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

Let us now see whether we cannot apply this algorithm to the essential problem in Pnin with a view to extricating ourselves from the epochë trap. We can take any pair of N.'s or Pnin's mutually exclusive statements and syllogize them according to Lewis Carroll's scheme. For example, in the very important Paris cafT episode Pnin maintains that he has never seen N. before; that is, he has met him for the first time in 192û, while N. maintains that they have met twice before, in 1911 and again in 1916. "How should we diagnose this case?" asks N. on a different occasion. In terms of Carroll's problem, "Pnin has met N." = q; "in 192-" = r; "prior to 192-" (i.e. "not in 192-") = non-r. We assume that neither is lying (as has been shown above, neither has a compelling reason to twist the facts). But what is the special condition p which sets the mechanism in motion? It is Pnin's being a character in N.'s book, something that Pnin cannot grasp ("the key to the pattern"). Therefore, one can say that Pnin has not seen N. until the early twenties, unless he is the hero of My Poor Pnin, in which case he has seen N. twice prior to the Parisian episode in the early twenties.

But the same radical logic can be applied to the sum of their statements, that is to say, to the entire version of Pnin as it is presented by N. and rejected by Pnin. The conclusion, which only seems paradoxical, will be, then, that N. and Pnin cannot coexist on the same plane: if and where there is N., there should be no Pnin, and vice versa. One pushes the other out, and Pnin ultimately flees the novel when N. arrives there in person, thus reversing Carroll's original mind-twister, "if Allen is in, Carr is out."40 From within N.'s story this cannot be explained satisfactorily. Why should Pnin refuse to stay at Waindell, to be securely employed at the new Russian Division that N. intends to create? The answer seems obvious: because N. had been Liza's lover and because she had tried to kill herself as a result of the affair, and even though it all had happened prior to her marriage to Pnin, and despite the fact that Pnin "had pardoned" N. some thirty years earlier (184), he still loves Liza and cannot overcome his squeamish dislike for N. But this obvious answer is superficial and flawed, for it fails to explain why then Pnin, in an exigent dialogue at the end of Chapter Six, should confirm to Hagen that he and N. are friends (170), or why he should refuse even to see his "friend" however briefly and hastens instead to leave Waindell on his birthday, at the beginning of a new semester. After all, he did not avoid N. on several previous occasions--all in the past, off stage--the last time only three years earlier, in New York. Florenski's formula gives a better explanation. Pnin dislikes and repels N. because N. is a "dreadful inventor" of what he vaguely perceives as a "non-Pnin." Pnin cannot know, but can sense, the condition p that denies him his freedom and his identity. On the plane of the present, on the terrain of the novel, Pnin cannot be observed in company with N.; this is why his image becomes the vaguer the nearer N. draws, and disappears altogether when N. steps on stage as an actor. Quentin Anderson arrives at this very conclusion, coming, however, from a different premise: "As [N.] physically approaches, Pnin must recede, because the narrator is precisely that element within whose ambience Pnin cannot exist." When N.'s book about "poor Pnin" is finished, the reader does not really know Pnin. When N. at last lets us into the novel's true "present" at the very end of Chapter Seven, we can only catch a glimpse of the door closing behind Pnin; Pnin "has gone, he has quite gone" (189). But since N. himself is merely a creature of someone else's fantasy (a condition p of a higher order: "the narrator is also a fictional character <...> like Pnin he is legible but nonexistent"), and since the reader, on subsequent readings, should not accompany N. anywhere but can instead enjoy an aerial view of the labyrinth, he will suspect that there may indeed be a different Pnin within Nabokov's book--yet outside N.'s.41 At that level all contradictions will somehow resolve, will upgrade to a consonance. On the novel's plane, they point to a higher modus of existence, infinitely beyond the characters's comprehension. At polar latitudes of probing thought, contradictions may be a symptom of the noumenal truth rather than of faulty reasoning. They prove, perhaps, that man's reason, like a magnetized needle, quivers helplessly in the proximity of the magnetic pole: the trusty instrument no longer directs here; rather, its erratic behavior signifies that one is near one's destination, where no compass is really needful.

