Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The Water Father

Because none of us, not even Northrop Frye, is smarter than all of us, here is wikipedia on Free Indirect Speech, also called Free Indirect Style, Free Indirect Discourse, or Discours Indirect Libre:

[It is] a style of third-person narration which combines some of the characteristics of third-person report with first-person direct speech. Passages written using free indirect speech are often ambiguous as to whether they convey the views, feelings, and thoughts of the narrator or of the character the narrator is describing.

OK, so. The entry mentions Austen, Joyce, Kafka, and maybe Chaucer as noted F.I.D. practitioners, and my learned brother Connor informs me that our old pal Flaubert was a big fan, too. And I cannot stop thinking about the way that it is supposed to work, and how it appears to be going incredibly haywire, in Pnin, whose second and third chapters I have just finished rereading.

James Wood apparently makes a great deal of hay from F.I.D. grass in his new book, and in one of his old books, he mentions a misfire of attempted F.I.D. that, prima facie, looks like it is going on in Pnin. At several times, Wood finds fault with writers for using their own words rather than those of the characters while putatively absorbed in the character. This is not a negligible fault; the inhabitation of a character is one of the finest tasks of fiction, and to constantly retouch down on a piece of authorial showiness is to be a distraction, sometimes a hampering distraction, and to do less than right by one's characters. And, for the very long stretches of Pnin in which we can forget that the narrator is a character, that is what may be seen to be going on. The narrative consciousness can fit Pnin like a glove, but at moments the glove seems poorly tailored. So, for instance, we have the kind of joke that the narrator would make -- calling a sonic headache of the professor's jackhammering on "Brainpan Street, Pningrad" (Nabokov, 63)-- contrasted with the kind that Pnin would make, writing on: "the blackboard, which he wittily called a grayboard" (Nabokov, 67). One word from that, is, of course, the narrator's -- "wittily" -- but that is exactly ironical; his mocking claim of Pnin's wit, which is really a rhinestone among the narrator's jewels, is just the sort of judgment to which we and he are privy and not, his poor narrator.

So this is a deeply weird Free Indirect Discourse -- except, of course, that it is actually an embodied character, albeit one who thus far -- through the first three chapters -- has revealed himself only very obliquely. In fact, in the third chapter -- which I think my be my favorite, with Pnin being the victim of for the most part only harmless fun -- has no intrusion from the Narrator Character at all. This is the distinguishing mark of Pnin the novel: the narrator is not the normal, fallible first-person narrator we usually meet -- Nick Carraway, Ishmael -- Pnin's narrator seems to be on top of things in a way that is completely authorial. His near-omniscience is authorial, that is, and his prose style is (both obviously and obscurely) Nabokovian. Because of the latter, he is charming; but, because we are charmed, we can fail -- by which I mean, of course, that I had once failed -- to notice the degree to which, as a narrator, or at least as presenter of a character, our narrator leans toward the sadistic.

The morality of the narration is less of an issue in the third chapter than in the second, which I remembered as being cute -- Pnin meets the Clementses -- but had not remembered as poignant, nor as unsettling, which I found it to be on this go round. Pnin's confrontation with the horrible Dr. Eric Wind is not only heartbreaking -- poor, blindsided Pnin -- but it is structured almost sadistically by the narrator. We begin with a mundane, if slightly sad, story of Pnin's treatment at the hands of his colleagues. We then are lulled into a brief spell of Pninian contentment coinciding with real-world happiness, as he charmingly becomes friends with his fellow surd, Laurence Clements. But then the tone shifts again -- "The cat, as Pnin would say, cannot be hid in a bag," (Pnin, 43), and we are introduced to Pnin's sometime wife, Liza, who will be coming to visit him. When discussing Liza, the narrator is at his cruelest, as we have been set up to think Pnin is doing all right just before he springs Liza's wantonness on us, and also (to this point, anyway) the closest to actual engagement with the plot. Here, again and again, he skates close to the text -- the Pnins get into America with help from a relative of his, he mentions the noise that Eric and Liza wind make when they say the word "group", something that Pnin, who has only read their letters, could not know -- and so the text's malign treatment of Pnin seems to have more and more agency.

The final, devastated Pnin, who has "nofing, nofing", is told by Liza as she asks for money, that he is the "water father" of her child. This is Eric Wind's preposterous phraseology, and Pnin rightly laughs at it, even as he begins to weep. Of the first three chapters, though, this is the only one that has such a sad ending; the other two have near misses, just the sort of happy endings the narrator has professed to hate. As we go forth, this seems to me to be the most important thread of which to keep track, in which the narrator seems to effect his desire that "doom should not jam" only by effecting his own closeness to the text. By the end of the book, we should also hope to develop a sense of Nabokov's strategy in presenting such an amorphous relationship to narration, and also to giving poor Timofey such a bad time.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Pnin: What to Expect

Today I am going to talk about Our Official Selection. Later, I will have stuff to say about Confederates in the Attic, about which I am pretty excited and a very small bit into. That will be one thing that draws comment, the doings of the nefarious M.R.'s -- who, worried that their all-girl book club's Benjaminite name sounded a little too much like something that Chairman Mao would've called his repopulation program, now appear to have starting calling themselves les Amies des Canard -- and probably some more stuff about the New York Times Book Review, about which I think very often. And of course there will be more on the books that at least nominally give this site a raison d'etre, our reading club books. And now, that book is Pnin .

