Embodied Memories in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory

Abstract

Nathalia Saliba combines Proust’s notion of embodied memories and Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of erotohistoriography to explore how memories are a bodily and sexual phenomenon in Ada, or Ardor and Speak, Memory. According to her, in both works, one sense is particularly highlighted: touch. In the novel, she verifies how the narrative is organized around the protagonist’s Eden of erotic recollections, which are transposed into the treatise Texture of Time, as a sadomasochistic persecution of time. In the autobiography, however, Nabokov presents his memories evoking a bodily feeling of being in a warm, humid and protected place, where he can feel secure and happy.