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

The existence of an involute thematic design of which the hero is unconscious is evident to the re-reader; but does its meaning extend outside its governance, outside its trail that winds through all seven chapters? In other words, has the Squirrel Theme, for example, a special allegoric mission, besides sharing in the general symbolism of all artistic expression? Not necessarily. However persistently such images may recur they need carry "no burden of meaning whatsoever other than the fact that someone beyond the work is repeating them, that they are all part of one master pattern."20

The cosmos of Pnin is unique in that it consists of two master patterns, one inside the other, and any solution of its nonplus requires brackets around the narrator's subsidiary design, to separate it from Nabokov's embracing one. One exceptionally astute reviewer saw through it at once: "[Nabokov is] a practitioner whose relations with his narrators and theirs with their characters are so irregular as to make the sacred 'point of view' emit rabbits like a hat."21

The figure of the narrator is the most elusive in the novel, and in this respect has rivals only in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pale Fire. To all seeming the problem is rather trivial. "At the end of the novel, I, V.N., arrive in person to Waindell College to lecture on Russian literature, while poor Pnin dies, with everything unsettled and uncompleted."22 At the time of this verdict (early 1954), only two chapters of the book had been completed, and just as Nabokov resolutely re-charted his hero's fate in the course of composing the rest of Pnin, so he did the character of the narrator. In a letter to the same correspondent written after the book was finished Nabokov puts distancing quotation marks round the "I" of the story, pointing out a very important strategic idea. The personified narrator, whose more or less intrusive presence shows itself from the very beginning, and who in a sense supplants his hero in the final chapter by shifting sharply the focus of narration--this narrator is brought teasingly close to the point of confusion with his maker. He has the same name and patronymic, and his surname begins with an N; just as Nabokov, he was born in April of 1899 in the "rosy-stone house in the Morskaya" in St. Petersburg; he is an "Anglo-Russian" writer of note, professor, and an expert in butterflies; and he shares with Nabokov artistic, cultural, and political convictions. Some finer biographical hachures diverge (N.'s Baltic aunt and her estate where he spends the summer of 1916; certain details of his TmigrT peregrinations in Europe; N. apparently is unmarried when he arrives at Waindell). But the radical difference that Nabokov sets off most emphatically, the one that required placing the "I" in the letter to Covici under the convoy of inverted commas, lies in the moral realm. (Which, by the way, further enhances the likeness between the narrator in Pnin and another fictional V.V.N., the "I" of Nabokov's last novel, Look at the Harlequins!, who lists, among his other writings, a novel entitled Dr. Olga Repnin.) N.'s various remarks regarding Pnin, the tone in which he tells the story of his affair with Liza, the fact of his publishing Pnin's disarmingly frank letter to her, and the flippant, even teasing, tone in which he presents it, suggest a good measure of snobbish bearing, callousness, vanity, and general lack of charity--faults that only a very shallow or hostile biographer would find in Nabokov, whereas a conscientious one would see abundant proof of exactly opposite traits. It is this very perception of himself as someone like the "Anglo-Russian writer" of Pnin that Nabokov disavows in his last Russian poem, which ends in a parody of unscrupulous characterization:

"N. -- pisatel' nediuzhinnyi, snob i atlet,
nadelennyi ogromnym aplombom."

