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

The intrinsic composition of Pnin poses, and the way in which it is presented underscores, an essential dilemma that must be taken up in earnest before any other. After all, one cannot but wonder, especially on first reading, whether N. distorts Pnin's past or Pnin refuses to recognize it under another's pen. In his French speech on Pushkin, Nabokov makes the following two observations that seem apt here, because I think they reflect light on N.'s creative methods:

Is it possible to imagine the full reality of another's life, to relive it in one's mind and set it down intact on paper? I doubt it: one even finds oneself seduced by the idea that thought itself, as it shines its beam on the story of a man's life, cannot avoid deforming it. Thus, what our mind perceives turns out to be plausible, but not true <...> After all, what does it matter if what we perceive is but a monstrous hoax? Let us be honest and admit that if our mind could reverse direction and worm its way into Pushkin's age, we would not recognize it. What is the difference! The joy that we derive is one that the bitterest criticism, including that which I direct at myself, cannot destroy.

I am quite aware that this is not the real Pushkin, but a third-rate thespian whom I pay to play the part. What is the difference! The ruse amuses me, and I catch myself beginning to believe in it <...> These images are probably false, and the true Pushkin would not recognize himself in them. Yet if I inject into them a bit of the same love that I feel when reading his poems, is not what I am doing with this imaginary life somehow akin to the poet's work, if not to the poet himself?34

Jack Cockerell's "deliciously funny" impersonation of Pnin, however, leaves N. "with the mental counterpart of a bad taste in the mouth" (189) and has the first-time reader thoroughly baffled. Pnin moves into the book on a wrong train and out of it in a wretched car, but the final sentence--Cockerell's--puts the reader back on the wrong train, as it were. Could Cockerell have made up the Cremona episode or perhaps deformed it for more effect, just as he had farcically exaggerated Pnin's gestures and solecisms? Or has N. spared his hero the ultimate disaster at the lectern, changed the end of Cockerell's story, and, his proclaimed aversion to happy-ending notwithstanding, "stuffed [Pnin's] coat" with all three typescripts "so as to have the one he wanted among the rest (thus thwarting mischance by mathematical necessity)" (26)?

Such questions, let me repeat, must be put but cannot be answered from within the novel. One should keep in mind that N. himself is but a character in Pnin, a prominent character, to be sure, but an element in the master design all the same. A part of the design, he cannot see it, although he may suspect, or believe in, its existence. His notion of the world in which he dwells and moves need not, philosophically, have an a priori advantage over that of another personage, Pnin, his compatriot and book-mate. Yes, N. has composed an ingenious story about Pnin (the first six chapters), but the reader of Chapter Seven receives a queer impression that, as steadily as Cockerell's Pniniana grows stale and bombastic, Pnin's familiar image, ideally bald and artificially tanned, in turn amusing and pathetic, becomes slurred over, becomes dim, and shifts into the shadow of the unfamiliar, unknown, from which he seemed to have emerged in the first sentence of the opening chapter. Here, in the last one, the reader, prodded by N.'s wand, begins to doubt the knowledge he has gained so far, for its source is now doubtful. The grotesque Clown of Cockerell's travesty has countervailed the fleeing King of Victor's fancy, and both these images are equidistant from the plausible Pnin we have come to recognize.36 Not any more. At the end of the novel his face becomes vaporous, his character little known. In fact, doubly so, for the story of Chapter Seven, the very information that sheds such an uncertain, alienating light on the precedent narrative, may be also suspect since it is N. who recounts that story, it is N. who slips in that information. In trying to come to a sensible conclusion about the conflicting versions of Pnin's self, the serious first-time reader, when he reaches the book's end, finds himself in a thoroughly enclosed, logically inescapable condition that Pyrrhonians called epochë, suspension of judgement, because either side of the story, N.'s or "Pnin's," if accepted, would contradict itself, yet the two versions cannot be reconciled. Or can they? The only way to break free from the implacable epochë is to re-read the book from a loftier point.

One of Lewis Carroll's curious logical problems can be formulated thus:

Suppose, q implies (or "includes," if it is a category) r; but p implies that q implies non-r; what can one infer from this?37

Florenski further notes that this problem is not an artificial riddle made up to amuse and flex an idle mind with a proclivity for logical cunning. Far from being an abstract conundrum, it serves a real, essential need and formally illustrates one of the most profound thoughts ever conceived, namely, that the ultimate truth must appear antinomic to the human mind. Curiously enough, in his theoretical solution of the problem Carroll allows the very mistake that most people make when they confront it in life. He reasons that if q implies r, then it cannot imply non-r; therefore, p implies the impossible, therefore, it is false. But Carroll's conclusion is erroneous because it is possible that not p but q is false, implying as it may at once r and non-r, i.e. two mutually contradictory judgements, and Florenski proceeds to prove it beyond dispute using symbolics and transformations of formal logic. His inference thus obtained is that the verity of p leads to the negation of q, or, in other words, that "one cannot assert q inasmuch as, or in the case that, or when, where, and howsoever, p is present." Which does not mean, despite Carroll, that p is absurd, or that q is absurd (containing as it does a contradictory effect). It means, rather, that neither judgement is absurd, and both may be true, but the one cannot be asserted in the other's presence. If p is present, then q is void; in any other condition q is valid.

