Nabokov

Nabokov’s Pnin is a novel of great complexity and intellectual playfulness – its “genre” is a meta-fictional non-genre (since it is fiction about fiction par excellence); its contents contains ‘the contents of the novel’, its ‘author-narrator’ is revealed to be a character, its two main characters (Pnin and the ‘author-narrator’) are alter egos of the assumed “author” Vladimir Vladimirovitch Nabokov. The novel even has a mascot - a squirrel that occasionally seems to jump into symbolic meanings… and the topic of the double double causes quite a trouble as well as Pnin’s English babble, etc. But supposedly we should start in a different way - a more serious one, and before we try to play it (i.e. read it) we should explore how Nabokovian game functions.

1.      The Narrator as a Violent Intruder

Reality and Self-reflection

If reality is the total of all perspectives and points of view (which can be considered the typical notion of reality in our postmodern era), then it is impossible to postulate the notion of “Reality”  since the total of all perspectives is an exclusively hypothetical concept not accessible to the experience of human thought but only to its imagination. Concerning the main tendencies in the development of the novel it is to be said that in realistic novels objective “Reality” is an important prop. On the other hand, in Nabokov, and in postmodern fiction in general, we would rather speak of “realities” which are interwoven and always shown in their multiplicity (hence such fiction may be considered more true to life than realism).

While literary realism resists any self-reflection, postmodern writers take delight in self-mirroring, and play with it ad absurdum. Nabokov’s Pnin is an extreme in this respect being incredibly self-reflective (i.e. reality-reflective), however, not through a narrator’s direct commentary (as, for example, in Sterne and Fielding), but by means of a seductive power so typical of Nabokov’s fiction, i.e. purely through the narrative strategies.

Subversion and Mediation

What is mainly questioned and mocked at in “Pnin” is the conventional role of the narrator and of the author. It is obvious that “Pnin” could easily become a traditionally structured novel if the narrator remained impersonal or even absent (carefully hidden), i.e. if there were no intrusions of the “I” narrator throughout the text. Significantly, these intrusions take place both at the level of the novel and at the level of Pnin’s life described in the novel. What Nabokov actually aims at in applying this rather awkward technique is to undermine the reliability of informants in fiction, and probably this is to be applied even on such fiction where the informants are originally intended to be absolutely reliable. In more general terms, Nabokov seems to be willing to cure readers from the passive attitude towards texts, and is undoubtedly successful in this respect since he finally makes readers join his game in a manner of a professional seducer. In “Pnin” Nabokov succeeds in showing that nothing can be mediated without imposing the mediator’s perspective on the recipient (in Marshal McLuhan’s words that “the medium is the message”).

Violence and Seduction

As was mentioned above, in Pnin readers are being “seduced” to play the game due to surprising and most peculiar intrusions of the narrative “I” into what is otherwise an impersonal er-form narration. The traditional objective er-form is first shattered on page 14 where, out of the blue, the narrative “I” appears with no explanation in quite an odd (typically nabokovian) sentence:

“On the third hand (these mental states sprout additional forelimbs all the time), he carried in the inside pocket of his present coat a precious wallet with two ten-dollar bills the newspaper clipping of a letter he had written, with my help, to the New York Times in 1945 anent the Yalta conference, and his certificate of naturalization; and it was physically possible to pull out the wallet, if needed, in such a way as fatally to dislodge the folded lecture.”[1]

The word “my” impossible not to notice is, of course, an absolute shock for the reader since it violently appears in a so far unproblematic perfectly consistent er-form narrative. Thus, readers might be inclined to ask themselves whether they did not skip anything important, they may start to hesitate and they immediately become more alert and suspicious - prepared to defend their position (they have just been involved in the game).

To make readers even more uncomfortable, and to integrate them fully into his games the narrator does not reappear as “I” until page 17 where his presence is as brief and dim as in the first mention. The only additional information the reader is given here is that the narrator is Pnin’s friend.

Manipulation

In any case, the intrusions of “I” occur in extremely banal contexts throughout the book, while the narrator does not seemingly give us any important information concerning the story of a Russian émigré Timofey Pnin, an academic teaching at an American college, until the very last few pages of the novel where the whole story is questioned as its narrator is revealed to be a person who had had a fatal influence on Pnin’s life, i.e. the narrator is revealed to be unreliable and manipulating. At this point the reader realizes that everything what has been said about Pnin so far was seen from the perspective of this extremely prejudiced ‘narrator-character’ and might feel like rereading the novel - this time from a totally different point of view. The mere story thus illustrates and clarifies the nature of the narrative strategy, which is always manipulative, and always plays with readers who can defend their dignity only if they can play with it.

2. Doubling the perspective

A fleeing character and a chased author

Andrew Field suggests that in “Pnin” the “narrative movement … is the flight of a character from his author.”[2] And indeed this crucial statement is in its absurdity the key to this game of doubling perspectives. But, of course, the question we could raise is what should be meant by “author”? The narrator definitely formed the whole Pnin’s existence, and hence, on the one hand, he could be in a way considered the author of Pnin’s character while his “authorship” would be a part of the story (and by authorship we would mean a strong formative personal influence) or, on the other hand, he could be seen as the author of the story, and hence also the author of Pnin as a character. So we would have two notions of an author: firstly, within the story, secondly, outside the story, but importantly, both these “authors” eventually remain inside the story since they are strictly speaking the ‘narrator-character’ and ‘narrator-author’ respectively.

However, the novel does not only deal with Pnin fleeing from the ‘narrator-author’, a friend under whom he refuses to work (the realm of the story), but also with Pnin who is trying to flee from Nabokov since the novel “Pnin” gets out of its author’s control, and starts to live its own life, which is what necessarily happens to works of art in general (the realm of the novel as a whole).

