Part 3 Chapter 1
Afternote
Pt. 3 Ch. 1 has two main roles: to show Van’s life as suddenly and sustainedly empty, now he is banished from Ada, yet to fill that emptiness with the vivid detail of furnished space, from itchy bright caterpillar hairs to pyramids, and colored time (“an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales”); and to begin to clear the deck of those who stand in the way of his and Ada’s coming triumphantly together, without harming others, in the second half of their lives, by announcing the deaths of Marina, Lucette, and Demon, and by reporting on the first of these deaths.
Both the rush of the years and the rollcall of deaths accentuate the accelerating pace of time as loss, which appears still faster with the shrinkage of textual space from Part to Part: Part One covers mostly four years of Van and Ada’s life in three hundred pages, Part Two five years in not even half as many pages, and Part Three will prove to cover twelve years, with a coda of another seventeen years, in just over half of Part Two’s less-than-half of Part One.
Van, as always, fills the emptiness of his life without Ada with work and with other women, but also, this time, with restless and fruitless travel, through which the women—at least five representative sexual partners in four pages: Marion Armborough, Lady Scramble, Eberthella Brown, his florindas at the Miramas Villa Venus, and his “favorite, lanky, awkward, black girl student” in Kingston—and the work—four books of psychology and philosophy—interlace.
The Starts of Parts Two and Three
Pt. 3 Ch. 1, as the start of a new Part marking a new and apparently inalterable absence from Ada, resembles but also greatly differs from Pt. 2 Ch. 1. Then, Ada was desperate to win Van back after his resolute repudiation of her, and her desperation in the Very Private Letters that she sends him forms the core of that chapter. There too there was continuity between the end of Part One and the start of Part Two: Cordula’s apartment, Manhattan, and the move to Paris feature in both, and the time-gap between the end of Part One and the first scene in Part Two may be a matter of days or less. Now, in Pt. 3 Ch. 1, we are at once dislocated into discontinuity, plunged into a trough of lost time and lost life, Van’s own and that of the mother whose life he never valued but whose death makes him brood on the meaningless of his own life in the absence of Ada.
Part Two starts at Manhattan’s Goodson Airport and ends with what seems a kind of retrieval and extension and sublimation of Ardis, in the apartment Cordula has passed on to Van: where Lucette stumbles into Van and Ada making love, where Kim’s album occasions a revisiting of Ardis the First, where Van, Ada, and Lucette’s romp in Van’s bed escalates the dangerous cuddles of Ardis the Second. Part Three begins with reminders of his time at Ardis reduced to hollow, almost mocking, mere verbal echoes in remote destinations: Ladorah, Lake Van, Sidra.
The End of Part Two and the Start of Part Three
Yet despite the contrasts there are also less obtrusive continuities.
The sensations and impressions so marked by diversity and dispersal in the first half of Pt. 3 Ch.1 reflect the consequence of Demon’s separating Van from Ada at the end of Part Two: Van’s vain attempt to distract himself from Ada’s absence through travel. This first half of the chapter connects causally with the two preceding chapters, even in its contrast in settings, structure, and society.
The second half of the chapter, on the other hand, offers an alarmingly rapid situational reprise: a parental death and the prospect of a family reunion. At the end of Part Two, Dan’s death occasions Demon’s seeking out Van in what he thinks still Cordula’s apartment, and therefore unexpectedly encountering Ada as Van’s long-term bedmate. Before he makes this discovery, Demon gushes to Van about Andrey Vinelander as Ada’s fiancé, and his intention not to “bother Ada in her Agavia”—not to disrupt her precious time with “Vinelander . . . the scion . . . of one of those great Varangians” (437)—even as he gathers what he can of the family for Dan’s funeral. As Demon elaborates still more on preparations for the funeral, Ada enters in her pink peignoir, and her father abruptly calls off all plans to round up the family: he now wants only to sunder his two children. In Pt. 3 Ch. 1, after two brief pages emphasizing Van’s life far from familiar shores and family haunts, Marina’s death too could unite the Veens for another funeral, only for Van’s discovery that Demon has already arrived with Ada and the man Demon has been so eager to secure as her husband to mean that this time, Van instantly breaks off all thought of attending the funeral.