No other kind of human experimentation, be it empirical or speculative, affords quite as excellent an opportunity to try one's strong inklings and vague beliefs as does a well executed novel. The recreated world is congruent and well done, its inhabitants are made after our likeness, and their maker, though omnipresent, is invisible to them. Why should Pnin be unable to make a telltale association of the name "Belochkin" with the persistent reappearance of a "belochka" (squirrel) at painful turns of his life--a connection that no reader (with any knowledge of Russian, of course) will fail to make? Perhaps Nabokov is saying that we are prevented from discerning the pattern of our life because of our position within it; the most astute, such as Vadim Vadimych of Look at the Harlequins!, can recall and record important recurrences but even they cannot assemble the pattern, for it spans not space but time, or rather a metaphysical space within which time is reversible and accessible in any point.

Or else we should assume that the entire novel, with both the elusive (but genuine) Pnin and the verisimilar (but specious) one, is of N.'s invention. This, of course, would explain all the incongruities so laboriously treated above but it would also leave an aftertaste of artistic dissatisfaction: such plainness of method is not at all characteristic of Nabokov's plotting. Such a plan would be quite different, for instance, from the concentric design of this next novel, where it is the universal narrator who keeps in the luminous shade of his close-tongued poem, while his weird creature is left to define himself and, in great measure, his maker in a quasi-first-person narration.

The concentricity in Pnin does resemble the essential riddle of Pale Fire; however, with its hero alive and without the much-revealing Foreword and Index of the later novel, Pnin does not seem to admit of more than one symbiotic interpretation, whereas Pale Fire allows several. Pnin's inner contradictions, especially acute within and between the first and last chapters (chapters of reversed polarity, as it were), cannot be explained satisfactorily on the novel's turf. In order to see the concentric circles of its design the reader ought to gain an elevated vantage point--indeed he is prompted to do so by a rather straightforward analogy: at the beginning of Chapter Five, Pnin's meanderings through a maze are observed from a "prospect tower." The narrator and the hero never appear on stage together (only in the pluperfect of N.'s memories): as stated earlier, it seems that one excepts the other.

Of Pale Fire Brian Boyd writes:

Nabokov, like Shade, deliberately and pointedly impersonates fate. Like Shade he realizes that any power which could pattern human lives would have to be far beyond the human, beyond the fathoming of reason. But, he feels, imagination might be able to imitate this power and to create a "correlated pattern in the game," thereby, perhaps, sharing "something of the same pleasure in [the patterned game of life] as those who played if found." Nabokov's acting as fate is not merely the normal privilege of a novelist to invent his events: in those novels where pattern in human lives is a major concern, his role is deliberately and specifically intrusive.42

"Nabokov's characters," observes another critic, "are 'galley slaves' in that they know themselves subject to inhuman and autocratic powers."43 But (if an obvious quibble be allowed) one's labor in life is analogous to a fictional character's labors set in composed type, readers of Pnin could readily solve the riddle of Pnin's existence, the riddle that he pursues in every chapter but is debarred from grasping by his very nature. Pnin may have the strange but well-grounded sensation that he is a victim of N.'s designs (especially in the first and the last chapters) but his credenda become haphazard when he reaches towards what geometers call the gnomon--in our case, the outer range of the book, the infinitesimal but untraversable space that separates N.'s narration from Nabokov's enveloping creation. Pnin does not believe that "people are reunited in Heaven" (58) and he happens to be right: the idea, attractive as it may be in Pnin's world, has no place outside it. He does not believe "in an autocratic God"; instead he does "believe, dimly, in a democracy of ghosts" (136), and the reader knows well that, inasmuch as Pnin is concerned, this is queer heresy.

40. In his "complete solution" of the Carroll Paradox (Mind, vol. 14, 1905, p. 401), Russel indeed puts it "if Carr is out, Allen is in" (characteristically of Carroll, he makes the names of the two actors all but roll up into his own pseudonym). An analogous situation occurs in Pale Fire; while both Shade and Botkin do co-exist on the same level under the canopy of Nabokov's novel, Kinbote and his zemblances either exclude Shade and Shade's world, or exist only as Shade's creation (without knowing that). By the way, it is not entirely impossible that Shade's strange transcendental swoons have something in common with Pnin's "dilatory" spells: both void familiar time and space conditions.

41. New Republic, 4 June 1966, p. 28. Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 26.

42. Boyd 1985, p. 82. My italics.

43. William Carroll, "Nabokov's Signs and Symbols," in A Book of Things About Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Carl Proffer (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974), p. 208.