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[NABOKOV-L] [SIGNS AND SYMBOLS]
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A.Stadlen quoted: "Across the narrow yard where the rain tinkled in the dark against some battered ash cans, windows were blandly alight and in one of the a black-trousered man with his bare elbows raised could be seen lying supine on an untidy bed." He then asked: Could he have his hands clasped below his resting head? But then why not say so?
JM: References to bare elbows are quite common in VN's novels. I've found them associated to a movement, such as "clasping shut a necklace", three times and I always associated this position to "wings". It is mentioned in KQK and in ADA, but I chose a particular sentence from Bend Sinister to bring it up as an example: ...and similarly the priest had failed to perceive the futility of his metaphysical promise in relation to those favoured ones (men of bizarre genius, big game hunters, chess players, prodigiously robust and versatile lovers, the radiant woman taking her necklace off after the ball) for whom this world was a paradise in itself and who would be always one point up no matter what happened to everyone in the melting pot of eternity.
Perhaps here VN might have also implied "wings" and called our attention to an unprotected window in the "living room". In this story it seems that the young man who suffers from "referential mania" certainly didn't fit in the category of those for whom "this world was a paradise"
Sergei Soloviev wrote:..." I don't understand why do you think that the parent who would look after the son would sleep with him in the same bed? [...] Of course watch him all the night and remain awake may be too difficult, this explains the rotation.[...} they desperately love him and want him to have a better place to sleep or because in the other room there is much more dangerous objects (she is cooking in the room with the couch?).
JM : You are right, Sergei, the parents might have taken shifts watching him at night because they'd be sitting on a chair placed by the bed. The room where cooking might take place (or, at least, which had been used when boiling water) also sports a dangerous window for anyone intent on "flying out".And yet, in my opinion, these precautions are preposterously planned, also because the young man ( at least as a child) was an insomniac.
What struck me most was the lack of space for their son in their cramped flat: it is suggestive of a lack of enough emotional space, although not of any lack of good-will on the part of the old couple.
Fran Assa: I think it is a mistake to dismiss symbolic references to Freud's thought in this story. VN of course was dismissive of Freud, but he mentioned him all the time! He obviously was not so ignorant as to dismiss something he had not read. [...] In one of my admittedly overly long messages,references to the stations of the cross was edited out
JM: Fran, perhaps you only checked the entry of my personal selection of those items I plan to discuss in the List, instead of the original message you sent and which has been distributed by the editors. Would Nabokov seriously employ "symbolic references to Freud"?
VN was quite vocal against the use of "Freudian symbolism" and I couldn't agree more with him.
The article bt Jacqueline Hamrit: The Silence of Madness in "Signs and Symbols" by Vladimir Nabokov (available thru google) contains a summary and various comments about literature and madness, examined from a philosophic point-of-view.
Excerpts of what J.Hamrit wrote:
"Madness has always fascinated writers and has a privileged relationship with literature, being sometimes more than a mere metaphor and rather corresponding to a thematic network underlying a text. It has even been compared to the reading and/or writing activity of literature. I intend in this paper, to make a comparison between madness and literature, to wonder about the way they can be linked and/or separated, through the analysis of a short story by Vladimir Nabokov entitled "Signs and Symbols" which was written in 1948 [...] Being himself subjected to auditory and visual hallucinations, Nabokov staged many characters tempted by madness. Thus, the protagonist Luzhin who is a chessplayer in The Luzhin Defense is the prey of a monomaniac passion which ends in a suicide. Nabokov has also dealt with sexual deviations such as paedophilia in Lolita in which the protagonist Humbert Humbert is cured in psychiatric hospitals. And the main character, Krug, in Bend Sinister, becomes mad at the end of the book when he learns about the death of his son[...] Nabokov declared during a lecture at Stanford University in 1941:"Genius is the greatest sanity of the spirit."[Vladimir Nabokov, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," Lectures on Literature 1980 (London: Picador, 1983) 377]...In a letter dated March 17, 1951 and addressed to the New Yorker editor Katharine A. White, Nabokov alluded to "Signs and Symbols" by mentioning the story of an old Jewish couple and their sick boy, saying: "Most of the stories I am contemplating [. . .] will be composed on these lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one." The short story narrates a day in the life of an old couple of Russian Jewish immigrants who, being themselves deprived of any name, live in a nameless city in the United States. Their twenty-year-old son had been treated in a psychiatric hospital for four years because, the narrator tells us,"he was incurably deranged in his mind[...] Divided into three parts, the story offers a dialogue, a conversation in direct speech, only in the last part. The narrator mainly uses indirect speech to narrate the conversation between the father and the mother, or between the parents and the nurse[...] We are then informed rather ironically that "the system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly" and that it had been called "referential mania"[...] He is moreover interpreted, judged[...]but he also tries to [...]decode "the undulation of things." He fails...
