Excerpt from S.Belletto's "No Accident, Comrade: Chance and
Design..." related to coincidences in Nabokov, as an additional contribution to
C.Kunin's comment ("There is a skylark in Pnin -
the importance of which, if any, escapes me"), once we regard "the skylark" as part of the farsical misunderstandings
and "random likenesses" in
Pnin.
" Nabokov uses chance to question the logic of
such homophobic constructions of sexuality descended from Freud; by focusing
attention on how coincidence operates in Pale Fire, we wee that the chance
present in the novels shifting registers is controlled by both the driving
narrative of Kinbote's Zembla tale and by those containement norms it apparently
reflects. There is a moment in Pnin ...about another professor who appears at
Wordsmith College - when the narrator remarks that a gas station attendant
looks markedly like one of Pnin's colleague, "one of those
random likenesses as pointless as a bad pun."[ ] This pronouncement
bears a special significance to Pale Fire because it links the potential for
real-life coincidences to textual or linguistic coincidences. For Nabokov,
in fact, it seems that part of a pun's work is to suggest, even on the minute
phonemic leve, that in a fictional world all ostensibly chance moments are
actually examples of what I have called narrative chance." S.Belletto
mentions Nabokov's answer to Alfred Appel in 1967 at this
point:
AA: "[s]some critics may find the use of
concidence in a novel arch or contrived."
Nabokov: "But in 'real' life they do happen...Very
often you meet with some person or some event in 'real' life that would sound
pat in a story. It is not the coincidence in the story that bothers us so
much as the coincidence of coincidences in several stories by different writers,
as, for instance, the recurrent eavesdropping device in nineteenth-century
Russian fiction" [ ]. and S.Bellotto adds: "The response reminds us once
again that absolute chance must become narrative chance when it is interpreted
as meaningful."..(p.67-68)