a resolved discord

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

The voices of many critics who claim that Pnin is the "warmest," "most approachable," "most gentle and humane of all Nabokov's novels," join in a curiously large capella.49 A memoirist, who used to know Nabokov at Cornell in the nineteen-fifties, recounts this characteristic anecedote:

At a crowded party, I found myself pushed up against him. Feeling the need to say something, an impulse I should have resisted, I told him that I had just read Pnin, which I had liked very much. He could have said "Thank you," but instead [he] asked, "Why?" I told him (and it was a truthful remark) that I liked it for the compassion I found within it. He abruptly turned away, as if I had slapped his face.50

There is one peculiar thing about the novel that is easy to overlook, and yet much of the book's "unusual warmth" felt by the average reader familiar with, but generally insensitive to, Nabokov's art issues from the fact that Pnin is his only novel, English or Russian, wherein nobody dies on or off stage, that is, on the novel's narrative surface (reported deaths, such as, for example, Mira Belochkin's in Chapter Five, will be thus disregarded).51 Curiously enough, Nabokov had meant, even in the fairly late stages of composition, to have his Pnin die after all. In 1954, outlining for Viking his plan for the book, he projected ten chapters, in the last of which the author would arrive at the scene "to lecture on Russian literature, while poor Pnin dies, with everything unsettled and uncompleted." He did, of course, change his mind, not only sparing his hero but promoting him to a secure position in his next novel, Pale Fire; yet one can make out premeditative steps of the original plan in the attacks of a singular chest trouble overwhelming Pnin towards the end of chapters One and Five and in Pnin's turning over Pushkin's lines on death in Chapter Three ("'In fight, in travel, or in waves?' Or on the Waindell campus?"). No less would the admirer of Pnin be disturbed if he learnt that Nabokov had sent the first chapter to the New Yorker with this character reference: "He is not a very nice person but he is fun." This is a strange remark indeed, for even in the opening chapter Nabokov takes great care to display some rare and admirable qualities of Pnin's heart, particularly his ability to be concerned with others in the midst of his own calamity (he inquires about the baggage man's pregnant wife after having botched, partly because of that man, his last chance to get to Cremona in time for his lecture). But in another letter (to Viking) Nabokov corrects that slip of the tongue and explains that his purpose was "to create a character, comic, physically inattractive--grotesque, if you like--but then have him emerge, in juxtaposition to so-called 'normal' individuals, as by far the more human, the more important, and, on a moral plane, the more attractive one <...> a character entirely new to literature."52

Knowing Nabokov's principles and methods of composing novels, knowing of the clash between Nabokov and The New Yorker's editors over their attempt to blue-pencil two of his short stories, knowing, indeed, very specifically that "the design of Pnin was complete in [his] mind when [he] composed the first chapter," one finds it hard to believe that Nabokov could really change anything in that design, much less a matter of such enormous consequence as the main character's life and death, to indulge an editor, even if she be a good friend, or the reader who might be otherwise left with "a bitter rather than a pleasurable feeling." Why should he feel embittered? Because, says a prospective publisher, that vox lectoris otiosi, Pnin's "death, he being the hero, would give him an heroic semblance which to me would be false. It would be no catharsis to justify its cruelty."53 At the apex of the first chapter N. confesses: "Some people--and I am one of them--hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam." (25; italics added). This brusque and vocal formula (its four short nouns trying on as they do four different vowel sounds before the m) is, however, suspended by Nabokov who at the end of the opening chapter, as well as at the end of the novel, clears Pnin's way of ultimate harm (notwithstanding Cockerell's attempt to reinstall it retroactively in the very last sentence, or N.'s frantic attempt to stop Pnin at the exit), securing for his hero safe conduct out of the novel--and, as it turns out, into the next one.

If Nabokov did mean to remove Pnin at the end in a Krug-like fashion, he must have changed his mind because of the compositional necessities discussed above, having decided to make the final chapter the novel's "musical resolution" and a vehicle of its topmost idea that Nabokov had earlier intimated to Wilson in connection with Bend Sinister. The ending of the "cliff-hanger" Chapter Six seems to be a provisional attraction set up to entertain the early birds while the main treat is being prepared behind closed doors.

Death in a good novel is as much of an illusion created by purely technical means as is the illusion of depth in a picture. It is not merely that "the 'I' of the book cannot die in the book," as Vadim Vadimych N. words the problem in Nabokov's last novel; any character is, in some wise, immortal both physically (because it is within the reader's power to resurrect him by the simple act of re-opening the book) and metaphysically (because "death" is but a figure of speech). At the end of Chapter Seven, Pnin narrowly but ineluctably escapes confronting N., but is quite unable to change the master design and prevent its path from describing a full ellipse; this evolution nudges the reader to begin re-reading the story, with Pnin re-entering the novel on a wrong train. As Nabokov once remarked, "You can only re-read a novel. Or re-re-read a novel."54 Only on subsequent trips can one ignore the destination, known in advance, and enjoy various pleasures of the journey itself: views framed by the window, smells, little accidents, chance companions, and, above all, the inexorable and smooth locomotion of fate. Pnin is doomed to ride along an interminable, looping route, having no consciousness of the previous rides. His existence, his love, his suffering, his final jailbreak are real but immaterial, inconsequential but emblematic and suggestive, vaporescent but recurrent--as though happening in a dream, but with the dreamer absent. "[In] novel after novel," says Appel, "his characters try to escape from Nabokov's prison of mirrors, struggling toward a selfawareness that only their creator has achieved by creating them--an involuted process which <...> clearly indicates that the author himself is not in this prison."55