Part Three and the Novel
If Part Three begins with a surprise structural break, a swift slideshow of unexpected shifts in time and place, it nevertheless connects with other structural features so far. The sequence “He traveled, he studied, he taught. He contemplated the pyramids. . . . He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van” establishes a new pattern that seems to owe nothing to the old except the irony of the lake’s name. Yet if that third sentence seems bizarre in its isolation (the fourth sentence jumps to still another setting, and the fifth to another again), it also links with the opening of Part One, “Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d’Or” (3) and even more tightly with the opening of Part Two, where Demon reports from the newspaper he is reading that “An American governor, my friend Bessborodko, is to be installed in Bessarabia, and a British one, Armborough, will rule Armenia” (330).
And where Part Three opens with an echo of and match for the abrupt temporal and emotional shift in Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, Part One opens with a distorted reprise of the opening of Anna Karenin, the long Ardis sections of the chronicle end with echoes and evocations of Anna Karenin’s end, her final stream of distraught consciousness, and Part One’s last sentence imitates the last sentence of Part One of Flaubert’s most famous novel, Madame Bovary. The echo of Flaubert in the opening of Part Three perfectly suits the mood and the action of the surprise shift of time and place in L’Éducation sentimentale, but why the match with the other novelistic markers?
Part Three: First and Last
One reason, at least, is the multiple links between the opening and closing of Part Three: Pt. 3 Ch. 8 ends with Van and Ada’s next reunion—deferred to the very end of Part Three—and their exultant adultery in the Trois Cygnes hotel in Mont Roux, where “in a word, the alberghian atmosphere of those new trysts added a novelistic touch (Aleksey and Anna may have asterisked here!) which Ada welcomed as a frame, as a form, something supporting and guarding life, otherwise unprovidenced on Desdemonia, where artists are the only gods” (521).
Indeed, the most pointed links the opening chapter of Part Three has with anything else in the novel are with Part Three’s closing chapter. Pt. 3 Ch. 1 announces the deaths of Marina, Lucette, and Demon. In retrospect Van thinks he could have briefly resumed a clandestine adulterous relationship with Ada had he come to Marina’s funeral: “He was always . . . to recollect with reluctance, as if wishing to suppress in his mind a petty, timorous, and stupid deed (for, actually, who knows, the later antlers might have been set right then, with green lamps greening green growths before the hotel where the Vinelanders stayed), his reacting from Kingston to Lucette’s cable from Nice (‘Mother died this morning the funeral dash cremation dash is to be held after tomorrow at sundown’)” (451) with a cabled request asking who else would attend, and an apology for not attending when he learns that Demon has already arrived with Andrey and Ada. Van and Ada would have found it difficult to deceive, if not “not overbright” (385) Andrey, then darkly brilliant Demon, had Van arrived for Marina’s funeral in the hope of cuckolding Ada’s husband. But the sentence at least discloses that Van and Ada do later bestow a cuckold’s “antlers” on Andrey, which occurs in Pt. 3 Ch. 8, when Demon’s death in the preceding chapter makes it possible for Van and Ada to reunite and to enjoy their adultery under the noses of purblind Andrey and his would-be intrusive but actually obtuse sister.
Pt. 3 Ch. 1 announces three deaths, Marina’s, Lucette’s, and Demon’s. If in Pt. 3 Ch. 8 Demon’s death makes it possible for Van and Ada to attain “the highest ridge of their twenty-one-year-old love: its complicated, dangerous, ineffably radiant coming of age” (521) in Van’s suite in his Mont Roux hotel, it does not however lead to the next step that Van anticipates, Ada’s leaving her husband to resume a life with him. For the shadow of a new death suddenly looms. In Pt. 3 Ch. 1, Van does not learn of Marina’s diagnosis with bowel cancer until the last time he sees her, less than two weeks before her death. But in Pt. 3 Ch. 8 he learns of Andrey Vinelander’s diagnosis with advanced tuberculosis—at that time itself a death sentence—just before Ada leaves Mont Roux, not with him as he had hoped but with Andrey, because “She could not tell her husband” of her intention to leave him “while he was ill” (529). At the beginning of Part Three, Marina’s death follows all too soon after Van’s learning of her diagnosis, but at the end of the Part, Andrey’s death comes all too slowly for impatient Van: another seventeen years, until 1922, when he receives Ada’s invitation to try to reconnect, and he begins to compose The Texture of Time on his impatient drive towards her—as Pt. 3 Ch. 1, elliptically, announces: “The Texture of Time, begun 1922” (450).
