Art and Exile: Nabokov's Pnin

ART AND EXILE: NABOKOV'S PMiV David Cowart* One cannot accuse the critics of neglecting Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, but their generous attention to the novel has not resulted in any real recognition that it ranks among the author's best works. Though several of the books on Nabokov include discussion of Pnin at chapter length, the treatment often seems perfunctory, as if the authors were husbanding their energies for the demands of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. If one finds more commitment among the authors of the six or so articles on the book, one still encounters a general disinclination to make any major claims for its comparative excellence. The reason for this critical diffidence may lie in the widespread conviction that a novel by the playful Nabokov, the Till Eulenspiegel of modern letters, is chiefly distinguished by its artifice, its tendency to take its own aesthetic as subject matter. But the critics who imply that serious reflection on the real world is somehow remote from Nabokov's intentions find themselves unable to assay a superb novel like Pnin, which manages at once to reflect on the artistry of its own making and to provide the reader with insights into the human condition from the viewpoint of one of the most notable victims of twentieth-century turmoil. More than any other contemporary author, Nabokov managed to dictate the terms on which critics might approach his work. "Remember that mediocrity thrives on 'ideas,' " he told an interviewer . "Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories."1 During the author's lifetime critics ignored this advice at their peril, for the barbed remarks in print, the "laughter from Montreux,"2 could be devastating. But now that Nabokov is no longer living one can risk suggesting that he neither wrote nor meant to write books completely unsullied by ideational content. Books contriving to be all play, all pattern , all artifice would in the end be all sail and no anchor, and in fact "ideas" and even "allegories" play an important part in Nabokov's fiction . One suspects that he realized perfectly well that his strictures 'David Cowart is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Thomas Pynchon: TheArt ofAllusion and numerous articles on British and American literature. He has recently completed a book on John Gardner that will appear in 1983. 198David Cowart would eventually enhance rather than diminish the appeal of fruit thus forbidden. Pnin, at any rate, should be recognized as one of Nabokov's best books because the element of play in it (always a major source of delight in a Nabokov novel) is perfectly subordinated to theme. In certain other novels the fun gets out of hand. Some readers even find Lolita, however pleasurable, to be largely linguistic and literary hijinks , an ultimately thin brew of poetry and pose insufficiently redeemed by Humbert Humbert's shift toward moral seriousness at the end. Indeed, much of the criticism on Lolita amounts to little more than catalogues and annotations of the novel's verbal games—with scarcely an attempt to suggest that all the allusions and puns add up to anything thematically. Pnin, by contrast, sparkles with the same humor and subtle complexity, but its seriousness emerges earlier. Its breadth, moreover, seems less equivocal for, in addition to Nabokov's familiar arguments about the primacy of art, it contains reflections on the chaos of the modern world, the archetypal search for the father, and, most importantly, the universal myth of man's decline from some former glorious state. The book spans five years, with flashbacks, in the life of the Russian émigré Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, whose attempts to adapt culturally and linguistically to his new country, the United States of America, are at once funny and pathetic. Pnin's ineptitude is comic yet winsome, and the reader's initial compassion modulates into something closer to admiration as the author reveals more and more of the decency , kindness, intelligence, and even heroism that exist beneath the protagonist's unprepossessing exterior. In an academic milieu that seems to reserve its highest...