Can anyone doubt that rather than duplicate the parturitional feat whereby a mountain spews forth a mouse, Nabokov opts for the reverse maternal drama in which a mouse risks conception to bring forth a mountain? Ostensibly in Ada, the authorial quest involves the pursuit of Time by Memory, the two being courtly lovers of the mind whose Proustian infidelities often leave us wondering whether in our romance with the past we haven't somehow confused the fictional swain with the autobiographical cuckold. But the real obsession of the book (and of all Nabokov's works since his first "American" novel, Lolita) is with facts, and having grasped this, we should have no difficulty making sense of a style whose passion for instructing the reader (mostly in things he never dreamt he was ignorant of) is discernible on every page.

Instruction, of course, suggests the deploying of facts, and the discreet observer of "transparent things," like his fellow peripheralists, never tires of telling us that our night-sea journey is through an ocean of data as much as through a vortex of words—data, it may be pointed out, which have in themselves as meager a rationale as do the varieties of supposition which led their formulators to discover them. And they are everywhere in Nabokov, fastidiously avoiding verification and one another, since, from the parafictional point of view, any collusion of facts within the grand cabal of a novel or story sows suspicion regarding the identicalness of fiction and reality. Thus, from Lolita to the present, Nabokov's oeuvre is seamless and of a piece, which is why grave problems arise whenever we try to distinguish his parafictional "fiction" from his parafictional "non-fiction."… (p. 40)

Of course, it is nearly impossible to do so…. For one thing, the acts of creation which brought both Ada and the autobiographical work Speak, Memory … into being, though disjunct in time, are not in Nabokov's mind really separable at all. The universe which includes these utterances among its paraphernalia also contains not one Russian emigré named Vladimir Nabokov, but thousands of them, each capable of recalling in the leisure of his mind some memorable time when some other Nabokov, with either the same or a different name, remembered having imagined an author imagining him. Such frame-tales are the very stuff of life, not of novels; that we tend to forget this fact and ignore its implications speaks well of our empiricism but not of our perspicacity. Exhibit: a parafictionist (let us for lack of a better name call him Nabokov) undertakes in the year 1969 to publish an account of how a Her or a She (named Ada) was pursued within the confines of some 445 pages of manuscript. (In all fairness to my terminological competitors, it must be admitted that figures in parafiction [not the parafictionists themselves] do frequently quest after some meta-fictional object which, like Barth's Her or She, remains chronically inaccessible.) He envisions a narrator who in turn posits an author having several tomes to his credit…. This same author claims to be fifty-two years old at a present moment in mid-July, 1922, and is beginning yet another masterwork, The Texture of Time. Not without a certain gourmet's complacency does this man of letters ponder the delicacies of Time and the pleasures of recollection…. (p. 41)

In 1922, the original parafictionist, already identified as Nabokov, was in the process of graduating from Cambridge University, having to his credit a number of publications…. Having himself always been fascinated with "the texture of time," he undertook to revise in 1966 (a mere three years before the appearance of Ada) a memoir which had originally been titled Conclusive Evidence, and which had described a "genius of total recall" recapturing from some lost and phantasmagorical past such minutiae as the vague remembrance of "the memory of 'memory's sting.'"… Of course, one of the major literary events of 1922 was a book called Ulysses about a particular day in 1904—June 16, to be exact—which day begins its odyssey in a Martello tower strangely similar to the "crenelated, cream-colored tower" where, according to the reminiscences of [Nabokov's] Speak, Memory, the parafictionist, aged five, spent the summer of that same year. (p. 42)

Nabokov's canon invokes monumental indeterminacy to suggest that to use one's memory is not to remember what has happened, but rather to remember what is happening. To demand that memory speak beyond earshot of the present is to make of memory a ventriloquist's dummy which, being unable to speak for itself, must be spoken for just as characters in novels are spoken for. And what this dummy inevitably articulates are facts—facts delivered in the wooden prose of history and which, by their rich profusion in text after text, disguise the ongoing impersonation of truth, deny that what is being said yields no recapturable past. The parafictionist, regardless of whom he is not being from moment to moment, can only speak in the language shared by his created selves—those autobiodegradable doubles who, by some magic of dissimulation, give his world resonance within the voice-box of a book. Which is, of course, mute—as mute as everything must be beyond catastrophe, beyond finale's outer rim. (pp. 42-3)