Pt. 3 Ch. 1 also introduces Dasha Vinelander, even before her brother, and her devotion to the Russian or Greek Orthodox faith. Van, visiting Marina two years before her death, catches sight of “a bearded old priest of the Greek persuasion, clad in neutral black, leaving on a motor bicycle for his Nice parish near the tennis courts” (451); and although his mother confesses to being attracted by sensory aspects of Eastern Orthodox rituals, “her soul remained irrevocably consecrated, naperekor (in spite of) Dasha Vinelander, to the ultimate wisdom of Hinduism” (451). At the end of Part Three, after Ada chooses for dying Andrey “the famous and excellent Grotonovich Clinic (for her husband’s endless periods of treatment) instead of Princess Alashin’s select sanatorium, Dorothy Vinelander retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually she married a Mr. Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout the Severnïya Territorii” (532), a comic comedown for the pious snob.
In Pt. 3 Ch. 1, when Van makes an excuse to leave Marina and Villa Armina, to return to America, “mummy-wizened” Marina “had asked, with her new, tender, myopic, because inward, expression: ‘Can’t you wait till I’m gone?; and his reply had been ‘I’ll be back on the twenty-fifth. I have to deliver an address on the Psychology of Suicide’; and she had said, stressing, now that everything was tripitaka (safely packed), the exact kinship: ‘Do tell them about your silly aunt Aqua,’ whereupon he had nodded, with a smirk, instead of answering: ‘Yes, mother’” (452). When Van meets Dasha Vinelander in Pt. 3 Ch. 8, he discovers she is indeed a blackmailer, as he has been warned, overtly and covertly, respectively, by Lucette (“a born blackmailer,” 466) and Ada (“Miss ‘Kim’ Blackrent, well, that’s exactly dear Dasha’s type,” 503). Dasha Vinelander tries persistently to spy on Ada in Mont Roux: “The woman was sure of three things: that Ada had a lover in Switzerland; that Van was her brother; and that he was arranging for his irresistible sister secret trysts with the person she had loved before her marriage. The delightful phenomenon of all three terms being true, but making nonsense when hashed, provided Van with another source of amusement” (527). When Van in Nice heard dying Marina acknowledge obliquely that he was her son, not Aqua’s, he did not yet know, as Lucette tells him in Paris the next year, that Demon had told her about Van and Ada’s affair (“Imagine, mother knew everything—your garrulous dad told her everything about Ada and you!” 462). Now, when Van at last meets Dasha Vinelander in Mont Roux, he learns from her that “in her deathbed delirium . . . our splendid Marina was obsessed by two delusions, which mutually excluded each other—that you were married to Ada and that you and she were brother and sister, and the clash between those two ideas caused her intense mental anguish” (519). Another theme encircles Part Three like a closed clasp.
Pt. 3 Ch. 1: Lucette
Of the four deaths that structure Part Three, the most surprising, and certainly the most harrowing and central, is the middle of the three announced in Pt. 3 Ch. 1: Lucette’s. Her death remains surprising even if foreshadowed by passages like “The lusterless whiteness of Ada’s skin (at twelve, sixteen, twenty, thirty-three, et cetera) was incomparably rarer than Lucette’s golden bloom (at eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-five, finis)” (104) and “He was to recall it with a fatidic shiver seventeen years later when Lucette, in her last note to him, mailed from Paris to his Kingston address on June 2, 1901, ‘just in case,’ wrote . . . ” (146).
Despite the wild centrifugality of Pt. 3 Ch. 1, as the second paragraph expands on the stark summary of the first’s “He traveled, he studied, he taught,” the three incidental women in three exotic locations all connect with Lucette and her fate.
