Subject
RES: [NABOKV-L] QUERY: Signs and Symbols
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Date
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Eric Hyman: "It occurred to me that in "Signs and Symbols" the mysterious
phone calls that baffle the old couple and many readers might be some kind
of communication, especially the last four words in the story, from their
newly dead son, sort of like the last paragraph of "The Vane Sisters." Has
this occurred to anyone else?"
Jansy Mello: An instigating query. There's one obstacle in relation to the
interpretation of the last four words in S&S (1948) as compared to the last
paragraph of "The Vane Sisters"(1951). According to wiki "Nabokov himself
described this device as something that 'can only be tried once in a
thousand years of fiction' " while referring to "The Vane Sisters" and the
same assertion is made again in a letter, dated April 1959 (as underlined
below): "The coded message is: Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me, Sybil."*
.."The implication is that the ghost of Cynthia, who had been such a good
painter of frost and thaw.supplied the brilliant icicles which the narrator
saw on the first page of the story**, just before he learned that Cynthia
was dead. On the same Sunday, a little later, he noticed the strange ruddy
umbra cast upon the snow by a parking meter; this came from dead Sybil.***/
Unless the acrostic is as accidental as ATOM in Shakespeare's sonnet.,
Cynthia has proved the correctness of her theory (.) My difficulty was to
smuggle in the acrostic without the narrator's being aware that it was
there, inspired to him by the phantoms. Nothing of this kind has ever been
attempted by the author."# (SLHarvest HBJ book,1989,p.286. This might
indicate that V.Nabokov hadn't attempted to use these same resources before
writing "The Vane Sisters".
The narrator in "The Vane Sisters" confessed that: "I was appealing to
flesh, and the corruption of flesh, to refute and defeat the possible
persistence of discarnate life. Alas, these conjurations only enhanced my
fear of Cynthia's phantom." The old lady in S&S seems to be equally afraid
of something (news about her son's death or of any attempt of his to reach
her after his demise?)
The mysterious chapter 3 reads: " The telephone rang. It was an unusual
hour for their telephone to ring. Having more English than he did, it was
she who attended to calls/ "Can I speak to Charlie," said a girl's dull
little voice./ "What number you want? No. That is not the right number."[ ]
"It frightened me," she said[ ] The telephone rang a second time. The same
toneless anxious young voice asked for Charlie./ "You have the incorrect
number. I will tell you what you are doing: you are turning the letter O
instead of the zero."/ They sat down to their unexpected festive midnight
tea. The birthday present stood on the table[ ] While she poured him
another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reexamined with pleasure
the luminous yellow, green, red little jars. His clumsy moist lips spelled
out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to
crab apple, when the telephone rang again."##
If there's any message from a dead boy it must refer to those ten little
jelly jars (the colors mentioned indicate jumbled traffic lights). If we get
inspiration from the initial clues in "The Vane Sisters" we'd have to pay
attention to specific items about manifestations from the otherworld coming
in already at the beginning (but, contrary to the sisters the "fledgling"
boy wasn't dead yet.) The message could also have been conveyed by the old
lady's observation about dialing O instead of 0 (Zero). There's been a rich
discussion about "Charlie" ( standing for the letter C) and city
telephone-codes in the VN-L.
Nevertheless, if we abandon the link to "The Vane Sisters", we have an
apparently unexplored lead when we admit that the mad youngster was not
always hallucinating (like Aqua, in "Ada", in relation to "Terra") but being
contacted by unknown spirits (would they be related to his parents's friends
who suffered death at the hands of the Nazi?)
Jansy Mello
..............................
#- One may read "Symbols and Signs" here:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1948/05/15/1948_05_15_031_TNY_CARDS_0002141
35?currentPage=all
* - "She, a painter of glass-bright minutiae-and now so vague! I lay in bed,
thinking my dream over. I set myself to reread my dream-backward,
diagonally, up, down-trying hard to unravel something Cynthia-like in it,
something strange and suggestive that must be there.// I could isolate,
consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding
nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies-every
recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed
yellowly blurred, illusive, lost."
**- "The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part
jewel, part mud. I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles
drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their
pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows
of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not.I did not
chance to be watching the right icicle when the right drop fell. this
brought me to Kelly Road, and right to the house where D. used to live. I
was rewarded at last, upon choosing one, by the sight of what might be
described as the dot of an exclamation mark leaving its ordinary position to
glide down very fast-a jot faster than the thaw-drop it raced. This twinned
twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying.I walked on in a state
of raw awareness ."
*** - "Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. The
lean ghost, the elongated umbra cast by a parking meter upon some damp snow,
had a strange ruddy tinge; this I made out to be due to the tawny red light
of the restaurant sign above the sidewalk; and it was then-as I loitered
there.it was then that a car crunched to a standstill near me and D. got out
of it with an exclamation of feigned pleasure."
## - Opening paragraph related to the jelly jars: "For the fourth time in as
many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to
bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.. After eliminating
a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the
gadget line for instance was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent
trifle: a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars."
---
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phone calls that baffle the old couple and many readers might be some kind
of communication, especially the last four words in the story, from their
newly dead son, sort of like the last paragraph of "The Vane Sisters." Has
this occurred to anyone else?"
