PNIN

“Some people – and I am one of them – hate happy ends. We feel cheated…. Had I been reading about this mild old man, instead of writing about him, I would have preferred him…” – Nabokov as narrator of Pnin.

When I discovered that Pnin was Zadie Smith’s favorite book (or a favorite, at least), I was quite surprised. I had not heard that Nabokov’s little novel was anything special. But then, Zadie Smith is quite special, so…. I put Pnin front and center on my readings. Then I started reading it and got a bit confused again. I mean, the opening is kind of humorous. A bit too cute, maybe, with the slapstick comedy of Professor Pnin losing his way, boarding the wrong train, losing touch with his luggage, abandoning a bus, and lurching to a stop in the street while his heart beats itself silly. But then a funny thing happened. Some ridiculous narrator interrupted the story. And the novel began.

Pnin is not about Professor Pnin and his rather boring current life at a fake college, or at least not mostly about him, although the text itself is rather burdened with all the details of that life. Instead, the novel is a mystery. And the mystery is the narrator. This guy has the audacity to interrupt the story every few pages with unnecessary quips about how he doesn’t like happy endings – as if he isn’t the one presenting us with the current narrative. And he insinuates himself into the narrative as Pnin’s friend – doubtful from the first moment it is stated. Why do we doubt the narrator’s statements? Because he knows too much about Pnin from the inside. Too much about his mind, imagination, dreams. No actual “friend” would know these things.

So, irony: We find an unreliable narrator because the narrator knows too much about the story.

And then he admits to being unreliable when he assures us that narrators have a difficult time with telephone dialog or when he says he doesn’t know if Victor loves anyone. But blast it all, who is this man? The knee-jerk reaction – and certainly one not to be trusted – is that the narrator is Nabokov. After all, he’s the guy writing the book. But Nabokov wouldn’t narrate the novel, would he. At least, if he did surely he would know the things he seems not to know, or he would create the endings he would want or he would merely paraphrase some telephone dialog rather than admit a shortcoming, right? And so, knowing that the narrator couldn’t be the author, we are left with the mystery.

The mystery is answered, however. It turns out that Mr. Nabokov – an expert in butterflies as well as English – is, indeed, the narrator. And Pnin doesn’t seem to like him very much.

What?

But isn’t Pnin just a character? Isn’t Waindell a fictional school? And Liza and Victor, they’re just types, right? If it’s all fiction – and Nabokov warns us that we should never desire truth in our fiction – then who is the narrator? And how, by the final chapter, does the narrator take over the action of the story and become the central character.

Nabokov uses Pnin to test his ideas about realism in literature. Here we are reminded of Williams admonition that the unconventional is used to give “a closer approach to the truth.” The narrator is certainly unconventional, but what is Nabokov’s truth? There doesn’t seem to be one. Instead, the novel works as the kind of puzzle which needs rereading. As he tells us in his initial lecture, only in rereading a great work can you see how it’s put together. It is the rereading that shows the structure. And Pnin has a great structure. Everything that happens in the narrative is mundane, while the past of Pnin, his ex-wife, the narrator, etc. all seems so glorious and melodramatic.

Nabokov – and the novel does tell us that the narrator is Nabokov – shows off a tremendous recall ability, even bragging about “the unusual lucidity and strength of my memory”; yet Pnin distrusts this memory. He even argues that Nabokov gets some of the basics of the story wrong. How can we trust a narrator who tells us how good his memory is when his main character is showing us its faults? Too fun!

The tongue-in-cheek nature of the mystery of the narrator is great, but Pnin is not a novel built on a punch line. Such does not account for the vision of the narrator as he describes a puddle: “It was a pity no one saw the display in the empty street, where the auroral breeze wrinkled a large luminous puddle, making of the telephone wires reflected in it illegible lines of black zigzags.” Beautiful writing which draws our attention to a detail that neither Pnin nor Nabokov could have seen. So, who is this narrator? Obviously we can’t trust the bastard.

And then we have Zadie Smith’s favorite line: “The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass’s seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail.” (Smith says she read the novel a number of times before actually checking to see if the trick worked, which, of course, it did.) This zebra cocktail could only ever be known to Victor. It was done before he met Pnin (and he never meets the narrator), yet it is described with perfect knowledge. How?

Clearly Nabokov sets up his reader with the expected idea of a reliable omniscient narrator. Then he undermines such omniscience by having the narrator doubt his own knowledge. I.e. how could the narrator know about Victor’s comb but not know whether the boy loved anyone. But then, as the novel enters the final third, Nabokov completely disrupts the whole idea of the narrator by having him become a character in the novel. In the final chapter, the narrator has become the English professor whose appointment drives mild-mannered Pnin right out of town. And, in the final line, the novel comes full circle as the story which begins chapter 1 starts again from another point-of-view.

