Shortly after I first became a professor, I read Nabokov’s
novel, Pnin. (No, sorry, I have
absolutely no idea how to pronounce that name.)
I had fond memories, very fond memories, of the book. In a fit of nostalgia at the end of the semester,
I decided to reread the book. A stunning
experience. Either I have changed a lot
since I first read the book or the book has changed a lot. (The latter possibility is tempting to
embrace—imagine a world in which books really do change between readings. You could then go back and reread your favorite
books and each time they would not just seem different, they actually would be different. Never mind—that’s a really dumb thought
experiment.) Now it isn’t really all
that surprising that after 18 years of teaching, I am a bit different—I’ve read
a few books since then, for example—but even still, this novel was nothing like
I remembered it. It still had
(obviously) the same episodes I remembered so vividly, but then when I thought
about it I realized there were only two episodes I remembered vividly. (Pnin on a bench in the wrong city realizing
he could never get to the talk he was supposed to give; Pnin utterly dismayed—indeed
more dismayed than any other character in any other book ever—when he hears
glass breaking in the kitchen sink.) The
entire story surrounding those two events was extraordinarily different than the
story which existed in my imagination.
When I thought about it, it really wasn’t hard to see why my
memory of the book was so different than the book as it exists. I remembered the book as being all about a
befuddled professor wandering around an idyllic campus in the Northeast. It was an amusing tale, capturing life at a
New England college perfectly. Why did
the book seem that way? Well imagine
being a newly minted Assistant Professor, coming from a 1960s style-concrete-slab-buildings-everywhere
campus in California, and arriving at one of the most gorgeous liberal arts colleges
in the world, red brick buildings with ivy covered walls set amongst rolling
green lawns and sparkling lakes. Imagine
wandering to a library which is gorgeous enough to be a chapel and a chapel which
is magnificent enough to be a library reading room. Imagine an office with 12 foot ceilings and
wood trimmed windows. And then imagine
reading a book about an old professor pottering around such a campus, slightly bewildered
by the world. How could that novel not
seem like an idyllic vision of a future life?
How could it not be utterly poignant when our professor hero had moments
of doubt and pain. How could said assistant
professor not henceforth recommend that novel to I don’t know how many people as
the best picture of life at a Northeastern liberal arts college ever written?
I was talking with someone not too long ago about this very
problem of a book which once read at a particular moment in life was forever
stamped not with the book but with the memory of a book which isn’t exactly the
book which is there. He mentioned the
idea of going back to write the novel he remembered. An intriguing idea, that.
So, what is this novel?
Curiously, it feels like I am about to desecrate the novel by describing
it accurately. That’s not a joke—I am
having this terribly sick feeling right now in even thinking about writing down
a review of Pnin, the book; I feel like I am about to kill Pnin,
the memory.
Pnin, the novel, starts off as the story of a
befuddled Russian refugee who is living a tenuous life as a professor at a college
in New England. The first six chapters
are tales designed to mock the professor, but in every case there is a twinge
of pathos mixed in with the mockery. We
find out why in the seventh, and last, chapter.
The narrator, someone eerily similar to Nabokov himself, tells us the
back story of his own past and his interactions with Pnin. And somewhere in the midst of that last
chapter we realize we have an unreliable narrator on our hands. Pnin stole the love of the narrator’s life and
this book is a sort of revenge fantasy, but revenge on a man who the narrator
knows is fundamentally good and decent. Indeed,
that Pnin, this pathetic figure should have stolen the beautiful woman from our
dashing hero seems incredible. The narrator
pretends in that final chapter than it was he who rejected the woman who went
on to marry Pnin because our narrator would not have her, but there is something
not quite right about that story. Every
moment in which we saw Pnin’s inner self throughout the book was necessarily pure
fabrication. Events which would have
just been amusing stories are turned into lampoon by relating the inner
thoughts of Pnin. In the first six
chapters, one imagines that the narrator knows all these things because he knows
Pnin well. Then we discover the narrator
has never spoken to Pnin at any point after the events in the book take place. Pure fabrication.
The book is clever—but you knew that—it is Nabokov after
all. As a portrait of life in a New England
college, it’s not exactly right—a bit too much caricature designed to make Pnin
look like a fish out of water. As a portrait
of a professor, again it’s not quite right.
As a means of thinking about how we do in fact create narratives of
others, it’s pretty good. How many people
exist in our mind’s eye exactly the way we really wish they were?
R.I.P. Pnin, the memory. Cue dirge.
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