by David Lodge
To consider the possible sources of Pnin in Nabokov’s experiences at Cornell is to be reminded that the book was a very early example of the ‘campus novel’, a subgenre which is very familiar to us now, but was only just beginning to manifest itself in the early 1950s. Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952) has some claim to be the first in the field, and Nabokov would certainly have been familiar with it, since he knew both McCarthy and her husband, Edmund Wilson, who was one of his closest literary friends at this time (they fell out later). Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution (1954), which was for those in the know a riposte to Mary McCarthy’s book, gave a further impetus to the new genre, though Nabokov was already embarked upon the Pnin stories when it appeared. What the three books have in common is a pastoral campus setting, a ‘small world’ removed from the hustle and bustle of modern urban life, in which social and political behaviour can be amusingly observed in the interaction of characters whose high intellectual pretensions are often let down by their very human frailties. The campus novel was from its beginnings, and in the hands of later exponents like Alison Lurie and Malcolm Bradbury, an essentially comic subgenre, in which serious moral issues are treated in a ‘light and bright and sparkling’ manner (to borrow the phrase applied to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, who would certainly have written a campus novel or two if she had lived in our era). Chapter Six of Pnin is a kind of campus novel in miniature:
The 1954 Fall Term had begun. Again the marble neck of a homely Venus in the vestibule of Humanities Hall received the vermilion imprint, in applied lipstick, of a mimicked kiss. Again the Waindell Recorder discussed the Parking Problem. Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as ‘Description of nature,’ or ‘Irony’; and in a pretty edition of Mallarmé’s poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it ‘birds.’
Aficionados of the campus novel (there are some austere readers of course who consider it a trivial and introverted subgenre) will hug themselves with glee at this beginning. Academic institutions are in a sense always the same. That is why, like the country house of classic murder mysteries, they make cosily reassuring settings for a tale, but why, also, we appreciate witty variations on the familiar themes and types. The earnest freshman’s marginal gloss, ‘Irony’, in this passage is itself a deliciously appropriate comment on the sentence in which it appears. We may note too the irresistibly funny bathos of the last word, ‘birds’, which gets something of its effect by echoing the American slang expression, ‘strictly for the birds’.
The two principal sources of motivation in the campus novel, which generate conflict between the characters and move the plot, are sex (usually illicit) and power (often involving a struggle over promotion or tenure). The first of these motives is only discreetly touched on in Pnin (perhaps because Nabokov felt he had enough sexual transgression on his hands in Lolita), but the efforts of Dr Hagen to secure Pnin’s appointment in Chapter Six is a good example of the second. It is typical that for most of the duration of the story Pnin is unaware that his job is in jeopardy. He is only concerned that his ‘house-heating party’ should be a success, while the reader is privy to the machinations of academic politicians which threaten his expulsion from Waindell. In fact Pnin is also unaware of the circumstance that most threatens the success of his party – the fact that he has confused the identities of two colleagues and invited the anthropologist Professor Tristram W. Thomas under the impression that he is the ornithologist Thomas Wynn. The two plot strands are very neatly intertwined in the extended treatment of this social event, which forms the climax to the story. Parties are a staple feature of campus novels because they conveniently bring the characters together in large groups, and loosen their tongues and reduce their inhibitions with alcohol, thus provoking amusing, indecorous or impolitic revelations. Throughout this party sequence we are kept in comic suspense as to whether Pnin will betray his mistake and suffer acute embarrassment in consequence. In the event he narrowly escapes exposing himself. The party is a great success (in his own eyes anyway) and he bids his guests goodbye feeling well pleased with himself. Then Dr Hagen, the head of the German department, under whose umbrella Pnin teaches at Waindell, learns from another departing guest that Pnin is planning to buy the house he has just rented, and Hagen feels obliged to return and tell him (in a well-meaning but clumsy way) that because of his own imminent departure and the intransigence of his colleagues (the Professor of French Literature Leonard Blorenge ‘who disliked literature and . . . had no French’ being the chief villain) Pnin’s appointment will soon be terminated. Pnin’s euphoria is shattered by this news. Sadly washing the soiled dishes and glasses afterwards he accidentally drops a pair of nutcrackers into the soapy suds containing the beautiful crystal bowl given to him by his son Victor and hears a sickening muffled noise of cracking glass. The reader winces in sympathy with Pnin as he suffers this cruel, additional blow of Fate.
