In "The art of conspiracy: punning and paranoid response inNabokov's 'Pnin.' " we read: "Recent discussions of social agency have focused renewed attention on the constitution of self and social control, inciting theorists to examine more closely the nature of perception and interpretation as those processes relate to the constructing mediation between subjects and communities. Since the relative success or failure of such mediation hinges upon the nature of interpretation as a complex interplay of control, resistance, and acceptance, new insight into questions of identity construction and language may be gained by examining the psychoanalytic category of paranoia, which deals with problems of boundary mediation [   ] Roustang humorously asks if psychoanalysis and criticism are not perhaps both basically paranoid in their insistence on interpretation of every word. "Is psychoanalysis a successful paranoid," he asks, "because it claims to have the last word in every discussion, the decisive explanation in every interpretation, the universal key to opening and closing every problem?"...Roustang is not rejecting psychoanalysis but cautioning against its moments of rigidification. By likening it to paranoia, he directs attention to the problems ofpopularized readings that bifurcate the text much as the paranoid too radically splits his/her sense of self and world...In Vladimir Nabokov's novels, we find both the paranoid character and a destabilizing humor that disrupts and mocks the urge to interpret too stringently. Nabokov might be viewed as an early postmodern author working with a tightly closed system that resists the expansive circuitry of contemporary postmodern "paranoids" like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. Nabokov's novels present a series of paranoid characters struggling to escape not only plot-worthy tensions but also the authorial conspiracy encoded within the process of representation [   ]... Pnin, in which Nabokov draws out the ironic implications of creating a character who resists any external evaluation - and hence narration - of his/her behavior. To tell a story about a character who, within that story, is resentful of another character who is telling stories about him or her is to realize the general potential of paranoia within the narrative structure, wherein one character is totally in control of the representation of another. Nabokov thus takes paranoid constructs and turns them into an admixture of metafictional humor and a more serious reflection on the nature of representation...Nabokov does...enter the fictional world he creates, violating the distinction between reality and fiction so crucial to sanity. It is as if the characters begin to suspect his presence, and so he becomes a large narratological nightmare walking in their other world[   ].As David Richter has noted, in Pnin "the more attentive the reader is, the more the narrative threatens to dissolve into a 'dreadful invention' on the part of the dramatized narrator" .... In a sense, then, Pnin seems to become aware of the author's plan to eliminate him and eludes narrative control before Nabokov can execute his scheme...Beyond the level of plot, however, one can recover the metafictional implications of Pnin's resistance to the narrator - as an uneasiness with the control representations have over one's "character."... read on a metafictional level...they humorously point up the lethal relationship between subjectivity and representation...[   ] David Cowart has argued...that both Pnin and the narrator are "aspects or projections of the mind responsible for the book. Both, in fact, are parody Nabokov's: one the maladroit exile and perpetual clown, the other the suave ladies' man and successful academic" ... Still, if Nabokov has an identificatory relation to Pnin, it works with an aggressive and ironic edge, suggesting that Nabokov might well have been engaged in "killing off" some potential aspect of himself through parody....The laughter that answers parody remarks and potentially accepts this slippage away from control, and Nabokov plays on such a release by introducing small, comical caricatures of chance into the novel.[   ] Leona Toker has traced the heteroglossic elements in Pnin, whereby characters continually re-appropriate the words of other characters so that language is always being uprooted from its original intention.... On a more localized level, puns function like parapraxes, like a locus of split intentions wherein one half of the meaning is often repressed, creating a problem for the interpretation of texts that is echoed in Nabokov's creation of characters struggling with this split subjectivity....Recall the euphemism for Pnin's heart attacks - the doctors say he suffers from no physical ailment but a "shadow behind the heart"...Nabokov critics may be re-enacting the split in the way they decide between considerations of Nabokov's humor and, more recently, discussions of his more personal values that are worked through his writing. Boyd's Nabokov helps the reader "detect something artful lurking at the heart of life, inviting us deeper into the world, allowing us to penetrate further into the mystery of creation, perhaps even promising us a new relation to everything we know" ...Some critics, in their reception of this new biography, push aside Alfred Appel's long-standing emphasis on Nabokov's metafictive play and irony, depicting instead a Nabokov whose art is a more consistently serious search for spiritual truths. .. Such interpretations enact not only one extreme reading that suppresses the humor ofNabokov's texts...While some aspects may well resonate with portions of Nabokov's work, I would argue that an inclusion of his more humorous deflections of totalization brings forward an important contribution that Nabokov makes to contemporary discussions postmodern perspective. Lacan emphasizes that there can be no process of being that does not include an aspect of loss, alienation and falling away from control...Certainly for Nabokov, parody mediates subjective boundaries that the paranoiac struggles to rigidify, directing attention simultaneously toward the scenarios of release and control as they unfold within the interpretive project." [Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com]