The Creation of Worlds
When the side panels of Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights are closed, their outer surfaces portray the creation of the world, and bear a Latin inscription from Psalm 33: ‘For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and it stood fast’. Painted in grisaille, the newly formed Earth, covered in strange plants and eerie shapes and shrouded in mist, is enclosed within a transparent globe. This haunting image of life’s primordial beginnings opens to disclose a panoramic vista of activity. Van’s description of Terra, with its ‘rainbow mist of angelic spirits’ restoring ‘myths of old creeds’ and ‘all the divinities and divines ever spawned in the marshes of this our sufficient world’ (21), curiously echoes Bosch’s image with its rainbow, myth of creation, and watery earth. Indeed, Ada reverberates with Bosch’s depiction of Creation. Nabokov believed that ‘the work of art is invariably
the creation of a new world’ (LL1), and that writing involved a ‘reinventing of the
world’ (LL 2). The concept of the artist creating a unique world is comically
literalised in Ada’s sibling planets Antiterra (or Demonia) and Terra, which mirror and distort each other and Earth. The planetary theme in Ada shades into metaphysics, as believers in Terra confuse the ‘Other World’ of Terra with the ‘Next World’ and ‘the Real World in us and beyond us’ (20). As the creator of
Ada’s world, the designer of the novel’s complex, interlacing patterns and motifs,
and the power of fate for the characters of his novel, Nabokov subtly intimates that a designing power may exist behind and beyond ‘this’ world. The physical structure of Bosch’s triptych is reflected in the relationship between the world of the reader and the world within Ada, as ‘unknown to Van, the book can be shut
up and its whole world looked at from outside’.3
Eden
The left panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights and the gardens and parks belonging to the Ardis estate both portray a sexual, rather than an innocent, Garden of Eden. The name Ardis is itself an anagrammatic play on paradise, and Van and Ada comically replay Adam and Eve and the Fall. Early in their relationship, Van catches a glimpse of Ada bathing at ‘an old-fashioned basin on a rococo stand’ with ‘a fat snake of porcelain curled around the basin’ (60). As
Van and the serpent ‘watch Eve and the soft woggle of her bud-breasts in profile’ (60), the mulberry-coloured soap (a humorous version of the forbidden fruit)
slithers out of Ada’s hand and crashes against the marble board.4The shattal tree,
which Van and Ada climb in part one, chapter 15, is ostensibly an apple tree – the
‘Tree of Knowledge’ from ‘Eden National Park’ (95).5When Ada falls, Van kisses
her between her legs as drupes (rather than apples) shower down around them. This first taste in the Tree of Knowledge leads to forbidden knowledge of another kind in the library, where they have sex for the first time in part one, chapter 19,
and explore the literature and history of sex and incest in part one, chapter 21.6
Photos taken by Kim of Van and Ada in the early stages of their sexual exploration in the nooks and crannies of the garden depict the two young lovers
A D Aand bosch
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as Adam and Eve. ‘Ada was represented by her two hands rearranging her hair while her Adam stood over her, a frond or inflorescence veiling his thigh with the deliberate casualness of an Old Master’s device to keep Eden chaste’ (406). Ada and The Garden of Earthly Delights also draw from traditions of love gardens in medieval poetry, such as the ‘Roman de la Rose,’ which Nabokov studied at
Cambridge.7Allusions to garden poems in Ada include Marvell’s ‘The Garden’
and Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, while Bosch’s garden forms part of a long poetic and painterly tradition of romantic courtly love in immaculate gardens containing flowers, birds, and fountains, and buildings made from crystal, gems and precious metals. (See colour illustration 29.)