Pnin hurled the towel into a corner and, turning away, stood for a moment staring at the blackness beyond the threshold of the open back door . . . Then with a moan of anguished anticipation he went back to the sink and, bracing himself, dipped his hand deep into the foam. A jagger of glass stung him. Gently he removed a broken goblet. The beautiful bowl was intact. He took a fresh dish towel and went on with his household work.
It is a brilliantly executed reversal of expectation, which relieves the reader almost as much as Pnin himself, and ensures that the essentially comic tone of the book is preserved even at the lowest point in Pnin’s fortunes.
As well as being a pioneer of campus fiction, Nabokov was one of the first writers to whom the epithet ‘postmodern’ may be usefully applied: that is to say, he had absorbed the lessons and achievements of modernism (in prose fiction represented supremely for him by Joyce and Proust) without feeling the need to reject the social realism of the nineteenth-century novel (he was devoted to Tolstoy and Jane Austen, for instance), but he developed an innovative form of fiction that was distinctively different from both of these traditions. Many of his novels take the basic narrative material of popular fiction about crime and detection, and play ingenious variations on the formulaic models – making the criminal an eloquent apologist for his actions (as in Lolita, for example), or a complete incompetent (e.g. Despair), or one and the same person as the detective (e.g. The Eye). Pnin is not a book of this kind. There are no crimes or even misdemeanours in the action. It has been pointed out that it is the only full-length work of fiction by Nabokov which does not describe a violent death (the death of Mira in the camps is recalled retrospectively, and is all the more harrowing for Pnin because its details are unknown, inviting his imagination to conjure up innumerable horrors). Its narrative model seems to be the kind of modern literary short story classically exemplified by James Joyce in his Dubliners, and (in a somewhat blander form) favoured by The New Yorker in the 1940s and ’50s, where the emphasis is on ordinary, mundane, even trivial, experience, which is made to shimmer with meaning and implication by the writer’s stylistic virtuosity and given aesthetic form by repeated motifs and symbols as much as by narrative structure. This kind of short story does not usually end with a dramatic twist of the plot, but with what Joyce called an ‘epiphany’, when the central character grasps the nature of existence, of his or her fate, in a moment of piercing insight, or such a revelation is vouchsafed to the reader in a passage of lyrical symbolism. Chapter Two of Pnin ends with an epiphany of loss, when his hopes of a reconciliation with his ex-wife are dashed:
‘Doesn’t she want to come back?’ asked Joan softly.
Pnin, his head on his arm, started to beat the table with his loosely clenched fist.
‘I haf nofing,’ wailed Pnin between loud, damp sniffs. ‘I haf nofing left, nofing, nofing.’
That Pnin’s mispronunciation of ‘nothing’ echoes the final consonant in his first name, ‘Timofey’, lends
an extra pathos to this complaint. Chapter Five also ends on a note of romantic-erotic deprivation for Pnin, as painful memories of his separation from Mira are evoked, rendered more poignant by the final vivid image of a courting couple on the summit of a distant hill at sunset. But at the last moment the serenity of this purely aesthetic resolution is undermined:
. . . two dark figures in profile were silhouetted against the ember-red sky. They stood there closely, facing each other. One could not make out from the road whether it was the Poroshin girl and her beau, or Nina Bolotov and young Poroshin, or merely an emblematic couple placed with easy art on the last page of Pnin’s fading day.
