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Seminar in Sentence-Making #36: Nabokov Edition
This is from Chapter Two, Part 4, of Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. The protagonist, immigrant professor Timofey Pnin, has just had all his teeth pulled:
A warm flow of pain was gradually replacing the ice and wood of the anaesthetic in his thawing, still half-dead, abominably martyred mouth. After that, during a few days he was in mourning for an intimate part of himself. It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft; but now not a landmark remained, and all there existed was a great dark wound, a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate. And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.
The first thing I notice is that the description isn’t static. It is wedded to narration in the forward motion of time. When we get “was gradually replacing,” we get the description of the before and after and the transition from one to the other because of the verb.
Nabokov, as he often does, takes big risks with figurative language in his description. He’s likening sensations to objects when he talks about the “ice and wood of the anesthetic.” It works because these objects so rightly represent the way the anesthetic makes the mouth feel — frozen (you can’t properly control the muscles of the mouth and tongue and lips the way you can’t when you’ve been sucking ice, and you can feel things but only dully, also in a way that recalls the post-ice-sucking sensation) and wooden (dull, heavy, strangely solid in a manner that becomes more apparent when contrasted against the “warm flow of pain” that replaces it, which is rightly given liquid and thawing qualities.)
The next big descriptive task, also framed in a way that shows the workings of the mind in reaction to the sensations of the body over time, is to talk about what it feels like to no longer have your teeth. Here, too, Nabokov gets figurative, parsing an extended metaphor comparing the tongue to “a fat sleek seal,” and familiarly tracing the former trajectory of the seal through a natural habitat that has more or less one-to-one corollaries with the habitat of the mouth. (Even the food stuck between the teeth gets nostalgic love, for it was “a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft,” a cleft that is will no longer hold anything because it is gone.) The seal’s former “secure kingdom” has been replaced by a “terra incognita,” a “great dark wound.” What has been lost was daily beautiful, and it has been replaced by a place of “dread and disgust” which “forbade one to investigate.” (The abstractions are more than earned — t he progression of rightly juxtaposed images have clearly shown why it is no longer any pleasure for his tongue to live in his mouth.)
In the last sentence of the passage, Nabokov switches metaphors: “And when the plates were thrust in, it was like a poor fossil skull being fitted with the grinning jaws of a perfect stranger.” It can’t be anything but intentional that these are death and decay images, or that the one set of bones he’s going to be showing everyone every day for the rest of his life are not even his own bones. How horrible, this fate, for a man who already has done his best to replace the outward way of being in the world — his Russian walk, his Russian language, his Russian propriety, his Russian style of dress and demeanor — for another which is neither Russian nor American, but which is a recognizably imitative version of the American which he didn’t set out to be until it was forced upon him, like the new teeth.
Finally, notice why the sentences are so beautiful in their sonic qualities. The thing I notice most is the way Nabokov makes use of repeated sounds within sentences, and especially in adjacent sets of words. His tongue is not a seal. It is “a fat sleek seal.” (And note, too, that at this moment, when he gets lyrical, the prose tightens to regularly iambic feet: “His tongue, / a fat / sleek seal . . .”) Along the same lines: “plunging from cave to cove” (a lesser writer would have said cave to cave or cove to cove, but the description keeps the sounds adjacent while varying the music by changing the vowel, and the description is more precisely right in so choosing) — and note, too, the broader sonic context of c-based sounds: “checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft . . .), and note, too, that in addition to that syntactical run beginning and ending with the k sounds in checking and cleft, it also contains the n pairing of “nuzzling that notch” and the s pairing of “shred of sweet seaweed” (which moves the w sound slightly from word to word, again, in a way that pleases the ear.)
Nice close reading, Kyle. I too liked the rhythm and surprising imagery of “his tongue, a fat, sleek seal.”
One question. What do you make of the last bit — “a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate”? It’s curious why he doesn’t just follow through with the seal metaphor here, why he switches back to the original, concrete term “gums.”
Nice close reading, Kyle. I too liked the rhythm and surprising imagery of “his tongue, a fat, sleek seal.”
One question. What do you make of the last bit — “a terra incognita of gums which dread and disgust forbade one to investigate”? It’s curious why he doesn’t just follow through with the seal metaphor here, why he switches back to the original, concrete term “gums.”
I think when he gets there, he’s still with the seal metaphor — the seal has lost that familiar environment he just described, and it’s been replaced with that terra incognita. In case we might think he had abandoned the seal metaphor, he joined the two sentences together with a semi-colon, so we’d know we were still parsing the same thread.