Garden of Delights
In The Garden of Earthly Delights, as in Ada, the Fall from the Garden of Eden seems a Fortunate Fall, leading into another kind of paradise, a sexual garden of
erotic pleasures.8Bosch’s central panel is a landscape riotous with sex, depicting
male and female nudes (including Lucette-like beauties with golden or auburn hair and pale, peach-coloured skin) who have sex with each other and couple with fruit and other objects of the natural world in an organic orgy. Despite the crowded activity and sense of universal sexual pleasure, the lovers in Bosch’s Garden are frequently isolated, absorbed in their individual desires and enclosed within their own worlds, as is even represented symbolically by one couple contained within a bubble. The physical environment of the Garden reflects the lovers’ focus on sensuality. The rock and crystal formations pierce and penetrate each other, and the tower in the uppermost Pond of Lust sprouts ‘gleaming pink
horns of cuckoldry’.9The pools in and around which the nude figures of Bosch’s
Garden flirt and make love have sexual connotations and reflect the belief that lovers were the children of Aphrodite, who was born from the foam of the sea. Aphrodite’s counterpart in Roman religion, Venus was ‘an ancient Italian
goddess of bloom and beauty [and] protectress of gardens’,10and the medieval
Dutch expression for lovemaking was ‘swimming in the bath of Venus’.11Bosch’s
fecund garden is at the height of summer ripeness and lushness, teeming with butterflies, insects, fish, shellfish, animals and birds of all kinds. Gary Schwartz observes that the depiction in the left panel of God’s blessing to ‘Be fruitful, and
multiply’ (Genesis 1:28) explodes into literal form in the central panel.12 Bosch
depicts an extravagant, comically literal embodiment of the blessing in his Garden. The busy landscape is permeated with fecundity and contains hundreds of identical nude young beauties and men who have ‘multiplied’ from Adam and Eve, replicating them on a grand scale and indulging in sexual temptations of every kind. The traditional meaning of God’s blessing as procreation, however, is not apparent in Bosch’s vision. There are no pregnant women and no babies or children, suggesting that the sexually active nudes are sterile. Schwartz observes
that the huge strawberries, cherries, apples, oranges and other berries are
‘fruitful’ in other senses of the word, with numerous sexual connotations.13 In
medieval Dutch, ‘to pluck fruit’ meant to make love,14and Dirk Bax proposes
that many of the fruits, and especially the strawberry, in Bosch’s The Garden of
Earthly Delights are metaphors for sexual organs. He analyses the fruits and shells
which shelter lovers as a play on the medieval word ‘scille’ or ‘schel’, which meant, in addition to shell or rind, a quarrel or row, with the implication that it
was a short step from quarrelling to making love.15At the same time, the sweet,
ripe, tempting fruits throughout Bosch’s landscape are an ambiguous echo of the Fall, reminding the viewer of the Original Sin.
Flamboyantly unrestrained sexual activity also occurs in the garden of Ardis Park. Its bowers, glades, ‘glens and gullies’ provide the setting for Van and Ada’s
exuberantly ‘immoderate exploitation of physical joy’ (139) and sexual explo-
ration. The garden is full of birds and proliferates with flowers, trees, butterflies, wasps, flies and mosquitoes. Like the self-absorbed couples in Bosch’s painting, Van and Ada feel enclosed in their own world and focus on each other to the exclusion of everyone else. The descriptions of the natural world at Ardis and the sexually suggestive insects and flowers in Van’s memoir reflect this absorption, and the intoxication of their desire is reflected everywhere in the garden. Demon refers to a figure in the central panel of Bosch’s Garden of a man embracing a ‘woman-sized strawberry’ (437) and the sexual associations of Bosch’s fruit, alluding to the Fall, are applicable to Ada. Van sucks Ada’s hot tongue and compares it to a ‘large boiled strawberry, still very hot. He sucked it in as far as it
would go’ (103). During a lunch at Ardis, Marina asks Price to bring Ada
‘enormous purple pink plums, one with a wet yellow burst-split’ (62). Ada’s immense sexual libido is paralleled by her enormous appetite for food, and the superabundance of food at Ardis and Van’s lavish descriptions of Ada eating complement the sense of lush growth and fertility in the garden. Moreover, Ada, Lucette and Van Veen are ‘the children of Venus’ (410), the lovers celebrated with such naked symbolism in Bosch’s central panel and its pools, and ‘the “arrow” in “Ardis” (Greek ardis, point of an arrow) alludes to the arrow of desire in Cupid’s
quiver’.16Appropriately, in the sections of the memoir set in Ardis’ garden, the
‘myths of Edenic or Arcadian innocence’ combine with ‘myths of sexual
experience, of Venus, Cupid or Eros’.17As with Bosch’s frolicking couples, and
despite the emphasis on breeding in the early chapters of the Ardis section, Van is sterile and Ada does not conceive with any of her lovers or with her husband, Andrey Vinelander.
