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SIGNS: Some background re: earlier discussions on N-L
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I am delighted that my Inner Circle Seminar on "Signs and Symbols" on 11
May in London is being honoured in this way.
Can I suggest that readers who want to link to the discussion that has
already taken place turn to the archives of NABOKV-L for December 2004?
I praised Alexander Dolinin's essay "The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's
'Signs and Symbols'" ( http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dolinin2.htm
) as "an important breakthough". But I did raise the question of whether
Nabokov intended us to be aware that the mother was buying fish, and
later making tea (and perhaps cooking the fish) after dark, when it was
already the Jewish Sabbath, when observant Jews would do none of these
things. Dolinin and others, including Dmitri Nabokov, responded.
Meanwhile Alexander Drescher had privately written to me, pointing out
that Good Friday and Erev Pesach (the first Seder evening of Passover)
coincided in 1947; he said he was writing something on "Signs and
Symbols". I thought he must have some evidence for this, and wrote
privately to him that the number of paragraphs in the three parts of
story (7,4, 19) could be taken to indicate the year and the very open
"For the fourth time in as many years" the date (in English or
American!) 4/4 (4 April or April 4) of Good Friday/Passover 1947. I made
these suggestions speculatively, half-frivolously. I believe I added
that the underground train's "losing its life-current" for a quarter of
an hour "between two stations" might have resonances with stations of
the Cross, and descent into hell for three days (the minute hand moving
three numbers on the clock dial). Also I suggested a link with Eliot's
"East Coker" and the underground train, in the tube, [that] "stops too
long between stations": "East Coker" contains the line "Still, in spite
of that, we call this Friday good." To my amazement, when Sandy
published his article (
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dreschersigns.htm ), he did not
have any evidence other than the bizarre logic that I had suggested for
the historical date of the events in the story. It had been an inspired
hunch. He did, however, give fascinating evidence to support my
hypothesis, namely, that in the story's first publication, in The New
Yorker, it was edited to have only 18 paragraphs in the third part, and
Nabokov's annoyance at this appears to have resonances in "Pnin".
Sandy's private email to me also contained a hint that he and I were
thinking along similar lines, in that we were both wondering why no
commentator considered the possibility that the third telephone call
might be from the son himself.
Then someone raised the question on NABOKV-L:
<< Returning back to Signs and Symbols, can anyone explain the pattern
of names: Mrs. Sol (the next door neighbor?) and Dr. Solov (family’s
doctor) surrounding, in the story line, Soloveichik (the one whom
daughter of Rebecca Borisovna married in Minsk)? Should we believe to
scientific monthly article (authored by Dr. Brink) and to the parents
that real people are excluded from the ‘referential mania’ conspiracy? I
could almost believe it if not for this chain of names flagging
something in the story. >>
To which I responded:
<< Why should we believe even the first sentence of this story? What
does it mean for someone to be ‘incurably deranged in his mind’? I ask
this in all seriousness as a psychotherapist, so-called. Someone like
Nabokov who writes about, and even impersonates, as narrator, what we
may loosely, or not so loosely, call madmen, has to decide, or at least
decide not to decide, whether these persons are responsible agents
subject to the moral law, or some kind of subhuman whose actions are
not, in a true sense, actions at all, but merely the outcome of some
process gone wrong in the human-looking entity that still bears a human
name. Nabokov meets this challenge magnificently, by making it crystal
clear, both within his fiction (for example, in Despair, Lolita and Pale
Fire) and outside it (foStrong Opinions), that he sees his madmen as moral agents. It is true
that, at times, Nabokov seems less certain of this position, as when he
says that Raskolnikov should be medically examined. But Hermann, Humbert
and Kinbote would be of no interest if they were mere automatons,
lacking human autonomy and responsibility.
So who is this narrator who tells us at the outset that the son in
‘Signs and Symbols’ is ‘incurably deranged’? I would not believe this
if told it by a psychiatrist or psychotherapist about a real person. Why
should I believe it here?
Similarly with the young man’s allegedly being ‘inaccessible to normal
minds’. If this were true, how could the self-styled ‘normal minds’
know, for instance, that the ‘inaccessible’ one has ‘no desires’?
Indeed, how could the learned Dr Brink write his paper about him? [...]
