of friction, the abiding effect of your sting, of your delicious poison. I do not accuse you, but this is why I crave and cannot resist the impact of alien flesh; this is why our joint past radiates ripples of boundless betrayals.”
“Joylessly, he felt the stout snake of desire weightily unwind; grimly, he regretted not having exhausted the fiend in Villa Venus. He accepted the touch of her blind hand working its way up his thigh and cursed nature for having planted a gnarled tree bursting with vile sap within a man’s crotch. Suddenly Lucette drew away, exhaling a gentle “merde.” Eden was full of people.”
The book feels like it’s watching itself, yet somehow never too crowded or busy seeming. Having at least two coauthors (Nabokov and the central protagonist Van), and a committee of transcribers and editors out of frame (including Ada), It does more heavy lifting than any book to engage the senses synesthetically and keep the mind occupied. It’s a challenge. This life is a long story that goes everywhere and nowhere. Space is denounced as an “impostor” and “it does not matter that we can never enjoy the true Present, which is an instant of zero duration.” Time is an arrow, “the direction of time” is absolute reign. We are impaled on it. Time is “not heading anywhere in the first place” “straight or round,” and its irreversibility is a “parochial affair.” Lambent, sinuous, meandering, a warped world begins with a bastardized iconic opening from another epic novel. It is a long swoon promising you will fall in love again. It is the purest essence of it, a substance beckoning orality. For the nape and axilla addicted, how precarious focus can be when the heart breaks something inside you. Set in a “nulliverse,” or fallen world, “where the only principle is random variation.” A cruor between “affairs of the flesh” and “affairs of the heart.”
“Tropes are the dreams of speech.”
“She lay curved away from him, with nothing beyond the opened parenthesis, its contents not yet ready to be enclosed,” I won’t compare myself to others but is everyone as locked in keys hidden as I am, crowing about their accomplishments? I’m a romantic writer like Vladimir was. I write about food and romantic love. Dimpled with feral, unconscious states of undress and dripping, Ada is the most erotic novel ever written. Not sleazy but erotic. High IQ molls and femmes fatales fledged fully, crying audaciously, meant to arouse and turn you on. “His girl’s ensellure was hot ivory; Lucette’s was downy and damp.” Van, caddish lothario, has “tasted this sensation, then that.” Decadently “only to find a tousled and sulky Lucette, still in her willow green nightie, sitting on the far edge of the concubital bed, while fat-nippled Ada, already wearing, for ritual and fatidic reasons, his river of diamonds, was inhaling her first smoke of the day and trying to make her little sister decide whether she would like to try the Monaco’s pancakes with Potomac syrup, or, perhaps, their incomparable amber-and-ruby bacon.” This scintillating and unsavory perversion, seasoned by more than one “enchantress,” is Vladimir Nabokov the storyteller bargaining with his life, gumming up the idyll we know (one beautiful maiden and spouse his whole life), the amaranth-garlanded chambers to be waltzed through leadenly with sorrow in his chest. This internal butchery begins at home while its consequent barbarism goes remote and abroad. God save you (the reader) and cry later for the“embered embryo,” the “paranymph” in her “private samsara” with her “vaginal brother” and “vaginal sister,” “her mind is a closed museum.” God’s silence intensifies with my solitude. City noise the soundtrack from my office window.
“All this you are free to diagnose as a case of advanced erotomania, but there is more to it, because there exists a simple cure.” I finally found out what women want, and it’s murder. Violence is the new sex, as seen in the movies. There are no sincere acts of sexuality but violence is prevalent in everything. To cement my legacy before forty because, why not? All I have is time. We are bound by the written word and its oral sensations. We can conquer it, guilty of this narcissistic art project “in the natural movement of thought.”
