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

On the other hand, if N.'s stories be true, why should Pnin want to gainsay them? After all, there is nothing particularly injurious in N.'s version of Pnin's boyhood, neither in that A-plus in Algebra that Pnin protests, nor even in the obviously pregnant Schnitzler episode, if one keeps in mind that their Paris confrontation takes place before N's entanglement with Liza, Pnin's future wife, and therefore any possible connection between the part Pnin played in Libelei (that of the betrayed husband, according to N.) and his disastrous marriage can be made, within the novel's time flow, only by looking backward. Besides, one will observe that Pnin does not simply deny N.'s story flat; he counters three specific items with his own, also very specific, memories: he maintains that he had poor marks in algebra in school; that his father would never introduce him to his patients; and that he had a different part in the play (that of the violinist). And, once again, his most extraordinary assertion is that he had never met N. before. As concerns the strength of Pnin's own memory, N. not only never puts it to any doubt but himself demonstrates and stresses its remarkable clarity in every chapter.27

There is, of course, an often repeated argument, strong but artless, that N.'s version sets off at every step the dissimilitude between his first-class childhood and Pnin's "middle-class" one and, in general, the contrast of his good fortunes against "his poor Pnin's" misfortunes. One special area of opposition is the English language, which is, for Pnin, a crude and treacherous tool of tortuous communication in a thoroughly foreign land, while for N., a rich and powerful means of artistic expression that enables him, among other things, to create the story of Pnin's poignant first love, tragic marriage, his sterling heart, and his lame English.

This line of argument, convincing in itself, cannot resolve any of the serious incongruities described above. How can N. hold that he and Pnin had met twice before their Paris rencontre when Pnin flatly denies it? What does Pnin mean when he later accuses N. of having invented that they "were schoolmates in Russia and cribbed at examinations," whereas in fact N. never said such a thing? What can possibly allow the acting narrator his prying access to Pnin's childhood memories, to his intimate broodings in the Waindell park, or indeed to his dreams? And, significantly, how is N. supposed to be at liberty to "publish" this book about Pnin, his private sorrows and all, if Pnin does not die in it? The obvious answer to the last two questions would be that the whole of My Poor Pnin (to borrow Nabokov's working title for N.'s putative book) is as much the fruit of N.'s creative imagination as the whole of Pnin, enveloping both N. the narrator and his book, is the fruit of Nabokov's. But if it were so, the reader would be forced to fight the annoying sensation of "everything spiral[ing] off into nebulous relativity" and of N.'s "playing the Red King to Pnin's Alice."28

The question of N.'s faithworthiness and, therefore, his probity ought to be of utmost importance to anyone wishing to understand the novel's deep-laid plot. One cannot, after all, help concluding that if Pnin be right in this collision, then the whole story of his life, the entire length of the book about him, should be regarded with suspicion.

We see, therefore, that the thorniest principal problem of Pnin is that the narrator's hero and friend refuses to own the narrator's version of his life. And upon closer examination it does betray any number of interesting oddities. Let us take, for example, the Baltic resort episode which shows more discordancy than N. cares to reveal in the Paris cafT section of Chapter Seven. In the "synoptic" chapters, N. touches upon this topic twice, in Chapters One and Five. In the first, Pnin sees, in a flash of a mild hallucinatory spell,

one of his Baltic aunts, wearing the pearls and the lace and the blond wig she had worn at all the performances given by the great ham actor Khodotov, whom she had adored from afar before drifting into insanity. (27)

the Belochkins rented [a cottage] that summer [1916] in the same Baltic resort near which the widow of General N. let a summer cottage to the Pnins on the confines of her vast estate, marshy and rugged, with dark woods hemming a desolate manor. (133)

We can now tabulate major discrepancies between the two versions of the episode (pretending for the moment that Pnin has his own independent version of his life which N. faithfully relates in Chapters One through Six).

The "Synoptic" Chapters (Pnin's Version)	The Concluding Chapter (N.'s Version)
Pnin's Baltic aunt	N.'s Baltic grandaunt
Khodotov, "great ham actor"	Ancharov, "provincial semiprofessional actor"
Bob Horn, an "employee"	Robert Horn, a "steward"

Curiously enough, within Chapter Seven, Pnin claims that he neither played the role of the cuckolded husband nor met N. that summer (or at any time before for that matter).

But the concluding chapter casts a still more disturbing light on the rest of the novel. Without it, the reader--especially the original one, who has read the magazine version of the novel--accepts the narrator's omniscience simply by the singular clause of the conventional literary contract extending the privileges of the third-person narrator to the first person. When, however, the narrator himself puts strict limits to the extent of his knowledge of his subject, as N. does in the last chapter, the reader is bound to marvel. Of course, N. could have easily collected various tidbits of his hero's life at Waindell from Hagen, from the Clementses, from the Thayers, and, above all, from Jack Cockerell; certainly, many of The Pines' regular summer guests (Chateau, Roza Shpolyanski, Bolotov) could purvey for Chapter Five raw material concerning the summer of 1954; and none too cumbersome research could turn up intelligence necessary for writing the second half of Chapter Two (Pnin's marriage, voyage to America, and Liza's visit to Waindell) and even Chapter Four (Victor Wind). A "prominent Anglo-Russian writer," N. could have then used his powerful imagination to caulk all the remaining gaps, supply the missing links, change the names, and so forth.30 Such a book, entitled, perhaps, My Poor Pnin, would have then had a logical task-pattern, similar to one that chess problemists call retrograde analysis: a move-by-move restoration of the initial position, which involves meticulous investigation of various thematic possibilities, such as surprise promotions to a lesser man, takes en passant, a forfeited castling privilege, or a plausible interplay and counterplay.31 The last chapter would have been a logical departure point: Pnin leaves Waindell as N. settles in it and decides to write about Pnin's adventures. A mechanism of this very type, though set in a true chess environment, works quite smoothly in V.'s biography of his half-brother Sebastian Knight: V. begins the book after Knight's death and leads the narration up to that death, a logical starting point of his quest, which is the end of the story about that quest.