Certain extensions of Nabokov's theory of time and memory discussed above make, perhaps, this prison of mirrors escapable. It has been suggested that Henri Bergson's "distinction between deliberate remembering <...> and unsolicited, genuine memory provides a paradigm for the analysis of recurrent motifs in The Gift." The existence and the whorls of that novel's thematic design refute the "triple formula of human existence: irrevocability, unrealizability, inevitability" proffered by the hero (and faintly echoed in the book's epigraph). "Crude mechanical attempts at recovering what is gone," continues the critic, "realizing the impossible, or preventing the inevitable (the end) are opposed to the genuine memory, mystical experience, and artistic inspiration that achieve a contact with 'another dimension'."56

Verbal art at its most intricate is the best method of recapturing the irrevocable, but it pitilessly robs memory of mnemonic tissue, for the past thus evoked pales the original impression the more, the brighter and fresher is the contact print emerging from the developing drum, as if it has blotted out the long-remembered image. This is one of those noble contradictions that whet and tickle one's sense of the transrational: the best way to preserve the past destroys it in the process. Imagination realizes past events in the "present" and strains itself to foresee the "future" even to its ultima. These are imagined realities, resembling the three squares drawn on each side of a Pythagorean triangle with the view to demonstrating the famous quadratic equation. Memory is a universal instrument of human creativity because not only recollection, but also imagination and even attempts to envisage are acts of remembering. This thought inheres in the very core of Pnin's philosophy. Mere mental kneading of the idea of temporality renders one wall of the mirror-trap of time translucent in places for a moment, so that a C., a Troshcheykin, a Krug, a Pnin, a Veen, or an N. may catch a furtive view, or rather image, of eternity, so ineffable and unimaginable for the book prisoners, so obvious to their spectators. These hair-ruffling, fleeting revelations are dress rehearsals for the ultimate metabasis eis allo genos, transcendence into an entirely different plane and sort of existence, that the immortal fictional personae perform before the hushed audience of mortals.

Notes

49. See, for instance, Nicol 1971, p.197, or Douglas Fowler, Reading Nabokov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), p.122.

50. James McConkey, "Nabokov and 'The Window of the Mint'," in The Achievements of Vladimir Nabokov, eds. George Gibian and Stephen Jan Parker (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 31. See Dmitri Nabokov's reaction in "A Few Comments on the Cornell Festival Volume," Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter, XIV (Spring 1985), p. 14:

[Nabokov] would never have 'abruptly turned away' upon hearing McConkey say, at a noisy party, that he liked Pnin for its compassion: Nabokov made no secret of the fact that compassion was a prime attribute of his own, and of the novel's.

51. One could argue that the poet Podtyagin in Mary does not die after all, in spite of all the sure signs of death inevitably waiting immediately beyond the novel's gates; after all, he does make a fleeting appearance, two years of fictional time later, in The Gift. But as far as the reader of Nabokov's first novel is concerned, Podtyagin is done for; besides, another character from Mary, Alferov, who wanders on the outskirts of The Defense in "1929," is said to have "liked to relate how an old poet [i.e. Podtyagin] had once died in his arms" (227).

52. From a letter to Katharine White, cited in Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, p. 225. SL, p.178.

53. From Pascal Covici's (unpublished) letter to Nabokov, March 25, 1954, preserved in the Nabokov Private Archive and quoted here with the kind permission of the late Mrs. Véra Nabokov. Boyd says, however, that "Nabokov thought highly of Covici, and whether for Covici's reasons or his own he eventually refused to let the heart trouble in the book's opening chapters kill Pnin off at the end." (Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, pp. 256-57). It must be noted that his "heart trouble" bothers Pnin as late as in Chapter 5.

54. John G. Hayman, "A Conversation with Vladimir Nabokov--with Digressions." The Twentieth Century, CLXVI (December 1959), p. 449.

55. Vladimir Nabokov, The Annotated Lolita, ed. by Alfred Appel, Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), p. xxxii.

56. Vladimir Nabokov Research Newsletter, XX (Spring 1988), pp. 49-52. For more on Bergson's concept of memory as applied to Nabokov see Toker 1989, especially the chapter on The Gift, pp. 142-76. The reader will remember that Van Veen was an attentive student and critic of Bergson's theory of "duration," creativity, and conscious stance with regard to "reality."

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