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Fwd: Re: Signs and Symbols: again x
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----- Forwarded message from STADLEN@aol.com -----
Date: Tue, 4 Jan 2005 14:41:54 EST
From: STADLEN@aol.com
Reply-To: STADLEN@aol.com
Subject: Re: Signs and Symbols: again x
In a message dated 23/12/2004 03:06:09 GMT Standard Time,
chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:
> Forgive a lengthy response. I think Mr. Stadlen has found the heart of the
> S &S
> story. Often our terminology, when we cannot speak face-to-face, obscures
> our
> meanings, but the tenacity of discussion wins. I hope my extensive quotation
> isn't too tedious, but it helps me respond without losing place.
>
> "the narrator ... merely reporting, accurately, that the parents were
> "confronted with the
> problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was incurably
> deranged
> in his mind"."
>
> Exactly. Sometimes this requires us to follow narratives based on premises
> we
> would generally dislike. I've found reading Dickens today requires me to
> practically throw away everything I know about life. Martin Amis has related
> how his father would read the books of certain authors while continously
> saying
> aloud, "Oh no they didn't," or, "No she did not say that," or "That
> certainly
> was not the case," as he faced down example after example of presumption,
> bad
> faith, or ignorance from an unskilled author. The opposite is the case with
> VN,
> with whom, if we are not seeing eye-to-eye, we generally need to look
> upwards.
>
> As a professional, Mr. Stadlen can see why parents could not or should not
> act
> as have these parents. I empathise with them because, although I know much
> less
> about their ethnicity and religion than many readers who have posted here,
> their
>
> dignity and heroism as aging, financially-dependent people in a nation not
> of
> their birth, speaking a language less flexible and soul-centered as that of
> their culture, their persistance in a tough alien world, command my respect.
>
> The father's -- "To the devil with doctors!" -- is defiant and courageous.
> This
> story takes place in a time in which elderly persons were often overwhelmed
> and
> overpowered by a vast health care machine blandly staffed by doctors whose
> word
> was more or less law. For many poor people, not much has changed. What Mr.
> Stadlen says about the father's exercise of "faith" and being "responsible"
> are
> right on target.
>
> so if one regards "mere possibilities of improvement" as trivial. They may
> appear less dramatic and absolute than a hypothetical other-worldly
> afterlife
> love-in of father, mother, and son. But is it not at least arguable that it
> is
> precisely such a happy-ever-after afterlife solution that trivialises the
> tragedy?
>
> Absolutely. VN would never posit a view of greeting card sentimentality.
> Consider his own share of history: blood-in-the-streets revolution witnessed
> as
> a child, exile, world war, holocaust, exile ... One undoubted victim of the
> 20th
> century who cannot be rehabilitated, resurrected, or reborn is the literary
> "happy ending." This is why my childhood favorite Dickens now reads as
> somehow
> more distant than Francois Villlon, who, in comparison, reads as familiarly
> as
> Eminem.
>
> "... my proposal that the boy himself may be making the third telephone call
> is
> a kind
> of deus ex machina appeal to miracles, whereas Dolinin's afterlife
> hypothesis
> is no more than sound common sense."
>
> I will have to look back in my undeleted mail for Dolinin's hypothesis, it
> sounds intriguing. My tendency is to hew firmly to the theory that readers
> must
> strictly confine their analysis to the material provided. In this forum,
> others
> have uncovered enormously more "material" in Nabokov's work than I was able
> to
> initially perceive. VN is an author of such technique and dimension of mind
> that, like an immensely gifted illusionist, he can manipulate fictional
> reality
> to produce more active stimula, more adeptly, than many excellent minds can
> process. Hence his teasing: "Oh, careless reader!"
>
> My guess regarding the caller is one of the possibilities Stadlen mentions,
> that
> of the girl who called twice before. It would be in keeping with the banal
> evils
> this family has faced: faltering memory (the wife's mistakenly leaving the
> man
> without the house key) the unpredictability of public transportation, a
> dependency on assistance from another family member -- a situation that,
> regardless of how generous, uncritical, or unquestioning the "prince" may or
> may not be, is not as desirable as being in control of finances sufficient
> to
> provide some buffer against the demands of life.