But Pnin is a more complex cosmos. Its plain sailing is ruthlessly deceptive; its light is phosphorescent and flickering; long bottomless cracks of suspiciously seismic-looking origin traverse its paved surface. One of the plainest ways of experiencing this singularity of Pnin is to imagine that at the end of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight the reader learns that Clare Bishop gave birth to healthy twins; that Knight's French valet's name is Palechine; and that V. first met his half-brother only in 1922, in Paris. The taut and durable film of causality wrapping the narration would then be slashed in three places, and widening scissures would run in all directions and reveal new strange vistas beneath. Careful shifts, faint tremors, and minuscule rearrangements, which in the first half of Pnin chiefly take shape of the narrator's occasional obtrusions, become ever more persistent in Chapter Five (Pnin and Chateau talking of N.) and Six (the Twin Theme, beginning with: "Pnin and I had long since accepted..." 148), and the quake of Chapter Seven not only shatters certain previously established routes but, by many implications, it changes the entire topography of the novel. On reading the novel even once, the intelligent reader will never be able to re-read, for instance, the "dissolve" scenes (when Pnin sinks to his past through the thin marshy surface of the novel's present) with quite the same sense of trust taken for granted in objective-person narratives. It is one thing to be aware that the narrator uses these spells, which he himself induces on Pnin, as a convenient means to feed in biographical data about his hero, as he does in odd chapters (One, Three, and Five), while resorting to regular "objective" pluperfect forays into the past in even; but it is quite another to realize, while re-reading those pages,

1. that the narrator has implicitly admitted, by roping off the extent of his knowledge, that he could not but make up such episodes (for instance, Pnin's childhood in Chapter One, or his love for Mira Belochkin in Five; or an evocation of his parents, in every odd chapter);

2. that his hero questions even the episodes that seem to issue from the narrator's memory, not imagination, and resents N.'s tampering with his past;

3. that the narrator may be an unpleasant fellow, a haughty snob, and a cold, unsparing, "evil designer" (23);

4. and that he is aware of the reader's suspicions and stirs them into his scheme.

Over and over again, in the course of his narration, N. shows how Pnin, driven to utter desolation, comes very close to solving the utmost riddle of his existence, but as he reaches to grasp "the key of the pattern" concealed by "the evil designer <...> with such monstrous care" (23) it dissolves in a squirrel (24, 58) or a row of rhododendrons ruffled by wind (24)--which, far from confusing "whatever rational pattern Timofey Pnin's surroundings had once had," do yield obligingly, although unbeknown to poor Pnin, the very pattern he is groping for (both images come from his St. Petersburg flat; both recur, in varying guises, at crucial jointures). In N.'s design, Pnin is given the key at which he looks abstractly, turns it this way and that and then drops with a shrug, without recognizing it, for one cannot be aware of a pattern, let alone see it, if one is an element of it.

This is exactly what Nabokov speaks of in his lecture on Proust:

In Search of Lost Time is an evocation, not a description of the past <...> This evocation <...> is made possible by bringing to light a number of exquisitely chosen moments which are a sequence of illustrations or images... The key to the problem of reestablishing the past turns out to be the key of art.33

27. "'I still hear,' said Pnin, picking up the sprinkler and shaking his head a little at the surprising persistence of memory, 'I still hear the trakh!'" (106); [Pnin] suddenly saw, with passionate and ridiculous lucidity, his parents...," (75). Many more instances can be produced.

28. Paul Grams, "Pnin: The Biographer as Meddler," in A Book of Things About Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Carl Proffer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974), p. 194.

29. It seems quite improbable that the "moneyed old maid" whom actor Ancharov "humored" (179) could be Pnin's "Baltic aunt" who had adored actor Khodotov "from afar."

30. Some names in Pnin are clearly made to speak, with a view, for instance, to bringing into suggestive correlation (and thus into the general design) the inevitable squirrel and the name of Pnin's fiancée, Mira Belochkin (belochka means "little squirrel" in Russian), or the cocker named Sobakevich ("Mr. Dog," a burley character in Gogol's Dead Souls) and his owner, Jack Cockerell.

31. This is what Eric Wind (who apparently plays chess reasonably well) has, perhaps, in mind when he refers to this most difficult and most bizarre type of chess problem (see p. 48).

32. See Phantom of Fact, pp. 121-22 and 133-34.

33. Lectures on Literature, p. 208.