The untrustworthiness of this narrator is apparent from the
contradictory sentences: ‘He had no desires’, and ‘What he really wanted
to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape’.
Who is making these contradictory attributions? The first appears to be
the narrator’s endorsement of an attribution by both parents. The second
appears to be the narrator’s endorsement of an attribution by the
mother, or perhaps the endorsement of the mother’s endorsement of an
attribution by the doctor.
Such is the spell of this mere unsubstantiated assertion about the young
man’s inaccessibility and incurablity that, as far as I know, nobody has
suggested a simple possible explanation of the third telephone call. It
appears to be easier for people to envisage the young man’s posthumously
affecting somebody else’s telephone call than to think that he might
simply make one himself, while still alive.
These parents, who supposedly know that their son has no desires
although he is inaccessible to their normal minds, seem curiously
uncurious about him. They do not even ask the nurse how he had tried to
kill himself. The mother merely reflects on what the doctor had told her
about the last attempt.
What makes readers so certain that the young man could not have been
uncertain in his ‘suicide attempts’? If he is such a genius, surely his
second attempt should have succeeded, after the bad luck of a patient
stopping his last attempt?
Why is it so clear that the young man does not want to come home? Why
should we accept the (unattributed) assertion that he wants to ‘escape’
from the ‘world’ rather than from incarceration in a ‘sanatorium’?
Is it not at least possible that he can only get unobserved access to a
telephone after midnight, or that he has escaped from the ‘sanatorium’,
or that he has ‘telepathically’ or intuitively or calculatingly realised
it may have started to dawn on his parents (after four years, and after
several suicidal gestures by himself) that he might actually be better
off with them?
I know there are other dimensions and depths to this story, but let us
as a precondition ‘get real’ about what goes on in the families of
people who are alleged to be ‘inaccessible’ and ‘incurably deranged’ in
their minds. [...] >>
My sentence "It appears to be easier for people to envisage the young
man’s posthumously affecting somebody else’s telephone call than to
think that he might simply make one himself, while still alive," was, of
course, a reference to Dolinin's essay.
This started an interesting discussion on NABOKV-L between Andrew Brown
and others, and myself. Then Sandy Drescher published his essay, but I
have seen little response to it.
Anthony Stadlen
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
May in London is being honoured in this way.
Can I suggest that readers who want to link to the discussion that has
already taken place turn to the archives of NABOKV-L for December 2004?
I praised Alexander Dolinin's essay "The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's
'Signs and Symbols'" ( http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dolinin2.htm
) as "an important breakthough". But I did raise the question of whether
Nabokov intended us to be aware that the mother was buying fish, and
later making tea (and perhaps cooking the fish) after dark, when it was
already the Jewish Sabbath, when observant Jews would do none of these
things. Dolinin and others, including Dmitri Nabokov, responded.
Meanwhile Alexander Drescher had privately written to me, pointing out
that Good Friday and Erev Pesach (the first Seder evening of Passover)
coincided in 1947; he said he was writing something on "Signs and
Symbols". I thought he must have some evidence for this, and wrote
privately to him that the number of paragraphs in the three parts of
story (7,4, 19) could be taken to indicate the year and the very open
"For the fourth time in as many years" the date (in English or
American!) 4/4 (4 April or April 4) of Good Friday/Passover 1947. I made
these suggestions speculatively, half-frivolously. I believe I added
that the underground train's "losing its life-current" for a quarter of
an hour "between two stations" might have resonances with stations of
the Cross, and descent into hell for three days (the minute hand moving
three numbers on the clock dial). Also I suggested a link with Eliot's
"East Coker" and the underground train, in the tube, [that] "stops too
long between stations": "East Coker" contains the line "Still, in spite
of that, we call this Friday good." To my amazement, when Sandy
published his article (
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dreschersigns.htm ), he did not
have any evidence other than the bizarre logic that I had suggested for
the historical date of the events in the story. It had been an inspired
hunch. He did, however, give fascinating evidence to support my
hypothesis, namely, that in the story's first publication, in The New
Yorker, it was edited to have only 18 paragraphs in the third part, and
Nabokov's annoyance at this appears to have resonances in "Pnin".
Sandy's private email to me also contained a hint that he and I were
thinking along similar lines, in that we were both wondering why no
commentator considered the possibility that the third telephone call
might be from the son himself.