This is the third time I have read the first chapter of Nabokov's Pnin. The first time was encountered in the New Yorker collection of comedy writing, called Fierce Pajamas, many years ago. Back then, I think I mainly viewed it as strange -- a quirky throwaway -- because it was not a knee slapper like "On the Sidewalk" or like "What We Talk About When We Talk About Donuts", which I laughed at so much once at Denny's that the waitress came over and asked me if I were going to be ok. Years later, I read the first chapter of Pnin -- along with most of the rest of it -- on the Red Line, when I went into Boston to take the GRE, had the people there tell me that I was eight days early, and spent the rest of the day just cruising around. That time, I was more of a Nabokov initiate, having thrown back already Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, The Defense, and, in a huge huge way, Pale Fire. And that time, I thought it was strange because Pnin, unlike the other English language heroes (Kinbote and Humbert Humbert) did not have the "fancy prose style" for which the latter says you can count on a murderer. Pnin was more like Cincinattus C., hero of Invitation to a Beheading, except that Cincinattus encounters a nightmare world of shady accusations and imprisonments, and Pnin encounters a confusing timetable. Comparatively boring, thought I.

Of course I was wrong, I being an idiot. I was told in a more flattering way than I deserved that I had gone about the book backwards by my good friend and advisor Prof. Fix, so I tried one more time. On my rereading now, I have only gotten through the first chapter, but already it feels more of a piece with its chronological neighbors, and less like a bagatelle -- because its narrator is so deeply weird. His attitude toward Pnin -- his sudden declaration that Pnin wrote a letter to an editor "with my help" -- and, overall, his outrageously explicit attitude of irony toward Pnin (telling us that Pnin will not make his train, he says "Now a secret must be imparted") -- this has all of the famous earmarks of the unreliable narrator, with none of the usual fullness of character for unreliable narrators (like Saleem Sinai, Dowell, and the more recent Leo Liebenstein). It will show you just how wretched of a reader I have been in times past that I am not 100% on much more he gets fleshed out, apart from the fact that I remember he gets somehow involved with the future ex-Mrs. Pnin. But we shall discover more on that anon.

Monday, July 7, 2008

Garbage Robots and Housekeeping

Great news, everyone, I am back from vacation on the glorious and lobster-rolled Cape Cod. I am going to take advantage of this momentous occasion to first, tell you about something that has nothing to do with books, really, and then eventually throw in some affaires d'etat. There are big things afoot. Also, I will justify this non-book stuff by talking about Canadian Ace Northrop Frye and his Anatomy of Criticism. So, prepare to be bored, amigos.

Have you seen Wall-E, citizens? Wall-E, a story about robots and floating space colonies of humans, made me think, of course, of the great Anatomizer, who has this to say about Highly Advanced Comedy:

The materials of the cognitio of Pericles or the Winter's Tale are so stock that they would be "hooted at like an old tale" yet they seem both far-fetched and invariably right, outraging reality and at the same time introducing us to a world of childlike innocence that has always made more sense than reality (Anatomy of Criticism, 184).

So it goes with the cognitio of Wall-E, a piece of childlike innocence that keeps up the tradition that has been building at Pixar of using the most stock materials to make the most fascinating and intellectually respectable entertainments provided today. Like its forebears (especially Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo), Wall-E represents in a way that I have not seen anywhere else, the continuation of the green-world comic mode that goes, as Cavell tells us, from Shakespearean romantic comedies through the screwball comedies of the thirties. Cavell called these latter comedies of remarriage, and in many ways that is what Wall-E is: both in the romantic pursuits of its protagonist (whose final scene is very much redolent of the anagnoresis of the great screwball comedies) and in the remarriage, as those of you who have seen it will know, of the people of this Earth with their home.

This business, I guess, could be done with books just as well. Because the chief searcher for this strain of comedy is the cinephile Cavell, I have tended to follow his lead and look for it just in dramatic work. (If any of you know of a novel that works this way, by all means, let me know). But, and this is where I will tie this post even more back into books than mere Frye-babble could: it negotiates both of its remarriages in the two terms I find to be the most uniquely cinematic, which are dancing and space. I am a person, as the old saw has it, who is more in thrall to Martin Chuzzlewit than Martin Scorsese; there are virtually no things that movies do that I would not rather see done in a novel, but boy, you can't beat film for sheer openness -- like the space of the trashscapes with which Wall-E opens -- or for sheer intimacy -- like the dance in which our hero and heroine unite their fates. Still, I will keep novels for my guide through my life, just as I keep Newtonian physics as my guide through physical medium-sized objects.

And now, the business of business: Did you hear, my Unpacking crew, that there is a rival gang of book nerds with a Benjaminy name? Well, there is. They rove unchecked across western New York, they are called the Mechanical Reproductionists, and their encroachment on our turf has not gone unnoticed. I will monitor them with an attention that borders on infiltration, and infiltrate their ranks with a thoroughness that borders on having actually started the club myself.

Business item two: while on my crustaceany vacation, I read a book called Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen, which was just as good as I-Wish-He-Were-My-Uncle James Wood said it would be in the New Yorker.

And speaking of the New Yorker, in the most recent issue, there is a great piece by another avuncular-in-a-perfect-world chap, Adam Gopnik, on GK Chesterton (the link just goes to the abstract, desfortunadamente). In the course of discussing Chesterton's untoward political and cultural views, Gopnik says this thing I found true and amusing: "Besides, if obviously great writers were allowed onto the reading list only when they conform to the current consensus of liberal good will --voices of tolerance and liberal democracy -- we would probably be down to George Eliot."

If you thought that was uproarious and were a girl, I will marry you, and if you thought that was uproarious and are a guy, I will go with you to California and marry you there. Until then, stay tuned for more jokes about our inability to live up to George Eliot's standards next time, on Unpacking My Library.