N. is not a bad writer; he is arrogant, athletic,
and possessed of enormous self-assurance.23

There are certainly more sound ways than one to describe Pnin's thematic import. An obvious one would be "a gradual, visionary restoration of the past." In Nabokov's theory of time, refined in every one of his subsequent novels and explained at length in Van Veen's tract The Texture of Time (the fourth part of Ada), there is no conceivable future, nor is its concept logically admissible, if only because, in order not to be an absurd convention, it would have to circumvent the present tense predicate in its definition, which is impossible. Yet one can assume the present as a running reference point which, when stopped in its track for any reason or by any means whatever, vanishes that very instant, gobbled by the past. But the past itself is given to us only as a rememoration, that is, only in the present of the recapture. Surely if, by definition, the "future" is a self-annihilative notion, if the present is an ephemeral figure of thought, and if the past as such must be an ever-rising, yet "at the same time" forever receding, line of memorial reference, then one ought to admit that time is but a powerful transcendental state of man's mind outside of which mind can retain its sanity (the chief condition of which is an ability to be conscious of one's self and to retain memory of oneself) no more than a compass its purpose at the pole. The idea of a string of continuously sequential phenomena is not merely human; it is the very element of consciousness, a mode of its existence and operation. A separate notion of "Time" distilled from this idea is in essence a poetic, not philosophical, notion, akin to that of the horizon. There is no independent definition of the straight line or, more basically, of the mathematical point, yet both are, purely poetically, postulated for essential mathematical operations; both can be precisely located and coordinated. Just as much, the irreversible ebbing of time is an illusory but amazingly ingenious and convenient trope that informs man's consciousness. Any good writer invariably transfers this metaphoric condition into the worlds that his imagination charts.

That Nabokov should make his best-thinking characters formulate these principles, whereas he himself has carefully witheld judgement in public statements, only underscores the supreme governance of the familiar illusion of time passage in serious fiction.24 At high altitudes of artistic accomplishment, fiction, particularly a novel, ought to aspire not only to structural but also to ontological congruity; this implies, among other things, that its personae cannot travel in time back and forth at will, cannot retrace their steps or to know their fate in advance, cannot, that is, reverse or otherwise upset the progress of time which should maintain the illusion of mechanical translation, not that of rotation, and which goes well only when not grasped. But time becomes perfectly docile to elaborate management when observed from without, from an advantageous and exciting position that Nabokov has reserved for the intelligent re-reader: a place beside himself. The reader is essentially beyond all the temporal constraints that condition the existence of the characters, he knows their destiny as thoroughly as he does their past, and he therefore can enjoy the master plan both panoramically and in minute detail, stalking up and down the labyrinthine paths and finding new treasures with every new reading.

Nabokov always envisages that mortal memory might be the forerunner of a consciousness to which the past might be directly accessible, open for the kind of endless reinvestigation which could lead to the discovery of the watermarks of time. Because as readers we can continue to re-examine the fictive past, Nabokov can offer us the shiver and thrill of discovering in the novel's events harmonies as unexpected as the "morning" pattern [of Van and Ada's mornings together prior to the crucial one at the Trois Cygnes, at the end of the Texture of Time part. G.B.]. In allowing such shockingly unforeseen pleasure and new insight into familiar events, Nabokov makes almost unbearably delightful the prospect of an immortality in which such discoveries would be rife.25

Even the strongest memory loses much of its vividness when exposed, as if our light fogged or blurred the preserved images previously viewed only in the darkroom of one's solitary recollection. The moment one's private memory becomes public property, it damages the fragile capillary vasculature connecting it with the prototype through a series of intermediate refueling reminiscences. In the critical episode of the last chapter, which I shall presently discuss, N. implicitly reckons with precisely this danger when he admits that, if he has "reconstructed in some detail the precedent impressions" of Pnin, it is not because he remembers their originals but because he remembers his remembering those impressions at a Paris cafT in the early Twenties and wants now "to fix what flashed through" his mind then (179). When put to words, even if they be the best words musterable, a remembrance loses its glow, and with it, its pass to the past.26 Its veracity thus becomes tarnished inasmuch and as soon as it is reified.

In Chapter Six, after the party at Pnin's house, Roy Thayer, a closet poet, jots down these lines in his rhymed diary:

We sat and drank, each with a separate past
Locked up in him, and fate's alarm clocks set
At unrelated futures...