The metafictional aside, ‘placed with easy art on the last page’, is a typical postmodernist move, breaking the storyteller’s spell to call attention to the irreducible gap between even the most eloquent literary language and real human pain.
There is another group of novels by Nabokov with which Pnin has more in common than with his novels of crime and detection, namely those which experiment with the form of memoir or biography (such as The Defence and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight), and it is the memoirist character and function of the narrator in Pnin that most obviously distinguishes it as a postmodernist work. This feature of the book becomes more and more obvious and obtrusive the deeper we get into it. Initially it is suggested only by a certain idiosyncrasy of phrasing in the discourse:
The elderly passenger sitting on the north-window side of that inexorably moving railway coach, next to an empty seat and facing two empty ones, was none other than Professor Timofey Pnin.
This opening sentence of ‘Pnin’ in The New Yorker was the first mention of Pnin in print; but the phrase ‘none other than’ is normally used to introduce a figure well-known to the addressee at least by name. The demonstrative ‘that’ applied to ‘coach’ also produces an unsettling effect on the reader, as if one had just missed the proper beginning of the story. The narrator adopts the tone of the traditional ‘omniscient’ author: ‘Now a secret must be imparted. Professor Pnin was on the wrong train. He was unaware of it, and so was the conductor, already threading his way through the train to Pnin’s coach.’ But before the conductor has apprised Pnin of his plight, the narrator mentions that Pnin’s wallet contains, among other things, ‘the newspaper clipping of a letter he had written, with my help, to the New York Times in 1945 anent the Yalta conference . . .’ [emphasis mine]. Suddenly the authorial voice has become a character on the same plane as Pnin. A question arises, and periodically recurs: how can he therefore know so much about the minutiae of Pnin’s experience and his private thoughts?
Further self-references to the narrator as ‘I’ and to his acquaintance with Pnin are sprinkled through the book, and in the last three stories they begin to cohere into a kind of sub-plot. It is revealed in the last chapter that the narrator knew Pnin’s wife Lisa in Paris before the war and had a brief affair with her when Pnin was courting her, provoking her to attempt suicide (there is a veiled reference to this connection in Chapter Two which only a very percipient first-time reader would pick up). Lisa in fact married Pnin because of her rejection by the narrator and subsequently confessed the affair to Pnin. This explains why, in Chapter Six, when Hagen tells Pnin that the English Department has just appointed a man who might become his new protector and patron at Waindell – ‘one of your most brilliant compatriots, a really fascinating lecturer . . . I think he’s an old friend of yours’ – Pnin replies: ‘Yes, I know him thirty years or more. We are friends, but there is one thing perfectly certain. I will never work under him.’ This brilliant compatriot is obviously Nabokov himself. He is never fully and explicitly named, though he is clearly the amateur lepidopterist ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich’ whose absence from the house-party is mentioned in Chapter Five. The basic facts of his exile from Russia, his expatriate life in Europe, and successful career as writer and academic in America, correspond exactly to Nabokov’s own life.
This creates a puzzle for the reader, and an effect, not uncommon in postmodernist fiction, to which deconstructionist critics give the name ‘aporia’ – a Greek word meaning, literally, ‘a pathless path’, used in philosophy to refer to a group of statements which are individually plausible but mutually inconsistent or contradictory. How can the omniscient authorial narrator of Pnin, and the ‘I’ who reports his encounters with Pnin, and the real, historic individual Vladimir Nabokov, be one and the same person? If ‘I’ is a fictional character he cannot claim omniscience (which is a literary convention restricted to authors). If ‘I’ is not a fictional character, then neither is Pnin – Pnin must be as real as Nabokov. But in that case ‘the real Nabokov’ cannot claim omniscient knowledge of him (and indeed Pnin accuses the ‘I’ narrator of telling lies and making up stories about him). Nabokov teases us with this insoluble conundrum, bringing himself closer and closer in the last chapter to a confrontation with Pnin without ever quite clinching it.
