“Stylistically, Lucette’s inner monologue varies from the model of “Ulysses” to that of “Anna Karenina.” From the shortest fragments like ‘Legs and arms’ and ‘These steps are something’ and the French puns (dix marches, dimanche), Nabokov switches back to description: ‘While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail. Her twisted progress was that of a cripple.’ Nabokov argued in the “Lectures” that Joyce overemphasized the verbal: we think in images as well as in words. Descriptions in literature have the advantage of conveying both, and in fact can feel more natural than an exaggerated stream of consciousness. Here as never before, Nabokov shows us what he means: we are in Lucette’s tormented head, and then we see her on the deck, over the rail, diving from ‘such a height,’ going in with hardly a splash and cruelly resurfacing. (Anna almost stands up after her leap between the wheels.) If Joyce leans heavily on verbal texture at the expense of visual substance, in this passage Nabokov gives us both. […] Nabokov beats Joyce at his own game by experimenting simultaneously with two layers of narrative: he gives us two counterpointed monologues and inner states. We see the illustrated thoughts of the dying girl, and hear the old man’s interrupted narration. The presence of Violet, the typewriter, Van’s reshuffled notes, his presumable emotional state all force us to visualize this other layer simultaneously: old Van is still not quite able to narrate this one unspeakable event, but tries to concentrate on details and force himself through, echoing the anguish of the dying girl. A film is able to do this quite simply by means of delineated flashbacks, but Nabokov employs no such ready-made markers to differentiate between temporal levels. The Nabokov-trained reader must follow the cues and catch both temporal layers – and distinguish the narrator from the author besides. Nabokov tries to shake the ornamentalism of “Finnegans Wake” by motivating his verbal acrobatics through the narrative, and keeping such dense passages in “Ada” highly emotionally fraught. If Nabokov succeeds, the reader is too enchanted by Lucette, the darkly romantic Veen world, and Nabokov’s pyrotechnics to balk at meta-literary strategies. The magic and the reward should occur on two levels: the seduction of the plot, and the intellectual and aesthetic pleasure of recognizing the craftsman’s mastery.”
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