The last time it was this cold this long I was in my 20s and in love. There are no lovers left alive. The brodernist should just put the fries in the bag. Being kind is killing me. Working til the world changes. Happiness is a choice like texting me back. Absence is a hell of a drug and only love can break your heart. Absence is balance. I’m writing til it stops but I can’t stop. Women are going to drive me insane. Nothing hurts. Don’t worry about me I’m fine. Thinkpiecey clickbait. Threadbare ascendancy. There’s power in this. Minimize the scholar’s power. Drain resources. Shrink the master. Trying to feel the sublime. I have only one question for women: why are you doing this to me? In Cortázar’s Hopscotch, we are immediately offered an off ramp from fictive Bergsonian discursion. Here it’s the germ of conception, folded and weaved in interminably without pleonasm or tautology. Two tone like wildfire, overflow. Flood. The “flow” meaning menstrual, “chronal” time until.
“Physiologically the sense of Time is a sense of continuous becoming, and if “becoming” has a voice, the latter might be, not unnaturally, a steady vibration; but for Log’s sake, let us not confuse Time with Tinnitus, and the seashell hum of duration with the throb of our blood. Philosophically, on the other hand, Time is but memory in the making. In every individual life there goes on from cradle to deathbed the gradual shaping and strengthening of that backbone of consciousness, which is the Time of the strong. “To be” means to know one “has been.” “Not to be” implies the only “new” kind of (sham) time: the future. I dismiss it. Life, love, libraries, have no future.”
If the future is “Sham Time,” then True Time, though unnamed, suggests the activation of “Deliberate Present” over the “Specious Present.”
You believe me, don’t you? I’m listening for the secret chords. I’m hearing the poetry. Periods point blank. The emotional exhaustion, Faster and faster the years come and I’m writing til it stops. Faster and faster it comes. You wanna be friends but I can’t have broke friends who don’t read legends. Girls love that. As “they were bound to be in the long ruin [sic!]” “casting an excruciating shadow” they are “firm and suffer in silence.”
Where is the magic and obsession in this life? Evolve painfully in a state of nature. Love doesn’t make sense neither does art that’s what makes it good. Not materialistic or deterministic, scientists and mathematicians concede either inexplicable or so maddeningly complex impossible to explain. Mass frisson instead of synergy is a negative dynamo. Virtuality-born isolation leads to numb bloodlust but it’s a heart shaped world, passionate love’s indentation in it indelible to blood vessels constricting around brainy phenomena and mindkilled fuckery.
Desire is a blade or at least a sharp, pointed object. Competitive edge is chronic with sexual frustration. In praise of folly, in response and reaction to brodernism, Franzen has been making this argument and DFW made it. The Recognitions is good but you shouldn’t write like that. The challenge and time demanded of a doorstopper so intricate it gets in the way of communication. A book you fall into, so-called encyclopedic fiction, not meant to be conquered. Information that talks to itself. The pleasure of it comes after in a refractory hangover. You live with it it, it infects your thoughts and way of thinking, engaging, generating meaning and beauty with clarity. A short story traces a story. A novella supplies the barest for you to communicate with. This is like wearing glasses to see outside. Letters, monologues. The story is in your heart, tell it like it needs to be told without worrying about entertainment or winning hearts like scalps. Badges but everyone’s a little dark. Seize the fleeting, precise conditions which bring you joy. Nabokov discussed in 4chan’s top lit threads is no accident. Brodernism just as my cryptofascistic sympathies are no secret. You don’t read it in one sitting, you attempt it. I love a text that has an up too late and smoked weed the wrong way type of vibe.
“In the fatal course of the most painful ailments, sometimes (nodding gravely), sometimes there occur sweet mornings of perfect repose—and that not owing to some blessed pill or potion (indicating the bedside clutter) or at least without knowing that the loving hand of despair slipped us the drug.” The Other is your heaven. Everyone is so nervous. It’s well understood that you pick your poison in natal contemplation. Acoustical delirium is the province and domain of providence. You could roll snake eyes every time, brodernists are still better than boring social climbers.