Then someone raised the question on NABOKV-L:
<< Returning back to Signs and Symbols, can anyone explain the pattern
of names: Mrs. Sol (the next door neighbor?) and Dr. Solov (family’s
doctor) surrounding, in the story line, Soloveichik (the one whom
daughter of Rebecca Borisovna married in Minsk)? Should we believe to
scientific monthly article (authored by Dr. Brink) and to the parents
that real people are excluded from the ‘referential mania’ conspiracy? I
could almost believe it if not for this chain of names flagging
something in the story. >>
To which I responded:
<< Why should we believe even the first sentence of this story? What
does it mean for someone to be ‘incurably deranged in his mind’? I ask
this in all seriousness as a psychotherapist, so-called. Someone like
Nabokov who writes about, and even impersonates, as narrator, what we
may loosely, or not so loosely, call madmen, has to decide, or at least
decide not to decide, whether these persons are responsible agents
subject to the moral law, or some kind of subhuman whose actions are
not, in a true sense, actions at all, but merely the outcome of some
process gone wrong in the human-looking entity that still bears a human
name. Nabokov meets this challenge magnificently, by making it crystal
clear, both within his fiction (for example, in Despair, Lolita and Pale
Fire) and outside it (foStrong Opinions), that he sees his madmen as moral agents. It is true
that, at times, Nabokov seems less certain of this position, as when he
says that Raskolnikov should be medically examined. But Hermann, Humbert
and Kinbote would be of no interest if they were mere automatons,
lacking human autonomy and responsibility.
So who is this narrator who tells us at the outset that the son in
‘Signs and Symbols’ is ‘incurably deranged’? I would not believe this
if told it by a psychiatrist or psychotherapist about a real person. Why
should I believe it here?
Similarly with the young man’s allegedly being ‘inaccessible to normal
minds’. If this were true, how could the self-styled ‘normal minds’
know, for instance, that the ‘inaccessible’ one has ‘no desires’?
Indeed, how could the learned Dr Brink write his paper about him? [...]
The untrustworthiness of this narrator is apparent from the
contradictory sentences: ‘He had no desires’, and ‘What he really wanted
to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape’.
Who is making these contradictory attributions? The first appears to be
the narrator’s endorsement of an attribution by both parents. The second
appears to be the narrator’s endorsement of an attribution by the
mother, or perhaps the endorsement of the mother’s endorsement of an
attribution by the doctor.
Such is the spell of this mere unsubstantiated assertion about the young
man’s inaccessibility and incurablity that, as far as I know, nobody has
suggested a simple possible explanation of the third telephone call. It
appears to be easier for people to envisage the young man’s posthumously
affecting somebody else’s telephone call than to think that he might
simply make one himself, while still alive.
These parents, who supposedly know that their son has no desires
although he is inaccessible to their normal minds, seem curiously
uncurious about him. They do not even ask the nurse how he had tried to
kill himself. The mother merely reflects on what the doctor had told her
about the last attempt.
What makes readers so certain that the young man could not have been
uncertain in his ‘suicide attempts’? If he is such a genius, surely his
second attempt should have succeeded, after the bad luck of a patient
stopping his last attempt?
Why is it so clear that the young man does not want to come home? Why
should we accept the (unattributed) assertion that he wants to ‘escape’
from the ‘world’ rather than from incarceration in a ‘sanatorium’?
Is it not at least possible that he can only get unobserved access to a
telephone after midnight, or that he has escaped from the ‘sanatorium’,
or that he has ‘telepathically’ or intuitively or calculatingly realised
it may have started to dawn on his parents (after four years, and after
several suicidal gestures by himself) that he might actually be better
off with them?
I know there are other dimensions and depths to this story, but let us
as a precondition ‘get real’ about what goes on in the families of
people who are alleged to be ‘inaccessible’ and ‘incurably deranged’ in
their minds. [...] >>
My sentence "It appears to be easier for people to envisage the young
man’s posthumously affecting somebody else’s telephone call than to
think that he might simply make one himself, while still alive," was, of
course, a reference to Dolinin's essay.
This started an interesting discussion on NABOKV-L between Andrew Brown
and others, and myself. Then Sandy Drescher published his essay, but I
have seen little response to it.
Anthony Stadlen
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm