a resolved discord

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

Erroneous beliefs are relatively harmless; knowledge of the axiomatic, ultimate truth ought to be prodigiously shattering. The "autocratic deity" of Bend Sinister lets Adam Krug see a spark of this knowledge while mercifully relieving him of his rational faculties and thus of his suffering. When granted to Adam Falter (in "Ultima Thule"), this knowledge wrecks his consciousness and renders his reason inapplicable to everyday life. One can safely believe in the hereafter; however, knowing anything of it is a self-destructive condition because such an experience must annihilate the concept of knowledge, indeed the very concept of a concept. This is why Van Veen, a psychologist exploring the hearsays of the hereafter, notes that "the confusion of two realities, one in single, the other in double, quotes, was a symptom of impending insanity."44 An invisible but caring hand invariably stops Pnin on the mete of a dangerous discovery. If it did not, the hero would have to be removed, as Adam Krug was, lest the novel's shell should crack owing to an essential disconformity. It is this ultimate designer's dexter hand, and not N.'s sinister, that holds the strings and monocratically manipulates his creatures and provides for them.

It seems, by the way, that Nabokov had initially intended to carry the plan of Krug's return "onto his creator's bosom" farther still, judging by his remark in a letter to Wilson written in January of 1944: "Towards the end of the book <...> there will be the looming and development of an idea which has never been treated before." One of Wilson's letters to Nabokov, written exactly three years later, sheds reflected light on that abandoned plan: "I'm sorry that you gave up the idea of having your hero confront his maker."45 Nabokov works a more elaborate application of this strategy into Pnin because he places an interposer between himself and his character, a narrator who closely resembles Nabokov in certain ways yet is essentially different in important others. And when Nabokov tells Covici, summarizing the book's plot for him, that "at the end of the novel, I, V.N., arrive in person to Waindell College to lecture on Russian literature, while poor Pnin dies..." he deliberately simplifies the matter, for he, V.N., will forever stay without the cordon of the quotation marks, and he cannot arrive at "Waindell College," and "poor Pnin" does not, and really cannot, die.

"It is godlike to create; it is unbearably human, and inferior, to be the subject of someone else's creation." Yet mere suspicion of the existence of a salubrious, all-arranging creative power beyond the limit of the comprehensible, ought to ennoble this feeling of inferiority, even if it fails to dispel it. "If our lives," writes Boyd, "are patterned by a force beyond ourselves, that force would seem to create its patterns, as a good novelist does, through individual human freedom. The patterning of one's life not only need not diminish its human value, its value visible from within mortality, but it might also reveal a resplendent worth to the more than mortal gaze."46

Nabokov's creatures are endowed with several unprecedented privileges. The author's legate is often among them in disguise, in effect sharing their predicament within the book's frame. One of those impersonating agents, writer Vadim Vadimych N., has frightful yet revealing visions induced by his almighty composer:

I now confess that I was bothered that night, and the next and some time before, by a dream feeling that my life was the non-identical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of another man's life, somewhere on this or another earth. A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man, that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier, and crueler than your obedient servant.47

Furthermore, and more important, some of Nabokov's select characters, especially the martyrs among them, those steered into the clutches of despair, driven by pain to the utmost borders of rational existence, may be allowed to glimpse the tailfin of a great discovery that Nabokov's reader is free to attain by sheer intellectual effort: that in well-made worlds, characters, sub specie auctoris et lectoris (a fixed, close, studious stare from impossible distances), are not mortal. In his introduction to Bend Sinister, Nabokov explains that in the last chapter of the book an "anthropomorphic deity" impersonated by him

experiences a pang of pity for his creature and hastens to take over. Krug, in a sudden moonburst of madness, understands that he is in good hands: nothing really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.48

The New Yorker version of Pnin, which muffles all references to N. and lacks Chapter Seven, ends with a very significant paragraph the phrasing and tonality of which bring to mind that musical resolution. One cannot help noticing that what seems perfectly in place at the end of a preface to a difficult, largely misunderstood book, would make much too candid a conclusion for a Nabokov novel. Here is this provisional finale, which Nabokov ruthlessly removed when, in book form, he retrofit Chapter Six to suit the general structure whithin which N.'s creative work is implicitly finished (but which does not coincide with the novel's boundaries). After Pnin had "rubbed dry" the miraculously recovered bowl "working the cloth very tenderly over the recurrent design of the docile glass" and placed it "on a high, safe shelf,"

the sense of security there communicated itself to his own state of mind, and he felt that "losing one's job" dwindled to a meaningless echo in the rich, round inner world where none could really hurt him.

Unlike Krug, Pnin preserves his sanity because this sense of security is an undirected, scalar, quantity; he gains it gratis, without the mind-quaking realization that he is in good hands of an autocratic deity who oversees his well-being from the unthinkable beyond.

Notes

44. Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 245.

45. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, pp.126 and 183.

46. Carroll 1974, p. 208. Boyd 1985, p. 83. Similar thoughts (drawn in reverse, as it were) can be found in the previously mentioned book by Florenski, particularly in "Letter Nine: Creation" (p. 260 et seq.). See especially his note 495 (p. 738), in which he cites from an old tract by the Archbishop of Kherson and Taurida Innokentii (Borisov):

There must needs be such a mind outside us that is capable not merely of comprehending the ultimate Truth but also of having the power to create all manners of truths from within itself and that, although self-sufficient, constitutes the very essence of the Truth and embraces the entire contents of light, love, and life. Otherwise, there would or could have been no truth or good anywhere. Otherwise, the foundation of all things and of all knowledge would have been sheer naught.

47. Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), p. 89.

48. Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (New York: Time, Inc., 1964), p. xviii.

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