Florenski translates the abstractions of his logical solution first into a simple example, then into a more complex one, closer to his concerns--and ours.

Example I: The sky is blue; but it is scarlet at sunset. What can be inferred from this? Here "the sky" is q; "blue" is r; "at sunset" is p; and "scarlet" (i.e. "non-blue") is non-r, which thus appears as an instance of the Carroll Paradox. If one follows careless common logic then one will have to conclude that either p is nonsensical, that is, there can be no sunset, whose very notion is inadmissible, or that q is absurd, meaning that the notion of the "sky" negates itself and, ergo, there can be no such thing. The actual answer is, of course, that although both "sunset" and "sky" are quite possible, at sunset one observes something else, a "non-sky" (e.g., the sun seen through the atmospheric layers, through "the sky").

Example II: A rationalist asserts that the contradicitons found in the Scriptures and Christian dogmata prove their non-divine origin. A mystic, on the other hand, suggests that in the state of spiritual illumination it is precisely those contradictions that prove the divinity of the Scriptures and the dogmata. Query: what can one conclude from these hypotheticals?

Again, "contradictions = q"; "non-divine origin" = r; "the state of spiritual illumination" = p; and "divinity of the Scriptures" = non-r (r's negation).

Common sense, says Florenski, dictates the inference that either p or q is nonsense: either spiritual ecstasy is impossible or it is absurd to talk about the Scriptural or doctrinal contradictions. In the first case, the mystic's premise would be meaningless; in the second, both his and the rationalist's judgements would be such. In fact, both of them are correct, and there is nothing absurd about either notion: if both the mystic and the rationalist are trustworthy, which one should assume, then there are indeed "contradictions in the Scriptures and the dogmata," just as there can be a state of "spiritual illumination." But what is contradiction to ratio is harmonized at higher altitudes. Contradictions are definitely there, but they cohere, as Florenski concludes his essay, into a "supreme synthesis in the light of the Sun that never sets, and then it is exactly [those incongruities] that demonstrate that the Holy Scriptures and the dogmata are above mundane reasoning and thus could not be invented by man, therefore, they are divine."39

34. "Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable," p. 40. Italics are mine.

35. "We arrived at last to Pnin's declaration one day that he had been 'shot' by which, according to the impersonator, the poor fellow meant 'fired' (a mistake I doubt my friend could have made)" (188).

36. There is a coincidental but striking lineage of subordinate mimicry in Ada, resembling very much Pnin's varying selves as they are imagined by Victor and Cockerell and consolidated by N. In the later book, a fantastic, "fantastically rare" butterfly, Nymphalis danaus Nab., mimicks "not the Monarch butterfly directly, but the Monarch through the Viceroy, one of the Monarch's best known imitators." (158). Cockerell, who is Pnin's best imitator and who creates an image entirely different from that of Victor's Royal father, at the end of his Pnin Act makes N. wonder whether "by some poetical vengeance this Pnin business had not become with Cockerell the kind of fatal obsession which substitutes its own victim for that of the initial ridicule" (189).

37. See Mind. A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, New Series, vol. 14, London, April 1905, p. 292, and July of that year, pp. 400-401. The first item, signed "W.," refers to a previous publication, in the "New Series" nos. "3 and 53" [sic], p. 146. The second is a rejoinder by Bertrand Russell regarding the most interesting article by Hugh MacColl, "Symbolic Reasoning," published in Mind earlier.

38. Father Pavel Florenski, Stolp i utverzhdenie Iztiny: Opyt pravoslavnoi teoditsei v dvenadtsati pis'makh [The Pillar and the Ground of the Truth: An Essay on Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters] (Moscow: Put' Publishing House, 1914), pp. 500-5. My explication of Carroll's problem is based on Pavel Florenski's treatise. One will note, however, that Florenski did not see the original publication in Mind, and quoted it second-hand by an inaccurate citation in L. Couturat's Les principes des mathématiques (Paris, 1905, p. 16). Therefore, he apparently did not know that the "common sense" solution of the original paradox (a dreary affair about "Allen and Brown" being in, "while "Carr is out," etc.) had been suggested not by Couturat but by Russell (see above note); it goes, briefly, "if p is true, q is false," which is identical with Florenski's formal solution. However, all these complications have little bearing on the ensuing argumentation, and I mention them only for the sake of the reader who may desire to consult an old and boisterous skirmish of famous symbolic logicians.

39. Florenski 1914, p. 505.