If we are looking at Pnin in order to investigate how Nabokov plays with the modern notion of fractured personal identity, then we have some seriously fertile ground. The character Pnin is wonderful all by himself to deconstruct: a old fuddy-duddy with a history of a great (if one-sided) love and a tendency toward goodness only challenged by bungling librarians, it seems. However, Pnin isn’t important here. Let’s not fool ourselves. Only Nabokov really matters. But who is he? Surely he isn’t the author. He’s a character. But sometimes he’s also the author, right? And how can we know the difference? Is there a difference? Nailing down the character/ narrator/ author Nabokov in Pnin is like trying to figure out exactly who/ what Godot is: we can wait a lifetime, but it isn't going to help.

And there is the beauty of the novel. It isn’t truth. It isn’t a satire on the American college scene (as the dust jacket claims). Rather, it is a study in creation. How close can an author be to a text without making the text “true”? Even if he’s inside it, Nabokov shows us, it’s still only ever going to be fiction.

“Good Writers and Good Readers” 2: “Fiction is Fiction”

"Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature.... The writer of fiction only follows Nature's lead." -- Nabokov

In order for a reader to really appreciate a great novel, the reader needs to cultivate a mind capable of that appreciation: “the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one.” Such a temperament will provide a reader with the tools to appreciate the art of the author and to aid in the creation of the novel in the imagination.

A writer can approach his/her craft in three ways: “as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter.” Obviously many readers turn to a storyteller for entertainment. And the laughter that accompanies a reading of Portnoy’s Complaint or shares the joy of Pnin’s new teeth are good examples. Teaching is also valuable, of course, as the reader learns much about puppet theater from Sabbath or about Middle Class American values from Humbert Humbert. But Nabokov is correct to really look for the enchanter in his authors: “it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the patter of his novels or poems.”

Nabokov looks to Ulysses as a great enchantment in his lectures. Reading Zuckerman Bound, you also see such enchantment. Roth gives us a simple story about a simple guy with regular ideas and ideals but where “the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story.” Such magic is key to modern drama, I would argue. What is there in Death of a Salesman, Glenngary Glen Ross, or Fences that is anything other than ordinary? Yet the experience of these works is, like the life of poor Prufrock, moving in its mundanity.

The plays of Tennessee Williams work to highlight such a magic of art shared by author and viewer/reader as a creative act. The wave-like structure of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or the way tension builds like the construction of a brick wall in A Streetcar Named Desire can only work if the reader is willing and able to be enchanted. But perhaps the best example of such enchantment is when the reader is willing – eager, even – to understand the story of a pedophile “with a fancy prose style” in Lolita.

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It is unarguable that Nabokov expects a great deal from readers. He demands attention, close reading, even a bit of detective work. And he repays these efforts with moments of powerful emotion (yes, emotion) – the great tingling at the top of the spine that signifies when all the mind is engaged in the magic of the art. Such a moment happens when reading Sophie’s Choice. Styron opens the book with Stingo, a narrator who, like Sabbath or Portnoy, spends an awful lot of time focused on masturbation. Getting into the novel, however, the reader finds Sophie, and her heartache is palpable. And finally, after the reader is well past Stingo’s crusty pillow, Styron hits the reader with Sophie arriving at the concentration camp, with her choice. And the reader’s world ends. Completely.

That is a perfect moment of art.

"Good Writers and Good Readers"

"What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books" -- Flaubert

It was just over a year ago that I first read Nabokov's introductory lecture "Good Writers and Good Readers" from his Lectures on Literature. This lecture was meant to be the first reading I completed for a directed reading in Modernism and Identity in 20th Century American Literature. I was also planning to post on it over a year ago. But then my health had other plans. Now, finally, I'm getting the posting up.

In this first lecture, Nabokov defines great readers and great writers:

• The great reader is a rereader. Because the first reading of a book must be linear, it is only on second or third reading that the writer really understands the structure of the work (and hence the genius of it).
• The mind is the only part of the reader that should come to bear on a book. Avoid bringing emotion or connection to your reading, but bring imagination. Disbelief must be suspended .
• Never identify with a character!: “this is the worst thing a reader can do.”
• “What should be established… is a harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind.”
• “Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective.”

And what do I think of Nabokov’s reader? I agree with him, for the most part. Surely rereading a great work is important, and without a willing imagination, how could the reader ever appreciate the author’s art as creation. I also agree that bringing to much personal emotion to a book can damage one’s appreciation – how could the sexually molested girl ever read Lolita with an appreciation for its artistic prose? To be contrary, I do see value in identifying with a reader when that identification is part of what the author asks of the reader (such as in Salinger’s work – the identification with Franny is especially important to really understand how the conversation with Zooey works). However, only a masochistic reader would seek to identify with most of Roth’s characters, or with Nabokov’s own Pnin, Humbert Humbert, or Lolita herself.

What I find most valuable about Nabokov’s injunction for the reader is his insistence on the creative act as a joint act between the reader and the author. The basic rhetorical triangle suggests this approach, but many literary critics want to either divorce the work from the author or from the reader or, god-forbid, from both. Still, Nabokov is not suggesting that his biography is what matters when one reads Pnin; rather, the balance between the author and reader is one of the creative act of the mind. To really “get” a work, the reader must attempt to share in the author’s experience of creating it – to see “how it works” – something akin to an art student spending hours copying a Van Gogh to better understand the master’s brushstrokes.