The Form of a Spiral

In terms of structure, as L. L. Lee precisely points out, Pnin is a “spiral, the means by which it contains itself as well as the story or stories”[3]. Lee also claims that the summary of the plot “gives us no sense of the book’s meanings nor of its delights”. Interestingly enough, what can give us the insight, Lee says, is “the dust jacket of the first edition of the novel” which “contains a picture of Timofey Pavlovich Pnin himself(…) In Pnin’s left hand is a book entitled, in Cyrillic (Russian) letters, PNIN [by] V.Nabokov”[4]. Lee says that “the picture of Pnin holding a book entitled Pnin suggests the fact that the novel is about the production of a work of art as well as about the character of Pnin.”[5]

Nabokov and Pynchon

It should be added that Pnin is not only about the process of writing but also and most of all about the process of reading, about readers and their expectations. The self-mirroring obsession concerns mainly the novels which, first of all, hold the mirror up to the reader. In this connection, we could make a brief comparison to Thomas Pynchon, Nabokov’s famous but probably less talented and more conventional follower. This comparison might be interesting because, on the one hand, both Nabokov and Pynchon hold the mirror up to readers and deliberately disappoint their expectations, but on the other hand, their approaches are essentially different since in Pynchon, as it seems to us, the disappointment is achieved only at the level of the story or contents, while Nabokov, being more radical, operates at the level of the novel as a complex (as a whole).

3. A Troubling Game of Doubling

Fictional author: Nabokov’s move

It is significant that both the narrator and Pnin share Nabokov’s interest in butterflies, both are, Russian émigrés teaching at American universities, furthermore, as L. L. Lee claims “ the narrator is exactly the same age as Nabokov – and both lived in a ‘rosy-stone house in the Morskaya’ Street in St. Petersburg”[6]. Therefore, as was said above, both Pnin and the narrator could be considered Nabokov’s alter egos (the former being a loser and the latter being the winner). However, the narrator-author might even be considered Nabokov himself, and therefore, an important question is to be raised here: Which Nabokov do we mean? L. L. Lee wrote: “The narrator is, in short, Nabokov; although the narrator is not the actual Nabokov who wrote the book, he is that character, the author who tells the story, whom Nabokov sometimes impersonates”[7]. This incessant doubling together with forming different layers of characters is the most fascinating feature of the novel. Now we shall focus on the notion of a double and doubling more in detail and we shall discuss its function as a prominent literary technique in the novel.

Doubling as a Literary Device

In the opening sentence of the sixth chapter the narrator analyzes nabokovian key literary device or, in other words, gambling method, i.e. the problem of doubling, here presented as everyday experience:

“Pnin and I had long since accepted the disturbing but seldom discussed fact that on any given college staff one could find not only a person who was uncommonly like one’s dentist or the local postmaster, but also a person who had a twin within the same professional group. I know, indeed, of a case of triplets at a comparatively small college where, according to its sharp-eyed president, Frank Reade, the radix of the troika was, absurdly enough, myself; and I recall the late Olga Krotki once telling me that among the fifty or so faculty members of a wartime Intensive Language School (…)there were as many as six Pnins, besides the genuine and, to me, unique article.”[8]

What is probably the most interesting moment in this extract is the suggestion that it is possible to distinguish more layers of doubling. These layers or types could be well interpreted as illustrations of the complex structure of doubling in the novel: Firstly, there are doubles coming from different scopes - which is, in fact, exactly the relationship between Pnin and the ‘narrator-character’ if both were conceived of as Nabokov’s alter egos, secondly, there is doubling within the same scope which would correspond to the relationship of the ‘narrator-author’ and ‘Nabokov as a fictional character of a “real” author’. The meaning of troika is thus already clear – ‘Nabokov as a fictional “real” author’ would be its root while Pnin and the ‘narrator-character’ / ‘narrator-author’ would be its remaining members.

For better orientation in these elaborate connections we could draw a simplifying scheme where arrows should represent the double relationships:

Nabokov-the fictional “real” author                            outside the story                            

Narrator-author of the story                                         sujet

Narrator-character                                          Pnin      fabula

            The realm of the novel

            The realm of the story

The ‘Twynn’ Complex

In short, the extract cited above can be considered not only a description of the mundane problem of doubles but more importantly it seems to be a typical example of nabokovian meta-textual method as it does not predominantly deal with the story where there occur some odd doubles, but mainly with the way the structure of the text (meta-text) is build up.

In any case, this game continues in its absurd humor by a charming episode which can be used as one of the keys to the cosmos of the novel – it is an episode about “a person whom Pnin knew as Professor [of ornithology] Thomas Wynn” but who “was not always Professor Wynn” and who “at times (…) graded (…) into somebody else whom Pnin did not know by name but whom he classified, with a bright foreigner’s fondness for puns as Twynn (or in Pinian ‘Tvin’)”[9].  In this short essay we focused on the motif of doubling which we presented as one of the main game devices used in “Pnin” – we tried to show how this strategy functions and why it is such an important aspect for the interpretation of the novel. The secret of the world of this novel (viewed as based on he game of doubling) is revealed  at Pnin’s birthday party which is nonetheless also a key event in the story:

“Good –bye, good-bye, Professor Vin! sang out Pnin, his cheeks ruddy and round in the lamplight of the porch.(…) ‘Now, I wonder why he called me that,’said T. W. Thomas, Professor of Anthropology…”[10]  

Sources:

Lee L.L.: Vladimir Nabokov (London: Twayne Publishers, 1976), pp. 124 -131

Engelkin Leszek: Vlaimir Nabokov (Olomouc: Votobia, 1997), pp.111-116

“Lech Budrecki: He wants to make us realize the existence of a literary convention, in this case the veristic convention demanding that a character cannot inform about another character’s contents of experience.[11]