Ada in Chiasmus: Chiasmus in Ada

Abstract

In his History of Reading Alberto Manguel states what may be an obvious truth when he points out that "the way we read a text today in the Western world—from left to right and from top to bottom—is by no means universal" (47). Nor has it always been the case in the West. Nabokov's Ada: the name, the title, is palindromic, reading the same backwards and forwards. Is it possible to read a novel 'backwards'? Is it possible to reverse the direction of time? If one attends closely to Nabokov, the answer to both questions may be yes. To interpret the novel Ada means to find a way to read it which is complementary to the virtuosic exemplarity of its form. The only way to read Ada's apparently circular nanative, as the nanator suggests in the opening chapter, is to 're-read' (19) (the verb 'reread' occurs far more often in the text than 'read'). To reread is of course not to read backwards but to interpret, to engage in a memory-work: the narrator claims to be 'reminding' the 'rereader'—which is only logical—to look backwards while reading forwards. 'Rereading' describes a general approach to nanative fiction, but Ada in 1969 set a new standard in the degree and complexity of its proleptic, retroleptic, 'incestuous' intratextuality1—and not merely intratextual: to read Ada is to