“A sense of otiose emptiness was all Van derived from those contacts with Literature. Even while writing his own book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.” Disclosure brings “transcendental delirium.”
“We must remember that he was only twenty; that his young proud soul was in a state of grievous disarray; that he had read too much and invented too little; and that the brilliant mirages which had risen before him when he felt the first pangs of book-birth on Cordula’s terrace were now fading under the action of prudence,” as writing a book is actionable not just cognitive. What if things were different, if they deviated along a course toward prosperity?
Focalizing inner spaces, “oneirotic” surrealism thermal with carnal girlchildren, obliterative and elaborative, “sportive,” God writes the best stories. Entering willingly into his passion, death to sin and death swallowed up in victory. Lewd, invasive thoughts. What you’re really thinking is unsaid, not what it seems, “The momentum of disaster lost none of its speed,” much to be said of what is selected for deletion, omission, absence, withholding, suspense, etc. at times maybe more telling or betraying, even if for an instant, of what one really thinks. Noetic, numinous. The “blank years” fly by. It slowly breaks your heart with its elegy for youth, makes you indisposed to answering texts or calls. Time moves slower for you than for me, “where artists are the only gods,” and times of grace are at hand.
There will be no love when no currency or metric of success or desirability can be ascribed to it. Nature is ruthless. We may already be there. “The passage of years” in which everything is revealed, stripped bare, zero sum, no delusions, absence is balance. A collective crash out is everybody’s problem, a homegrown special hell. It’s thinking about the same three moments forever.
“No more destruction, Van. Only love.”
“Love is blind,” “and we do not mean the rose sore of Eros alone,” “wrench every nerve of the soul”
hear the spirit better “All was lost in that one chink of a second.”
“Nothing happened—or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind.”
“Numbers and rows and series—the nightmare and malediction harrowing pure thought and pure time—seemed bent on mechanizing his mind.” Only death is the end of the world. “Why not risk it?” Chapters become vignettes the way a youth spanned four hundred pages “had her a thousand times” “sported recently” “the horror of ardor” at Ardis. Here is a book that’s punishing and hurts you with pleasure where a slimmer one wouldn’t do or hit as hard and this hits hard and soft. The effect is elongated but shiv-shaped. “he knew he would never give up; to her he would surrender the remnants of his self at the first trumpet blast of destiny.” Before life turns the last page on you. Heart failure. “Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought they could explain everything.” Condign.
I’m to attend a wedding in Spring. The years lurch along, the past gets bigger magnified in everything stretching out. The bait and switch gut punches leave you reeling swerving toward consecution. My best thoughts. From “harems” to nursing “homes for aged ladies,” to “mausoleums.” I had to blackout “that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.”
“furthermore, in my works, I try not to ‘explain’ anything, I merely describe.” Love was the only thing that ever mattered. Everything is about survival day to day hand to mouth and nothing that doesn’t flourish can grow just shadows lengthening a natural selection of selective breeding polycules “blew her nose, and gasped, and swallowed, and spoke, and next moment all, all was lost.” “apt to relieve a passion of anger and disappointment by means of bombastic and arcane utterances which hurt like a jagged fingernail caught in satin, the lining of Hell.” “Life forked and reforked.”
“unconsciousness, far from awaiting us, with flyback and noose, somewhere ahead, envelops both the Past and the Present from all conceivable sides, being a character not of Time itself but of organic decline natural to all things whether conscious of Time or not.” To “caress time” as an “epicure of duration.” “Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers, and reason corrects the feverish beat.” “My time is also Motionless Time” “one year seems to pass faster because it is a smaller fraction of my increased stock of existence and also because I am less often bored” drives the hammer home and although Space is a lie, we are “better adapted” “to Extension rather than to Duration,” “the perpetual disaster of receding time,” the “Future” is “Sham Time.”
You deserve to grow old observed. Having someone to intimately experience aging with is cardinal.