Jansy Mello: An instigating query. There's one obstacle in relation to the
interpretation of the last four words in S&S (1948) as compared to the last
paragraph of "The Vane Sisters"(1951). According to wiki "Nabokov himself
described this device as something that 'can only be tried once in a
thousand years of fiction' " while referring to "The Vane Sisters" and the
same assertion is made again in a letter, dated April 1959 (as underlined
below): "The coded message is: Icicles by Cynthia. Meter from me, Sybil."*
.."The implication is that the ghost of Cynthia, who had been such a good
painter of frost and thaw.supplied the brilliant icicles which the narrator
saw on the first page of the story**, just before he learned that Cynthia
was dead. On the same Sunday, a little later, he noticed the strange ruddy
umbra cast upon the snow by a parking meter; this came from dead Sybil.***/
Unless the acrostic is as accidental as ATOM in Shakespeare's sonnet.,
Cynthia has proved the correctness of her theory (.) My difficulty was to
smuggle in the acrostic without the narrator's being aware that it was
there, inspired to him by the phantoms. Nothing of this kind has ever been
attempted by the author."# (SLHarvest HBJ book,1989,p.286. This might
indicate that V.Nabokov hadn't attempted to use these same resources before
writing "The Vane Sisters".
The narrator in "The Vane Sisters" confessed that: "I was appealing to
flesh, and the corruption of flesh, to refute and defeat the possible
persistence of discarnate life. Alas, these conjurations only enhanced my
fear of Cynthia's phantom." The old lady in S&S seems to be equally afraid
of something (news about her son's death or of any attempt of his to reach
her after his demise?)
The mysterious chapter 3 reads: " The telephone rang. It was an unusual
hour for their telephone to ring. Having more English than he did, it was
she who attended to calls/ "Can I speak to Charlie," said a girl's dull
little voice./ "What number you want? No. That is not the right number."[ ]
"It frightened me," she said[ ] The telephone rang a second time. The same
toneless anxious young voice asked for Charlie./ "You have the incorrect
number. I will tell you what you are doing: you are turning the letter O
instead of the zero."/ They sat down to their unexpected festive midnight
tea. The birthday present stood on the table[ ] While she poured him
another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reexamined with pleasure
the luminous yellow, green, red little jars. His clumsy moist lips spelled
out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to
crab apple, when the telephone rang again."##
If there's any message from a dead boy it must refer to those ten little
jelly jars (the colors mentioned indicate jumbled traffic lights). If we get
inspiration from the initial clues in "The Vane Sisters" we'd have to pay
attention to specific items about manifestations from the otherworld coming
in already at the beginning (but, contrary to the sisters the "fledgling"
boy wasn't dead yet.) The message could also have been conveyed by the old
lady's observation about dialing O instead of 0 (Zero). There's been a rich
discussion about "Charlie" ( standing for the letter C) and city
telephone-codes in the VN-L.
Nevertheless, if we abandon the link to "The Vane Sisters", we have an
apparently unexplored lead when we admit that the mad youngster was not
always hallucinating (like Aqua, in "Ada", in relation to "Terra") but being
contacted by unknown spirits (would they be related to his parents's friends
who suffered death at the hands of the Nazi?)
Jansy Mello
..............................
#- One may read "Symbols and Signs" here:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1948/05/15/1948_05_15_031_TNY_CARDS_0002141
35?currentPage=all
* - "She, a painter of glass-bright minutiae-and now so vague! I lay in bed,
thinking my dream over. I set myself to reread my dream-backward,
diagonally, up, down-trying hard to unravel something Cynthia-like in it,
something strange and suggestive that must be there.// I could isolate,
consciously, little. Everything seemed blurred, yellow-clouded, yielding
nothing tangible. Her inept acrostics, maudlin evasions, theopathies-every
recollection formed ripples of mysterious meaning. Everything seemed
yellowly blurred, illusive, lost."
**- "The day, a compunctious Sunday after a week of blizzards, had been part
jewel, part mud. I had stopped to watch a family of brilliant icicles
drip-dripping from the eaves of a frame house. So clear-cut were their
pointed shadows on the white boards behind them that I was sure the shadows
of the falling drops should be visible too. But they were not.I did not
chance to be watching the right icicle when the right drop fell. this
brought me to Kelly Road, and right to the house where D. used to live. I
was rewarded at last, upon choosing one, by the sight of what might be
described as the dot of an exclamation mark leaving its ordinary position to
glide down very fast-a jot faster than the thaw-drop it raced. This twinned
twinkle was delightful but not completely satisfying.I walked on in a state
of raw awareness ."
*** - "Night had fallen without sound or ceremony when I came out again. The
lean ghost, the elongated umbra cast by a parking meter upon some damp snow,
had a strange ruddy tinge; this I made out to be due to the tawny red light
of the restaurant sign above the sidewalk; and it was then-as I loitered
there.it was then that a car crunched to a standstill near me and D. got out
of it with an exclamation of feigned pleasure."
## - Opening paragraph related to the jelly jars: "For the fourth time in as
many years they were confronted with the problem of what birthday present to
bring a young man who was incurably deranged in his mind.. After eliminating
a number of articles that might offend him or frighten him (anything in the
gadget line for instance was taboo), his parents chose a dainty and innocent
trifle: a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars."
---
Este email está limpo de vírus e malwares porque a proteção do avast! Antivírus está ativa.
http://www.avast.com
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
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/