I
found a great deal to admire in Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin,
but I found it a difficult read because I found the narrator so unpleasant. I
never found the novel to be light-hearted, as many readers and reviewers apparently have, and I mostly connected with the sadness in it
that becomes more prevalent as the book moves on. I disliked the narrator's contempt
towards Pnin, who's a truly decent character, but I also realize that employing
a narratorial voice that treats the protagonist viciously while simultaneously conveying
Pnin’s goodness and humanity is something only a writer of tremendous skill can
manage. The ongoing symbolism of the squirrel as the ghost/metaphor for Pnin's
lost love Mira is quite remarkable, too.
But
the scene that interested me the most was the one in which Pnin flashes back to
the time when he was sick as a boy and became obsessed with the wallpaper in
his room:
He had always been able to see that in
the vertical plane a combination made up of three different clusters of purple
flowers and seven different oak leaves was repeated a number of times with
soothing exactitude; but now he was bothered by the undismissable fact that
he could not find what system of inclusion and circumscription governed the
horizontal recurrence of the pattern; that such a recurrence existed was proved
by his being able to pick out here and there, all along the wall from bed to
wardrobe and from stove to door, the reappearance of this or that element of
the series, but when he tried traveling right or left from any chosen set of
three inflorescences and seven leaves, he forthwith lost himself in a
meaningless tangle of rhododendron and oak.
I
wondered if Nabokov was deliberately evoking "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which
was written 65 years before Nabokov's novel. In Gilman's story, the protagonist
becomes obsessed with the floridly ugly wallpaper in the bedroom of the
country manor her husband has rented for the summer. She first tries to make
sense of its weird, conflicting, confounding patterns – much as she’s trying to
make sense of the complex, illogical rules and double standards of the
patriarchal world she's trapped in. Then she starts to see malign eyes moving
inside the pattern. As her madness progresses, she starts to see the image of a
lurking woman trapped inside the pattern, and the narrator becomes obsessed
with getting her out.
Pnin,
on the other hand, doesn't fall prey to insanity as he tries to make sense of
his own wallpaper, although whoever designed the paper is described as "the
destroyer of minds, the friend of fever". But as a metaphor, the
wallpaper in Nabokov's chapter could function in much the same way as Gilman's:
Pnin has become aware that he's trapped in a world he cannot fully understand
or navigate despite his best efforts. Does he escape insanity because he, as an
educated man, is not oppressed by society to the same extent that Gilman's female
protagonist is? If Nabokov was deliberately riffing off the themes and images of Gilman's story, that
conclusion seems likely.