Just responded to another
query on this Pninian time detail. And agree with Sherry, especially in this
novel where from the earliest pages we find Pnin consulting happily and
mistakenly a train time table on which he thinks he's found a quicker
route.
Time and Pnin have their difficulties. As
in Pyre (my new name for Pale Fire) Shade wonders how we deal with the timeless
afterlife -- grab a passing surd and glide by?
Pnin never glides: The Bolshevic Revolution
foisted a new and unwanted calendar on him and his generation. Since then,
nearly impoverished Pnin is braced by free time tables, even free toothpicks and
brochures. But as an intellectual, enmeshed in myth and folk legend, he is
buffeted by everyone else's more ruthlessly pursued agendas.
VN points out (in Pyre) that the very
atmosphere will devour us if we discard our space helmet of mortality. Though
Pnin's mortality, so far, remains intact (So far. His heart, a clock
itself, and not the perpetual kind, is ticking away its finite moments in
time signatures that would puzzle a Brubeck), his consciousness is visited
again and again by figures from his past. The permeable past, for Timofey,
a fabric infinitely less stubborn and intractable than the wallpaper patterns
that forced their malicious formulas (trick puzzles -- no solutions)
on his sick child's mind.
The sweethearts of his awkward youth
applaud his lectures and beam lovingly at him. Squirrels move back and forth
through time, like aides de camp between the campaigns of the young Russian
Pnin, the full grown European Pnin, and the prematurely frail water father (On
the train to Cremona he is "elderly." Fifty? Fifty-one? Ouch). Even a
friend's summerhouse in Vermont wavers briefly between old Russia and new
world.
It's all timing. Speak Memory
among many other things, is the story of that most favored of artists, the one
who has time on his side. Often merely the nick of time, escaping Bolsheviks and
Nazis. But also making the crucial professional connections that time has
so few of to parcel out. Nabokov found his erstwhile friend and, for
years, irreplaceable advisor, Bunny Wilson.
Pnin, always a day late and a kopek short,
has friends who have the sense to appreciate him. And the greatest victory of
life, a son who has chosen him, and values him as he should be valued. But
instead of meeting the dealmakers you need to survive, Pnin keeps meeting the
Falternfals of life.
He's right on time, though, when it
comes to snubbing the great one who has done him so few favors, his Creator.
Good for him.
AB