Pt. 3 Ch. 1, Paragraph 2, Sentence 2: “He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van.” The sentence says nothing about Van’s possessing the governor’s niece, but knowing Van, we infer, amusedly, that he does, especially in the context of two more women following in the next two sentences. And we infer correctly.
On the night before Lucette’s death, Van watches from the deck of the Tobakoff “the low sun’s ardency break into green-golden eye-spots a few sea-serpent yards to starboard, on the far-side slope of the bow wave” (474)—itself recalling the second woman Van is with in the second paragraph of Pt. 3 Ch. 1, in Sidra, where he watches “the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales” (449). But somehow as Van falls asleep on the Tobakoff that night he dreams “of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman’s extremely compliant and accomplished niece” (474-75). For rereaders, the diving grebe cannot help foreshadowing Lucette at the end of the chapter diving to her death from the Tobakoff into “such a disorder of shadows and snaking reflections” (493: cf. the “sea-serpent yards” of the previous evening)—all the more so as Lucette has been strongly associated with birds (especially birds of paradise, at 387, 410, 421 and 559).
The explicitness about Van’s sexual relations with Marion Armborough ramps up on Lucette’s last afternoon beside the swimming pool. As at Kingston, Van is aroused sexually by Lucette’s proximity and her eagerness (she whispers that she’s “A happy new girl. Alone with you on an abandoned ship, with ten days at least till my next flow,” 478): “Her half-veiled gaze dwelt upon him with heavy, opaque greed, and she was right, they were really quite alone, he had possessed Marion Armborough behind her uncle’s back in much more complex circumstances, what with the motorboat jumping like a flying fish and his host keeping a shotgun near the steering wheel” (478). The implicit sexual relationship between Van and Armborough’s niece becomes comically explicit and contrasts with Van’s vexed determination not to respond to Lucette’s invitations and allures on board this boat: “Joylessly, he felt the stout snake of desire weightily unwind; grimly, he regretted not having exhausted the fiend in Villa Venus” (478).
Pt. 3 Ch. 1, Paragraph 2, Sentence 3: “From a hotel balcony in Sidra his attention was drawn by the manager to the wake of an orange sunset that turned the ripples of a lavender sea into goldfish scales and was well worth the price of enduring the quaintness of the small striped rooms he shared with his secretary, young Lady Scramble” (449). “Lady Scramble” evokes the game of Scrabble (“scrabble” and “scramble” are in several senses interchangeable, explicitly so in Ada: “a medically minded English Scrabbler” (379) and Ada’s best score as “the highest . . . ever obtained for one word by a Russian scrambler” (227)). In the key Scrabble chapter, Lucette at one point clings “to her last five letters (with none left in the box) forming the beautiful ARDIS which her governess had told her meant ‘the point of an arrow’—but only in Greek, alas” (225), and it is exactly these letters that are reversed in another impermissible Scrabble combination, the place-name “Sidra,” and that are again evoked aboard the Tobakoff as Lucette “prepared to ardis into the amber” (479). And it is through a remembered game of Russian Scrabble—in which Lucette is left with six letters in the last round, “LIKROT or ROTIKL” (379), not yet understanding either the word KLITOR or what it refers to—that she brings to a climax her discussion with Van at Kingston of her sexual initiation at fourteen with Ada and the gap between her eight-year-old innocence and Van and Ada’s sexual experience.
Pt. 3 Ch. 1, Paragraph 2, Sentence 4: “On another terrace, overlooking another fabled bay, Eberthella Brown, the local Shah’s pet dancer (a naive little thing who thought ‘baptism of desire’ meant something sexual), spilled her morning coffee upon noticing a six-inch-long caterpillar, with fox-furred segments, qui rampait, was tramping, along the balustrade and curled up in a swoon when picked up by Van—who for hours, after removing the beautiful animal to a bush, kept gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips with the girl’s tweezers” (449). “Qui rampait” immediately evokes Ada, who tells Van when she first shows him her larvarium “Je raffole de tout ce qui rampe (I’m crazy about everything that crawls)” (54), as the “six-inch long caterpillar” recalls the larvarium’s comically phallic caterpillar, “the noble larva of the Cattleya Hawkmoth (mauve shades of Monsieur Proust), a seven-inch-long colossus, flesh colored, with turquoise arabesques, rearing its hyacinth head in a stiff ‘Sphinxian’ attitude” (56).