There is an interesting note of authorial unease in this section of the book, as if Nabokov felt almost guilty at having created a character so much less happy and successful than himself, and subjecting him to a series of embarrassing and humiliating experiences. This theme is worked out through the character of Jack Cockerell, the head of the English Department, whose expert mimicry of Pnin is a sour, second-order version of the author’s original creation of the character. Cockerell’s imitation of Pnin is his party piece, his hobby, his occupation, and increasingly his obsession. When the narrator (let us call him ‘N.’) arrives in Waindell to give a public lecture prior to taking up his appointment, Jack Cockerell puts him up for the night and treats him to the whole repertoire of his Pnin imitations, a performance which amuses N. at first but becomes increasingly wearisome and leaves him finally ‘with the mental counterpart of a bad taste in the mouth’. Very early the next morning N. goes out and glimpses Pnin driving out of Waindell for the last time, in his old blue sedan packed with possessions, accompanied by a dog that has never been mentioned before (a final hint, perhaps, of the limitations of N.’s knowledge of Pnin), but fails to attract his attention. Returning to Cockerell’s house, N. is trapped by his host and led, like a prisoner to punishment, to ‘a British breakfast of depressing kidneys and fish’.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘I am going to tell you the story of Pnin rising to address the Cremona Women’s Club and discovering he had brought the wrong lecture.’
This, the last sentence in the book, takes us back to the end of the first story, but gives it a new twist. Chapter One ends with Pnin having survived all the various disasters which threatened the successful delivery of his lecture. Confident that he has the text safely stowed in the pocket of his jacket, he listens to the chairwoman’s bathetic introduction (a masterpiece of mimicry, this, by the way) without being in the least bothered by it. He is rapt in reverie, triggered by a memory of reciting a poem by Pushkin as a boy in the presence of his proud parents. It is a poignant yet sweet epiphany of the world he has lost: ‘Murdered, forgotten, unrevenged, incorrupt, immortal, many old friends were scattered through the dim hall among more recent people.’ Are we to suppose that, after this moving experience, another characteristic pratfall awaited the unfortunate Pnin? There is of course no way of deciding with certainty whether Cockerell is right or wrong in claiming that Pnin had after all contrived to bring the wrong lecture: the relation between the two versions of the episode is another example of aporia. There are hints in Chapter Seven that some of Cockerell’s Pnin anecdotes are unreliable, the product of mischievous invention rather than accurate reporting, and we may choose to place this one in that category. But this merely underlines the way in which Cockerell’s storytelling casts a cold light on N.’s (or Nabokov’s) own storytelling and perhaps on the whole process by which writers turn life into art.
Novel of character, roman-à-clef, campus novel, epiphanic short story, postmodernist metafiction – Pnin contains elements of all these fictional subgenres, but ultimately it is sui ge
neris, uniquely and quintessentially Nabokovian, having a family resemblance to his other works without being exactly like any of them. For those who know their Nabokov well it is full of allusions to and foreshadowings of those other works (especially Pale Fire, where Pnin reappears, happily ensconced in a tenured professorship at Wordsmith College), authorial in-jokes and hobby horses, and coded meanings concealed in proper names. A formidable body of commentary and exegesis has by now accumulated around this slim volume. But even first-time readers cannot fail to appreciate Nabokov’s marvellous and distinctive way with words. The apparently effortless fertility of his metaphorical imagination is never employed ostentatiously for its own sake, but always to give us an enhanced awareness of reality. For example, Pnin’s habit of breaking off from the prepared text of his lectures to interpolate some personal reminiscence is described as ‘those unforgettable digressions of his, when he would remove his glasses to beam at the past while massaging the lenses of the present’ – a brilliant fusion of the literal and the metaphorical, of the physical and the emotional. Or take the more elaborated account of Pnin’s reaction to the extraction of his teeth: