Pnin
This was Nabokov’s “breakout” novel that “launched him” into stardom, at least so Wikipedia states. It’s why it was selected to read and review, too, though one can wonder what exactly makes a book a “launch” for any author.
Doubly so in this case: it isn’t immediately obvious why this was the book which introduced Nabokov into America’s literary gentry. Maybe there isn’t anything about it. After all, there’s always that loved ringer about how everyone envies The Event, but not the thousand training days spent. Manufacturing one’s own luck? Never!
By the time Pnin was released, Nabokov had twelve novels prior. Interestingly enough, Lolita was the direct predecessor.
All the more you may wonder why Pnin was the launchpad, despite Lolita looming itself over culture and Epstein’s island and power structures — that Pnin was the “safe” launchpad for an already marked symbolic whisperer, nodding toward Nakobov’s Russian noble roots furnishing a cosmopolitical aware inheritor — but, stepping back as the New York Times bestseller selector you’re destined to be, it’s plainly evident: let’s not discuss heavy things. Keep in mind that Pnin was released on an honest 1957 day, while Lolita debuted an earnest two years prior in Paris, though inevitably hitched over to America a Pninian year after.
Though a light satire trebled on university doldrums, especially American, I couldn’t help but find it melancholic. Lo and behold, such melancholy was the original intent of the novel, possibly. The book was originally devised to end in Timofey Pnin’s death, yet with an editor’s demand it was gutted. Which, to such an editor’s credit, may have greatly influenced its success: who wants to read about an émigré demise? Let’s not discuss heavy things!
Still, it is extraordinarily difficult to rewrite one’s intent. Though one could find humor in how Pnin carried himself, navigated the strangeness and schemed in earnest, nevertheless it felt the same as a cold and unused auditorium, spare props of a life disjointed, but most predominately an academic melancholy, aptly. Without the certain demise so one is inclined to roam the laminate floor a little after, lost in wonder. Maybe this is part of the novel’s power.
How I can’t help but find my own folly in education and the education of others. Even today, reading Cicero (of all things), so I feel mental bars evidently stricken and slithering in every conversation. How absurd! Conversations without definitions, movements without intent.
The academic tower isn’t merely a respite, but a fester, and in such pearled walls so one slackens the statements of Man and dolls them a Reality rarely found. To talk of virtue or literary style, but have not a slightest urge to clarify. Morality and ethics, but a Senate’s blade bloody dribble slathers each step toward the throne. Taking each conversation and building upon all of these predecessors until you trace it back to a Latin quote from The Anatomy of Melancholy only to reflect, for a moment, why does this tomb of melancholy exist, and so even the esteemed admits: to ward melancholy away, nothing less.
Maybe some researcher would support these claims or find them absolutely abhorrent, but it doesn’t seem far-fetched to say modern education anchors itself from Prussian rule. The Prussian school: a regime to transfigure the caribou into the mule. Pocketed for another slot in the standing army, standing province to coalesce and of great expanse one can slaughter for order.
To fitfully brutalize you only need to master two things: a propensity to fulfill orders, and a doubt all but vanquished. To these ends so the modern institution takes ample note. And to these ends so I find myself vaguely withdrawn and uncomfortably I try and try to shake away and hope there’s something beyond blood splatter and power: ignoring the connection of productive research best amidst the violence of war.
Yet without an army demanded nor earnest nation devoted, how neglected we are in fitness! The Prussian school without a Prussian destination and a Prussian vigor. Despondently I finished the final terms of my college, and despondently so because I couldn’t help but feel myself as, indeed, the aimless mule.
Thus melancholy hearkens and follows through each clear Pninian caricature and student, whether with the pinned indifference, ample breasts and pendant, — no longer do the Big College Names summon admiration; places now as aimless or programmed and in a strange deference. Prussian obedience for un-Prussian rewards: there is little vigor left for such prostituted institutions funded through NGOs and whatever dumbing down needed for the next war.
You cannot shy away from the goal of employment locked within an Economy dominant: one can flutter around each page and tomb but so looms The Real World and you are but a fidgety one in the corner wishing enough words could ever bar you from the true intellect steering nations and capital and humanity’s darkness. Wishing that it meant something, even though half of your colleagues are snoring and the other half are daydreaming and most of them rehash tired talking points, grasping for a relevance while the Suits mold your world and fashion for you this propaganda hurling cage.
One shall not even join the true brawn carrying such lain plans, to gather a simple yet honest admiration. There is nothing to admire in wilted hands to turn each page with a crinkled soul knowing this isn’t living, but a reverie most deluded and melancholic for those who see it.
One is completely correct to argue that it is not the admiration of others, but of one’s own and alone assessment to strive for, and to this I hasten to agree. But whether we speak of On Friendship or My Little Pony: Friendship & Magic so renders the same result: hunched and staring out toward the silver mute sky. As I imagine most derive a good sense of self-esteem in what they’re capable of, whether they can claw toward their dreams, and who dreams of these small exchanges and theses to forget? If one coughs enough phlegm perhaps through clear speech alone could something be derived, but dreams often distill down to that Reality we’re ignoring: power, resources, and coldblooded empiricism.
What ought to be a book discussion instead turns into this void and personalized academic review, but I will also love to point out how the book captured the alienation of the immigrant. Plopped intermittently in whatever scene so we enter flashbacks of a childhood so distant, it may as well been fairytale. And life is certainly like that too, even for the native. Yet the immigrant cannot even find anything to anchor in after these flits, especially if everyone is now missing: at least for the native the highway hums through each checkpoint, through each ancestral inner chime. It was an interesting contrast.
Another point is that, well, we could certainly imagined the enraptured academic as satisfied, in a groove and expanding influence about. Some parts of the book, when Pnin is especially immersed, well, who’s the chump now after writing all of this, is what I’d think.
It seems like the type of book everyone will get something different out of. Maybe this would encourage you to read it and see how divorced this post is from it.