But Lucette is often fatally entangled with Ada, as she will be on the night of her suicide, when Ada’s on-screen allure suddenly displaces the real-life temptations Lucette has at last all but led Van to succumb to. The “fox-furred segments” of the caterpillar that Van removes for Eberthella Brown cannot help calling to mind Lucette, memorably clad in furs at Kingston and then at Manhattan a week later, and very emphatically compared to a fox in the red coloration, especially the imagined red of her public hair, that excites Van so strongly at Kingston. Early in the novel, Van reports his mother’s comment: “My eldest is rather plain but has nice hair, and my youngest is pretty, but foxy red, Marina used to say” (126). At Kingston, just before he helps Lucette out of her fur, Van muses: “Indian summer too sultry for furs. The cross (krest) of the best-groomed redhead (rousse). Its four burning ends. Because one can’t stroke (as he did now) the upper copper without imagining at once the lower fox cub and the paired embers” (368). Referring to the uncomfortably large erection he maintains throughout the scene, Van notes “the condition in which the image of the four embers of a vixen’s cross had now solidly put him” (377). A week later, after the Ursus outing, Van implores Lucette to tell him the name of Ada’s Arizonian suitor: “Please, little vixen! I’ll reward you with a very special kiss” (415), but as she eagerly misinterprets the promise, he clarifies “‘Little vixen’s axilla, just that—unless’—(drawing back in mock uncertainty)—‘you shave there?’” (415). Neither “fox” nor “vixen” occurs elsewhere in Ada.
Eberthella Brown’s bizarre name stands out as a riddle, easily and comically solved, it seems, when a dictionary explains Eberthella as the name of a genus of bacteria. But the novel features another biological name doubly coupled with Brown: Culex chateaubriandi Brown (106), in particular the “female of Chateaubriand’s mosquito” (106), a species given a “slap-bang Original Description” (106) by Boston’s Professor Brown and very shortly afterward a more adequate accounting by “Braun, the Philadelphian dipterist” (107). The Chateaubriand motif throughout the novel at first seems only Van and Ada’s amused play on their sibling incest, but proves on deeper inspection to indicate especially their fatally embroiling their half-sister in their love and precipitating her suicide, in echo of Chateaubriand’s love for his sister, who committed suicide (see Boyd 1985/2001: 125-28). Lucette’s involvement in the Chateaubriand motif is nowhere more explicit than in Van’s account of Chateaubriand’s mosquito, that “insect characterized by an insatiable and reckless appetite for Ada’s and Ardelia’s, Lucette’s and Lucile’s (multiplied by the itch) blood” (106). The insect, the itch, the taxonomic name and the Brown surname all recur in the description of Eberthella Brown and the caterpillar that alarms her and causes Van, after removing it, to keep “gloomily plucking itchy bright hairs out of his fingertips with the girl’s tweezers” “for hours” (449), in a kind of pointed anticipation of the protracted regrets Van feels after Lucette’s imminent suicide.
The surname Brown occurs in one other context that also marks Van’s regret. In 1884 Van’s last ploy for ensuring Lucette cannot witness his and Ada’s next romp is to ask her to memorize by heart the poem by “Poet Laureate Robert Brown” from “This brown book . . . one of my most treasured possessions . . . . no less than a collection of the most beautiful and famous short poems in the English language,” which she can keep if she succeeds (145). She does, and still remembers the poem seventeen years later, quoting it in full in her last note to Van, “mailed from Paris to his Kingston address on June 2, 1901, ‘just in case,’”—in case her attempt to seduce him aboard the Tobakoff fails—which he reads “with a fatidic shiver” (146) on his return to Kingston after he and the Tobakoff have failed to find her in the dark waters of the Atlantic.
