A Resolved Discord (Pnin)
by Gennady Barabtarlo
page two of eight

In a footnote to his lectures on Mansfield Park Nabokov defines plot as a "supposed story," thematic lines as "images or an idea which is repeated here and there in the novel, as a tune reoccurs in a fugue," and the structure as "the composition of a book, a development of events, one event causing another, the cunning way characters are brought in, or a new complex of action is started, or the various themes are linked up or used to move the novel forward."15 In few respects does Nabokov tower more above most other novelists than in his art of compositional arrangement, particularly the thematic concord of interactive motifs achieved by means of subtle, "organic," transitions and the carefully staged recurrence of certain details. Aetiological tendrils stretch from one chapter to another, spotlighting these details in retrospect. For example, Pnin's brown suit bought by the tortuous experience of the first chapter is dismissed by Liza as improper in the second, and her casual remark dropped as Pnin is helping her into a fur coat becomes the last injury of a grotesquely cruel visit. But there are thematic lines that run the entire length of the novel surfacing in every chapter in various guises. The network of such long-range lines, together with the local ones, is very intricate in plan, its crosscutting strings reaching far and near and suggesting a deliberate design and, therefore, a designer responsible for it. Far from being an idle and clever game, this design points to philosophical possibilities beyond the realm of fiction.

The important theme of optical reflection is a good example of such long-distance thematic arrangement. In Chapter One it is "the gleam of a tumbler, the brass knobs of [Pnin's] bedstead" that "interfered even less with the oak leaves and rich blossoms than would the reflection of an inside object in a windowpane with the outside scenery perceived through the same glass" (24). Pnin sees this in a hypnotic flashback, and one must not overlook here an additional motif of aberration, of a slight but insuperable incongruity between things perceived and things reflected, which after all is at the base of one of the book's possible interpretations, for the general distortion of Pnin's life as related by the narrator N. somehow corresponds to these optical refractions. On the other hand, Cockerell, a lesser fictionist himself, tells the story of Pnin in a rapid series of slapstick anecdotes that depict the genuine Pnin with much less clarity than the "Petite Histoire" of Russian culture (Pnin's research in interminable progress) "reflect[s] in miniature <...> Major Concatenations of Events" (76). In Chapter Two, "the slow scintillant downcome [is] reflected in the silent looking glass" (34). In Three, when Pnin raises his tired eyes from the book and trains them on the window above, "through his dissolving meditation <...> there appeared the violet-blue air of dusk, silver-tooled by the reflection of the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, and, among spidery black twigs, a mirrored row of bright book spines." (78). In Four, a contrapuntal chapter, the theme of reflection swells especially large. What seems at first glance a purely technical topic grows in scope and significance on second reading and becomes a model of the plot growth. The focal point falls on pages 98û99, in the exact geometric center of the novel, where Victor experiments with the reflections of various objects that change their shape, if not essence, when seen through water:

<...> the red apple became a clear-cut red band bounded by a straight horizon, half a glass of Red Sea, Arabia felix. The short pencil, if held obliquely, curved like a stylized snake, but if held vertically became monstrously fat ù almost pyramidal. The black pawn, if moved to and fro, divided into a couple of black ants. The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass's seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail.

a pair of crystal candlesticks with pendants <...> responsible in the early mornings for iridescent reflections, which glowed charmingly on the sideboard and reminded my sentimental friend of the stained-glass casements that colored the sunlight orange and green and violet on the verandas of Russian country houses. (145-6)

Another emblematic image gracing every chapter with scheduled regularity is the squirrel. Its appearances in Pnin assemble into a pattern more complete than the one formed by a posy of violets in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, or by the oblong puddle in Bend Sinister, or by the sunglasses in Lolita. There are readers who see in the squirrel a metempsychic incarnation of Pnin's dead fiancée whose specter interferes in his life at critical turns.17 Others have proposed that the pattern of the rodent's appearances offers "a number of possible metaphysical answers to the problem of human pain," no doubt a cardinal problem in Pnin. In the opening chapter, for example, the squirrel pyrographed on the bed-screen in Pnin's recaptured childhood fantastically turns into a live one squatting near him in his present, after "the panic and the pain are over," and it may signify that Pnin's pain "here is not part of some wantonly malevolent design but a means of extracting the treasures of the character's private past and our present pity."18 There seems to be a correspondence between the squirrel's visiting a chapter and Pnin's appointed misfortune, immediately passed or immediately pending. In Two in particular he encounters the squirrel at a quickly vanishing point when he suddenly senses that he is on the verge of grasping at last the all-resolving principle of the universe (his world), the key to his existence--perhaps, the fact of his being the subject of a masterly invention, the squirrel's persistent reappearance serving as proof and a telltale emblem.

Both thematic lines seem to conflow in Six where Pnin argues engagingly that Cinderella's pantoufles are made not of glass (verre), an erroneous assumption based on a corrupted text, but rather of ermine, or even squirrel, fur (vair). And Nicol sees meaningful reciprocity in Pnin's sending Victor a postcard with a picture of the Gray Squirrel and Victor sending Pnin, a few months later, a "glass punch-bowl of 'Cinderella' color."19

Thematic recurrence certainly is one of Nabokov's best studied strategies. There is a place towards the end of Pnin where a character actually prods the reader to notice the contrivance: at Pnin's party, Joan Clements speaks with an English professor about a certain author--quite clearly, the very author that narrates the episode:

But don't you think -- haw -- that what he is trying to do -- haw -- practically in all his novels -- is -- haw -- to express the fantastic recurrence of certain situations? (159)

This misleading ambivalence knows many variations under Nabokov's pen. Often, as in the "hawing" sentence above, he makes of it a deliberately transparent feint. These can be rather difficult to grasp sometimes. For instance, there are several "Eastern" images in Chapter Two. (As so many other prominent thematic strings, this one reappears for an instant in the last chapter, where Pnin is said to have mistaken a Shriners' temple for a Turkish consulate.) When Joan Clements goes to answer Pnin's telephone in the hallway, the narrator suddenly makes what seems at first blush an unattached digression:

Technically speaking, the narrator's art of integrating telephone conversations still lags behind that of rendering dialogues conducted from room to room, or from window to window across some narrow blue alley in an ancient town with water so precious, and the misery of donkeys, and rugs for sale, and minarets, and foreigners and melons, and the vibrant morning echoes. (31)

15. Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. by Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich-Bruccoli Clark, 1980), p.16. My italics.

16. Lectures on Literature, pp. 210 and 208. My italics.

17. William W. Rowe, Nabokov's Spectral Dimension (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), p. 62ff.

18. Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, pp. 282 and 283.

19. Phantom of Fact, pp. 243-44. Nicol, "Pnin's History," p. 202. Edmund Wilson's daughter recalls that her father once got for her an Audubon print with gray squirrels from a Boston rare-book dealer, which he himself eventually became "devoted to" and did not want to part with (Rosalind Baker Wilson, Near the Magician. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989, pp. 172-73). Nabokov might well have seen it at Welfleet.