The six chapter-long episodes related by N. follow a similar compositional plan which, on a larger scale, is also a paradigm for the entire book. At the beginning of each we see a serene Pnin, totally unaware of impending disaster, ignoring its numerous signs. Then clouds gather, the scene darkens, and he invariably faces an unforeseen and painful setback that usually occurs close to, but not quite at, the end of a chapter. At the very end of this presumably objective narration, that is, at the end of Chapter Six, Pnin is shown composing a letter whose opening line, "permit me to recapitulate," sets up a perfect transition to the final chapter which does recapitulate and in a sense rephrase the entire story. In Seven the narrator recollects his previous encounters with Pnin, the subject of his six-part narrative. He revives, in fascinating detail, the first time he met him as a schoolboy in St. Petersburg; later, as a vacationing student on N.'s grand-aunt's Baltic estate; and in emigration, both in Europe and in America. Once, in Paris, N. set about amusing Pnin "and other people around [them] with the unusual lucidity and strength" of his memory by recounting the first two anecdotes, "A Visit to Dr. Pnin" and "The Libelei." However, much to N.'s apparent surprise, Pnin "denied everything" and affirmed that they had never seen each other before. Here, needless to say, we face a dilemma of capital urgency for the entire aetiology of the novel: Is N.'s astonishment feigned, has he made up these episodes (and perhaps others as well)? Or does Pnin refuse to accept them because he was "reluctant <...> to recognize his own past" (180)? Either proposition harbors an internal contradiction and runs against solid psychological evidence available in the text. Even if N. were an uzhasnïy vïdumshchik, incorrigible fabricator, who concocts amusing stories about acquaintances only to flaunt his awesome memory and indulge his enormous vanity, he certainly would not do so in front of the very victim of his fabrication who would instantly and successfully refute it and expose the inventor's vanity to a sneer. Why should N. risk a public discomfiture if he was not certain of his memory's accuracy? While relating his first encounter with Pnin, N. wonders: "Do I really remember his crew cut, his puffy pale face, his red ears?" and answers without the slightest hesitation, "Yes, distinctly" (176). Is it a rhetorical quirk? What is more, later in the chapter it is Pnin who seems to have retouched the past when, in a sudden volley, he shouts across the table to Barakan who is engaged in a conversation with N.: "Now, don't believe a word he says, Georgiy Aramovich. He makes up everything. He once invented that we were schoolmates in Russia and cribbed at examinations. He is a dreadful inventor" (185). The situation is the more extraordinary for the fact that Barakan (another pre-marital paramour of Liza's, one of the several Georges of different ethnicity that she befriends in the novel) was present at the rencontre in the Paris cafT, to which Pnin evidently is referring and during which N. said nothing of the sort--in fact, he pointed out that he himself had gone to a "more liberal school."

20. Alfred Appel, Jr., "Nabokov's Puppet Show," in New Republic, 156 (14 January 1967), pp. 27-30, and 21 January, pp. 25-32. (Second part reprinted in The Annotated Lolita, ed. Alfred Appel, Jr. [New York: Vintage Books, 1991], cf. p. xxviii).

21. Howard Nemerov, "The Morality of Art," in Kenyon Review, XIX (Spring 1957), pp. 313-321; p. 314.

22. Selected Letters, pp. 143 and 178 (letter to P. Covici of 29 September, 1955).

23. "Akh, ugoniat ikh v step'..." Vladimir Nabokov, Stikhi. Foreword by Véra Nabokov (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979), p. 299.

24. See Strong Opinions, p.143: "This is Van speaking <...> I have not decided yet if I agree with him in all his views on the texture of time. I suspect I don't." This was said in 1969. Cf. some of Nabokov's later comments on the matter, id., pp. 184-86. See also his 1973 interview with the CBC, in which Nabokov says that he may be "still leaning upon the gate" of the conclusions reached by Van Veen in the Time section of Ada (The Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter, X, Spring 1983, p. 45).

25. Brian Boyd, Nabokov's Ada: The Place of Consciousness (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), p. 186.

26. Cf. the opening paragraph of Chapter Five of Speak, Memory (New York: Putnam's, 1966) (which in the Russian version opens on a sentence absent from the drier English one: "Na rukakh u belletrista umiraet Mnemozina" ["Mnemosyne is dying in the novelist's arms"--the grammatical play on the verb's mode, "dies every time he takes her in his arms" and "we watch her dying in his arms," cannot be rendered by one English verb]):

I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with my novel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be safe from the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in my memory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, and the portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boy in one of my books [The Defense--G.B.], is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The man in me revolts against the fictionist (95).