But there is yet another connection with Lucette that Nabokov seems to pack into this one sentence on the opening page of Part Three. Eberthella Brown is “(a naive little thing who thought ‘baptism of desire’ meant something sexual)” (449). That pointedly digressive parenthesis seems hardly accidental. No one in Ada is more clearly a “naive little thing” in sexual matters than Lucette at eight or even twelve. And “baptism of desire” is one of two kinds of baptism the Catholic Church accepts without sacerdotal administration of the sacrament: one is “baptism of blood,” in the case of “martyrs for the faith,” and the other, “baptism of desire,” “those animated by perfect love of God.” Lucette is repeatedly associated with martyrs (418, 459, 464) and her peculiar sense of the impact it would have for her and Van if she could win him sexually seems like a carnal equivalent of the “baptism of desire” (“Long ago she had made up her mind that by forcing the man whom she absurdly but irrevocably loved to have intercourse with her, even once, she would, somehow, with the help of some prodigious act of nature, transform a brief tactile event into an eternal spiritual tie,” 485), only for her “baptism” to involve all too deep an immersion.
Van—and Death—among the Veens
The first half or so of Pt. 3 Ch.1 focuses on the distractions Van engages in while separated from Ada: travel, women, work, Van set apart from the Veens. The second half focuses on Van in connection with the Veens, and with death and the meaning of life.
The advance announcement that “Three elements, fire, water, and air, destroyed, in that sequence, Marina, Lucette, and Demon” (450) leads into an account of Marina’s death, as (rather remotely) perceived and felt by Van.
Death has begun to pervade Ada: after Dan’s death, reported two chapters ago, and recalled here just as Marina’s slide toward non-being begins (“For seven years, after she had dismissed her life with her husband, a successfully achieved corpse, as irrelevant . . . Van’s mother had been suffering from various ‘obscure’ illnesses, which everybody thought she made up, or talentedly simulated,” 450). Illness, suicide, and accident, respectively, will take Marina, Lucette, and Demon, into death. The last of these, Demon’s, seems to allow Van and Ada to reunite, only for Andrey Vinelander’s advanced tuberculosis to prompt Ada to conclude she cannot leave a dying man—meaning that she and Van will be seventeen years closer to death, into middle age, before they attempt, at first unsuccessfully, to revive their love.
Death threatens to hang over Van’s memoir, until the unexpected upswing in Part Four and Part Five, which introduce Van and Ada triumphantly together for another near half-century. Part Four begins with Professor Veen denying the future—even as he keenly anticipates reuniting with Ada—only for a listener to object on the grounds of the inevitability of death:
Here a heckler asked, with the arrogant air of one wanting to see a gentleman’s driving license, how did the “Prof” reconcile his refusal to grant the future the status of Time with the fact that it, the future, could hardly be considered nonexistent, since “it possessed at least one future, I mean, feature, involving such an important idea as that of absolute necessity.”
Throw him out. Who said I shall die? (535)
Death does ultimately come for Van and Ada, but not with the kind of assumed inexorability that the intensifying focus on death and the accelerating pace of time in Part Three seem to threaten.