What’s awesome (maybe I should’ve put this in the post) is that in the next paragraph, Pnin decides that the dentures are the best thing ever, and he likes America better for having made them. Then he tries to convince his landlord to get all his teeth pulled out, too. He says: “You will be a reformed man like I.”
This book is better than I remembered it being. Maybe I just yesterday was grown up enough to appreciate it.
i like how he makes it seem like that losing all your teeth could be a kinda cool experience.
Yes, it’s still the same beach, except that the coast has been denuded and the old palimpsest of tongue-memory needs a bit of time, following the shoreline’s violent erasure, to be drawn (as had been the teeth) and, with a bit more time, retraced with calmly delighted familiarity. (“cove to cave” is a nice tidewater touch.)
In what circumstances would one say
?”During the few days that …” – a temporal clause to attach to a finite clause (that is, to a could-be-stood-alone sentence).
But, rather than “for a few days”, as here?
Ah, Pnin. Those squirrels. Nice post.
As careful a writer as Nabokov was, the choice of article (or preposition) would seem intentional in every case. I don’t know why he made the choice. One could make a case for “during” instead of “for” on the grounds that the reader will subconsciously be attuned to the sonically identical ending of “enduring.” As for “a” instead of “the,” perhaps he’s trying to cue us into some kind of understanding of Pnin’s interior life during this period with regard to how he’s perceiving and interpreting the passage of time.
Is that why he made those choices? I can’t say for sure. But I can say that the degree of wordplay and grammatical manipulation is transparently this attentive throughout the novel, so it’s a plausible explanation for the things that are bugging the copy editor inside you.
(By the way, deadgod, I have only one friend who is as good at spotting these things in writing drafts, and he makes his living as a copy editor for a magazine you probably read.)
I agree it doesn’t sound quite right. It doesn’t seem implausible to me that Nabokov’s mastery of idiomatic English should have an odd gap here and there. I also wouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s a manuscript error that was not caught or a transcription error on the part of the publisher. If you want to rationalize it you could attribute the slip to the narrator–isn’t he a fellow immigrant?
Beautiful passage overall, one that I remember well. Is it strange that “Pnin” is my favorite Nabokov?
I feel like more people than you might think find “Pnin” to be their favorite Nabokov. It’s definitely mine.
[…] Kyle Minor schools us on the beauty and subtlety of Nabokov’s sentences. […]
[. . . and to Kyle]
I had wondered, in asking myself the question, whether the temporality that Kyle talks of in the blogicle (“narration in the forward motion of time”) weren’t intended by that temporal mis-preposition, or whether that infelicity weren’t meant to contribute to Pnin’s multiplicitous sense of dislocation, or at least whether some such intention or contribution might be an excuse for Nabokov’s having hung on to a tiny error after it’d been pointed out to him.
The distortion of Pnin’s sensibility (by the operation) is surely explicitly made present in the first two sentences of the paragraph Kyle quotes: Pnin marches to the appointment, jauntily bouncing his cane and guessing what his perceptions will be like on the way home after his de-dentition; on the way home, he trudges, leans on the cane, and looks carefully at nothing. – definitely, a before and an after.
Then, the “After that, during a few days he […].”.
– that the mislex suggests ‘endurance’ and ‘duration’ is good; I hadn’t thought of that.
I do think that, as alan says, Nabokov could’ve made a mistake, and that it could even have remained unnoticed until publication or long after. If it sounds/looks cool, and nobody notices, it’s not a ‘mistake’, descriptively, eh?
–
Typos and errors don’t ‘bug’ me – I’m not the one who ‘fixes’ them!
I think they’re often occasions for specific thought, and the category ‘linguistic slippage and misprision’ indicates the plasticity and (possibly) the capacity for transformation of the mind altogether.
So, let’s play Calvinball with words and things.
One of the slipperinesses of this novel is the question of who the narrator is, and what his relationship to Pnin might be. We have something like free indirect discourse constructing Pnin (access to his interior life coupled with a distinct narrator who sees Pnin from outside Pnin), but before too long that narrator announces himself in first person, and then the ending calls into question how we construct that narrator. But however we construct him, his mastery of English, especially at the level of grammar and other technicalities, exceeds almost everyone else’s, John Updike on down. So I don’t think the use of the article is a function of an immigrant’s inability to get down the right article. I’d argue that it is most likely intentional.
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