>
> So, I see a stranger, not too bright or attentive but not malicious, simply
> making the same annoying mistake time after time. Prosaic and
> inconsequential,
> but I don't think VN needs us to believe that the forces arrayed against our
> protagonists are larger than life. Simple dimwittedness, as relentless as a
> buzzing fly, can sap our energy and deflate our hope. The last straw can be
> merely the incensing sounds of someone nearby in a restaurant clearing their
> sinuses or endlessly recapitulating their golf game.
>
> "And even if the doctors were right ... why would that preclude
> "possibilities
> of improvement", such as
> ... deciding he would like to come home again and his parents'deciding they
> would like him home, even if advised against this by the doctors?"
>
> True, and part of the uncaring professional ignorance that enchains the
> family.
> I must apologize for discussing my unfortunate friend in an earlier post.
> The
> personal anecdote gambit in literary discussion may be considered
> trivializing,
> and certainly is a way of swinging the discussion onto tricky ground. In
> addition, I wouldn't want that anecdote to be taken as my "last word" on the
> resources of medicine. I inadvertantly stacked the deck when I neglected to
> mention that my friend, several weeks earlier, had argued his primary
> physician
> into letting him stop the lithium treatment that had stabilized him for at
> least
> eight or nine months. Valium, too, is I think contraindicated for
> schizophrenics, and may have helped triggered the disaster. In any event, an
> unusual case with little to offer this context. Today, I would not deem any
> psychiatric condition "incurable." And living with one's family whenever
> possible is a better alternative.
>
> Is it not believable that Vladimir Nabokov would enjoy setting this "chess
> problem" in which readers, as it were, lose their "life current" between the
> "two stations"
>
> The phrase "life current" is a brilliant example of the gifts VN lays out
> for
> the reader -- and which I missed entirely.
>
> "... supremely intelligent human agency of Nabokov in preparing this trap
> for
> readers to fall into and then learn from?"
>
> More than almost any other author, VN prepared his stories and novels with a
> complete sense of what one might call the "chemical properties" of each
> character. It is doubly unusual for a writer who was so alert to the
> "scientific" aspect of creating a story, so skilled at using time and the
> ingredients of humanity and the world, to be simultaneously so
> extraordinarily
> poetic. His descriptions of the weather in S&S have been aptly quoted in
> this
> forum. I was entranced by S &S from the moment the narrator described how
> the
> wife "waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his arm. He
> kept clearing his throat in a special resonant way he had when he was
> upset."
> And then, at the bus shelter, "a tiny half-dead unfledged bird was
> helplessly
> twitching in a puddle."
>
> The patient wife, the man's resonant clearing of his throat, a man of
> dignity,
> hurt, exerting control over his pain, and then the image that encapsulates
> the
> story, the bird. These words, these moments convey all the strength, and all
> the fragility of a world.
I should like to thank Andrew Brown for his kind and considered response to
what I wrote.
May I add: Whoever makes the third telephone call, the mere fact that the
mother has pointed out the presumed error the girl is making focusses our
attention (thanks to Alexander Dolinin) on the 6 that is being dialled, whether
by
one or two people, three times in succession. Three sixes could be understood
either "Christianly" as 666 (i.e. Death) or "Jewishly" (by Gematria) as 6+6+6 =
18 = Chaim = Life (Hebrew). The sixes are thus completely ambiguous. One can
deduce precisely nothing from them.
Surely both these symbolisms are beside the point, except the point that they
and the other beside-the-point signs and symbols are, ultimately at least,
beside the point.
My own point was simply that, while of course we don't know who was "really"
making the third call, there is, corresponding to the boy's presumed
"referential mania" of attributing human agency to non-human events and
referring them
to himself, a kind of reciprocal "NON-referential mania" into which we readers
can be seduced by the story, whereby we overlook even the possibility that a
post-midnight telephone call to his parents might originate from the boy
himself as human agent. I wondered if this might have been one of VN's points,
too.
Anthony Stadlen
----- End forwarded message -----