Duty
During Marina’s last illnesses “Van visited her less often than dutiful Lucette, whom he glimpsed [at Villa Armina] on two or three occasions” (450). “Dutiful Lucette” will herself die in part through her sense of duty—through what Van calls “her last, last, last free gift of staunch courtesy that was stronger than failure and death” (490) when she chooses to remain with the Robinsons, those “old bores of the family” (475), rather than to follow Van as he escapes from the on-board cinema where Ada on screen has disrupted his emotional state. Lucette will be there too at Marina’s death, and Ada will be there at least for Marina’s funeral, as she will also dutifully remain with her dull and dying husband at the end of Part Three. But Van, who last visits Marina less than two weeks before her death, only after a foray to a nearby Villa Venus, and who thinks after Marina dies that perhaps the funeral might have provided cover for a tryst with Ada, ignores Marina’s plea to remain with her until she dies, offers an excuse for not staying, only because he cannot stand the smell of her diseased body, and avoids her funeral. His sensual and sexual self-concern and his indifference to responsibility feature again in his relations with Lucette on the Tobakoff and contribute to her suicide. And his too-late remorse for Lucette is prefigured by the remorse he feels, only after her death, for his treatment of Marina:
Van tortured himself with thoughts of insufficient filial affection—a long story of unconcern, amused scorn, physical repulsion, and habitual dismissal. He looked around, making wild amends, willing her spirit to give him an unequivocal, and indeed all-deciding, sign of continued being behind the veil of time, beyond the flesh of space. But no response came, not a petal fell on his bench, not a gnat touched his hand. (452)
The passage continues with Van musing about the meaninglessness of his life without Ada—
He wondered what really kept him alive on terrible Antiterra, with Terra a myth and all art a game, when nothing mattered any more since the day he slapped Valerio’s warm bristly cheek; and whence, from what deep well of hope, did he still scoop up a shivering star, when everything had an edge of agony and despair, when another man was in every bedroom with Ada. (452)
—in a way that anticipates Lucette’s sense of the meaningless of her life without Van:
“ . . . It’s a dull life, Van.
“I enjoy—oh, loads of things,” she continued in a melancholy, musing tone of voice, as she poked with a fork at her blue trout which, to judge by its contorted shape and bulging eyes, had boiled alive, convulsed by awful agonies. “I love Flemish and Dutch oils, flowers, food, Flaubert, Shakespeare, shopping, sheeing, swimming, the kisses of beauties and beasts—but somehow all of it, this sauce and all the riches of Holland, form only a kind of tonen’kiy-tonen’kiy (thin little) layer, under which there is absolutely nothing, except, of course, your image, and that only adds depth and a trout’s agonies to the emptiness.” (464)
But the similarity of their sense of life’s emptiness does not help Van understand her until too late.
On the other hand Van does feel strongly for Lucette, and far more than the sexual desire that she stokes and he cannot easily extinguish: a love, admiration and tenderness far removed from the “unconcern [and] amused scorn” he feels for his mother. His strong and frustrated desire in the first chapter of Part Three for a sign from dead Marina, despite the insufficiency of his filial affection, reflects in one way his fascination for Aqua, the woman he really had loved as his mother, until her suicide, and with her fascination for Terra, Terra as a “Next World” (20). Offering his pretext for leaving dying Marina, Van tells her he has “to deliver an address on the Psychology of Suicide” and she, in her last recorded words to him, implicitly acknowledges him as her son: “Do tell them about your silly aunt Aqua” (452). But all Van’s work as a psychologist and philosopher seems to arise out of his concern for the woman he had thought of as mother: her insanity, her suicide, her fervent belief in Terra.
Neither Van’s researches inspired by Aqua nor his desire for some “unequivocal, and indeed all-deciding, sign of continued being” (452) from Marina offer him what he seeks. Yet his thwarted search seems to be answered in a positive mode in the last chapter of Part Three, in the way Van tentatively signals that he senses dead Lucette’s loving presence and support somehow hovering over his and Ada’s reunion at Mont Roux: see Boyd 2021. In Pt. 3 Ch. 1, Lucette’s cable to Van about Marina’s death does not lead to him arriving for her funeral, precisely because Ada, Andrey and Demon are all there, and therefore does not lead to Ada and Van setting “the later antlers . . . right then, with green lamps greening green growths before the hotel where the Vinelanders stayed” (451). But in Pt. 3 Ch. 8, with Demon also dead, Lucette, herself dead, does seem somehow implicated in the “frenetic love [of] Van and Mrs. Vinelander . . . throughout the duration of adultery” (521).
The end of Part Three segues into The Texture of Time, where Lucette seems to influence both the action, Van and Ada as lovers, and Van’s text, his attempt to separate space from time, and time past and time present from the open future. The Texture of Time is first named and dated among Van’s works in Pt. 3 Ch. 1. There, it seems to intimate that Van’s blank stretch of time without Ada might last at least until 1922. But when we reach Pt. 3 Ch. 8 and its close sequel, The Texture of Time itself, and understand their relation to Lucette, their action and their text seem to signal how full Van’s time and Ada’s can ultimately be.