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.