Still Time: Textual Consciousness and Photography in Nabokov's Ada

Odekirk, Connor

Still Time: Textual Consciousness and Photography in Nabokov's Ada

Files

2015OdekirkC1.pdf(261.96 KB)

2015OdekirkC_release1.pdf(126.15 KB)

Date

2015

Authors

Odekirk, Connor

Advisor

McGrane, Laura

Department

Haverford College. Department of English

Type

Thesis

Language

eng

Access Restrictions

Dark Archive

Terms of Use

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

Abstract

I have chosen to write my thesis on Vladimir Nabokov’s late novel, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. In my thesis I invoke Henri Bergson’s treatise on duration, Time and Free Will as well as Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, among other theorists and criticism to examine tropes of time and narrative forms of memory, such as memoir, photography, and voice recording, in the novel. Photography is a prominent image and theme in this text, which is itself fictionally structured in the form of memoir. Photographs appear both as images that both exist within and are also narrated by the text. They are also forms of memory that the memoir archives within its narrative. They are both subject of the text as well as a function of the narrative. In my thesis I examine the protagonist’s (Van Veen’s) philosophy on time – a theory that is both a reflection and recalibration of Bergson’s Duration. I then analyze the existence of Van’s memoir – including the photographs – within the text both to question his theory regarding time and also to show its fundamental flaws. Interestingly, some of the photographs that I examine in the novel appear earlier in Van’s memoir, as remembered, narrated events rather than posed or candid photographs. It is not until later in the text, and, by virtue of the memoir’s chronology, later in Van’s life, that photographs of specific, already-narrated events surface. The discrepancy between what Van remembers and the images that he sees for the first time in the photographs, in addition to seeing the physical photographs for the first time, complicate the temporal structure of the text as well as Van’s relation to Time and memory. It is through such complications that I explore the temporal complexities of Ada.