Nabokov takes Bosch’s comically multiplied sexual acts and fruits from the central panel and extends it in Ada, ‘although what Bosch juxtaposes in space
Nabokov mostly overlaps in time’.18 In an excess of ardour that is both a joke about youthful libido and a celebration of Van and Ada’s superiority in the act of love (as in so many other things), Van and Ada have sex as many times a day as they can find a moment alone, as well as in every nook and cranny of Ardis Park and manor. Van, Ada and Blanche each take multiple lovers, and the Veens’ love is ‘multiplied’ around Ladore in the myths and creeds spread by Blanche. In these sexual permutations of the theme of repetition that pervades Ada, Nabokov explores ‘what René Girard labels “mimetic desire,” the imitative nature of erotic
love’.19 In the three panels of Bosch’s triptych, Brian Boyd argues, Nabokov
found ‘his most complex image of the triumphs and torments of love’s
singularity and repetitions’.20
Hell
The right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights depicts a nightmarish Hell on earth on the Day of Judgement. The dark, frozen wasteland flickering luridly with the flames of isolated fires depicts monstrous kitchen knives and giant musical instruments of torture on which humans are strung, cut and impaled. Hybrid monsters and demons of all forms take possession of the world, brutally killing, ravaging and mutilating the human figures. According to Peter Beagle, all three panels of Bosch’s triptych are located on the same earthly site, based on the similarities between the three landscapes – each with bodies of water and a
common horizontal line interrupted with vertical structures.21Ardis Park proves
to be similarly complicated, with its own lake, pool, streams, bogs and shrubbery featuring in all the innocent, passionate and hellish dimensions of Van and Ada’s love. In the lyrical, exuberant excess of their early lovemaking, Ardis seems an untouchable paradise to Van and Ada, containing both Eden and the garden of sexual delight, yet despite Van’s fanatical denunciation of death and ‘the existence of physical pain in all worlds’ (136) in his two summers there, Ardis contains the Hell of Bosch’s third panel. With the discovery of Ada’s infidelities and the agony of betrayal and loss, Van is ‘expelled from Ardis’ (97) and his paradise rapidly disintegrates into hell, becoming the ‘poisoned point of Ardis. Arrowhead Manor. Le Château de la Flèche, Flesh Hall’ (318). Ada experiences hell at Ardis after Van leaves – her second letter begins ‘This is a second howl iz
ada (out of Hades)’ (332), echoing Aqua’s signature at the bottom of her suicide
note ‘My sister’s sister who teper’ iz ada (‘now is out of hell’)’ (29). Ardis as hell is
emphasized by Dan’s death at Ardis on another Boschean note in 1893, when he
crawls into the very shrubbery or ‘bosquet’ around the Park where Van and Ada in 1884 and 1888, and Ada and Percy de Prey in 1888, had had sex so often. Dan’s death, reported by Demon and by Dan’s nurse ‘Bess (which is “fiend” in
The novel proves a wider setting for Bosch’s hell panel, beyond Ardis Park. Antiterra is called Demonia and is inhabited by demons, including Demon Veen, whose name and wings underscore his many demonic attributes. Van describes Demonia’s demon enchanters as ‘noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily beating wings’ (20), but to believers in Terra, they are ‘vicious monsters, disgusting devils, with the black scrota of carnivora
and the fangs of serpents, revilers and tormentors of female souls’ (21), a
description that would be equally apt for the demons in The Garden of Earthly
Delights. Demon and Van are physically violent towards their rivals and debased
in their sexual exploitation of women, young girls and little boys. Van notes that ‘no sooner did all the fond, all the frail, come into close contact with him (as later Lucette did, to give another example) than they were bound to know anguish and calamity, unless strengthened by a strain of his father’s demon blood’ (20).
Van and Ada are ‘two different young demons’ (420) as they caress Lucette in the
ménage à trois scene in part two, chapter 8, and Ada, whose name contains the
Russian ‘ad’ for ‘hell’,23inherits Demon’s sexual libido and irresponsibility as well
as his blood.
Just as the figures in Bosch’s central panel are positioned ambiguously in the triptych between Eden and Hell, the sections of the memoir describing Van and
Ada’s sexual paradise allude ambiguously to both innocence and torment.24The
multiplication of the sexual act celebrated in Van and Ada’s early love eventually takes its hellish form in Ada’s infidelities with Dr Krolik, Philip Rack and Percy de Prey, and in Van’s mistresses and prostitutes. ‘Veen’ not only evokes Venus, it also means ‘bog’ in Dutch. The ‘Ladoga bogs’ and ‘lovely rich marshes in the Ladore region’ (108) are a prominent feature of the land around Ardis, even producing ‘bogberr[ies]’ (72) and ‘bogflower[s]’ (489). Boyd believes that Nabokov made
‘the hell that complicates the heaven of love, the bog encircling the garden’25into
a central metaphor and structural foundation for the novel, linking the Dutch painter and Dutch bog with the Veen children and garden of Venus. Thus, in Ada, the Boschean allusions extend into the concept of a paradisal love garden that is ‘always at risk of subsiding into a hellish watery bog, a connection stressed by the very name Veen (peat, bog) and by Blanche’s village and surname, Tourbière
(peat, bog), but pointing forward especially to Lucette’s watery grave.’26 Boyd
focuses particularly on the hellish consequences for Lucette and Blance. Lucette is implicated in the bog theme through Ada’s bog orchids, the souci d’eau/ ‘marsh marigold’/‘care of the water’ motifs, and her surname Veen. The psychological ramifications of damaging sexual involvement with Van and Ada culminate in her suicide. Blanche is implicated in the bog theme through her village, peat-digger
father, and surname (‘de la Tourbière’ would be ‘van Veen’ in Dutch27). ‘A negative
Venus [afflicted by venereal disease], lover of an inverse Eros [Sore, the night watch-
man], mother of a “hopelessly blind” Cupid, Blanche undermines completely the
myths of love she has tried to disseminate’.28
The most confrontational of all of Ada’s hellish multiplications of sex occurs in the Villa Venus chapter, part two, chapter 3. Ardis is parodied and grossly distorted in the ‘floramor’ brothels of Eric Veen’s Villa Venus chain, where an utterly degraded and parodic sexual ‘paradise,’ characterised by violence, disease, corruption, and exploitation, is for sale. The pedophilia is particularly shocking, involving a kidnapped ‘green-eyed frail faunlet’ (355) in a French Villa Venus, a little boy of eleven or twelve called Cherry with whom Van has sex in an American Villa Venus, and a child called Adora who Van ‘fondled and fouled …
many times’ (357). The most horrifying episode concerns Cherry,29 a ‘pretty
catamite … exhausted by too many recent engagements,’ who is ‘defaced by the varicolored imprints of bestial clawings and flesh-twistings’ and has ‘dysenteric symptoms that coated his lover’s shaft with mustard and blood, the result, no doubt, of eating too many green apples. Eventually, he had to be destroyed or given away’ (355). Boyd believes that in this chapter Nabokov mostly closely approaches the hellish vision of Bosch’s triptychs: ‘The paragraph on Cherry alone can be read in conjunction with the right-hand panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights: the shafts of various kinds penetrating many a rectum, the
unsavory anal and oral discharges, the ‘bestial clawings’.30Just as Adora is a tragic
double of Ada, Cherry and Lucette are linked in their red and green colours, their ‘copper curls’ and ‘girlish crupper’, the detailed descriptions of homo- sexuality, and the fact that they ‘both taste the fruits of sex too early, and to fatal
effect’.31
When Van experiences the anguish of Ada’s infidelities, he remembers that ‘Aqua used to say that only a very cruel or very stupid person, or innocent infants,
could be happy on Demonia’ (301). Aqua and Lucette are pervasively associated
in Ada with motifs of martyrdom and torture. Aqua’s life becomes a misery of neglect and betrayals after Demon marries her ‘out of spite and pity, a not unusual blend’ (19). Her downward spiral into insanity is exacerbated by Demon’s infidelities and her confusion about the circumstances of Van’s birth, and she commits suicide when Van is thirteen. Lucette, whose suffering and place at the moral centre of Ada has been carefully documented by Boyd, commits suicide when she gives up hope of ever forming a love relationship with Van. Pointedly, Lucette’s suicide is couched in terms that recollect the central and hell panels of Bosch’s triptych and Van’s years at Ardis. Her dive into the Atlantic’s ‘disorder of shadows and snaking reflections’ (493) with a head that ‘had started to swim like hell’ (493) is prefigured by her ‘ardis [dive] into the
As Ellen Pifer notes, on Antiterra, ‘the Demonian appetite for supreme reality has eaten through the barriers of restraint and moderation, destroying, as well, the consolations – affection, loyalty, charity – which make relations among
human beings bearable on earth’.33 Carl Linfert believes that the monsters in
Bosch’s The Last Judgement are not devils, but ‘only humans disguised as monsters’ and that ‘Bosch leaves the condemned mortals alone and face to face with terror, to endure martyrdoms such as would seem to be among Hell’s
fiercest punishments’.34 If the hellish panels in Bosch’s triptychs represent the
nature of mankind, the hybrid demonic figures which inflict such pain and suffering on their human victims portray a chilling view of the human capacity for cruelty. The acts of brutality and sexual exploitation by Ada’s demonic Veens,