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JM: References to bare elbows are quite common in VN's novels. I've found them associated to a movement, such as "clasping shut a necklace", three times and I always associated this position to "wings". It is mentioned in KQK and in ADA, but I chose a particular sentence from Bend Sinister to bring it up as an example: ...and similarly the priest had failed to perceive the futility of his metaphysical promise in relation to those favoured ones (men of bizarre genius, big game hunters, chess players, prodigiously robust and versatile lovers, the radiant woman taking her necklace off after the ball) for whom this world was a paradise in itself and who would be always one point up no matter what happened to everyone in the melting pot of eternity.
Perhaps here VN might have also implied "wings" and called our attention to an unprotected window in the "living room". In this story it seems that the young man who suffers from "referential mania" certainly didn't fit in the category of those for whom "this world was a paradise"
Sergei Soloviev wrote:..." I don't understand why do you think that the parent who would look after the son would sleep with him in the same bed? [...] Of course watch him all the night and remain awake may be too difficult, this explains the rotation.[...} they desperately love him and want him to have a better place to sleep or because in the other room there is much more dangerous objects (she is cooking in the room with the couch?).
JM : You are right, Sergei, the parents might have taken shifts watching him at night because they'd be sitting on a chair placed by the bed. The room where cooking might take place (or, at least, which had been used when boiling water) also sports a dangerous window for anyone intent on "flying out".And yet, in my opinion, these precautions are preposterously planned, also because the young man ( at least as a child) was an insomniac.
What struck me most was the lack of space for their son in their cramped flat: it is suggestive of a lack of enough emotional space, although not of any lack of good-will on the part of the old couple.
Fran Assa: I think it is a mistake to dismiss symbolic references to Freud's thought in this story. VN of course was dismissive of Freud, but he mentioned him all the time! He obviously was not so ignorant as to dismiss something he had not read. [...] In one of my admittedly overly long messages,references to the stations of the cross was edited out
JM: Fran, perhaps you only checked the entry of my personal selection of those items I plan to discuss in the List, instead of the original message you sent and which has been distributed by the editors. Would Nabokov seriously employ "symbolic references to Freud"?
VN was quite vocal against the use of "Freudian symbolism" and I couldn't agree more with him.
The article bt Jacqueline Hamrit: The Silence of Madness in "Signs and Symbols" by Vladimir Nabokov (available thru google) contains a summary and various comments about literature and madness, examined from a philosophic point-of-view.
Excerpts of what J.Hamrit wrote:
"Madness has always fascinated writers and has a privileged relationship with literature, being sometimes more than a mere metaphor and rather corresponding to a thematic network underlying a text. It has even been compared to the reading and/or writing activity of literature. I intend in this paper, to make a comparison between madness and literature, to wonder about the way they can be linked and/or separated, through the analysis of a short story by Vladimir Nabokov entitled "Signs and Symbols" which was written in 1948 [...] Being himself subjected to auditory and visual hallucinations, Nabokov staged many characters tempted by madness. Thus, the protagonist Luzhin who is a chessplayer in The Luzhin Defense is the prey of a monomaniac passion which ends in a suicide. Nabokov has also dealt with sexual deviations such as paedophilia in Lolita in which the protagonist Humbert Humbert is cured in psychiatric hospitals. And the main character, Krug, in Bend Sinister, becomes mad at the end of the book when he learns about the death of his son[...] Nabokov declared during a lecture at Stanford University in 1941:"Genius is the greatest sanity of the spirit."[Vladimir Nabokov, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," Lectures on Literature 1980 (London: Picador, 1983) 377]...In a letter dated March 17, 1951 and addressed to the New Yorker editor Katharine A. White, Nabokov alluded to "Signs and Symbols" by mentioning the story of an old Jewish couple and their sick boy, saying: "Most of the stories I am contemplating [. . .] will be composed on these lines, according to this system wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one." The short story narrates a day in the life of an old couple of Russian Jewish immigrants who, being themselves deprived of any name, live in a nameless city in the United States. Their twenty-year-old son had been treated in a psychiatric hospital for four years because, the narrator tells us,"he was incurably deranged in his mind[...] Divided into three parts, the story offers a dialogue, a conversation in direct speech, only in the last part. The narrator mainly uses indirect speech to narrate the conversation between the father and the mother, or between the parents and the nurse[...] We are then informed rather ironically that "the system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly" and that it had been called "referential mania"[...] He is moreover interpreted, judged[...]but he also tries to [...]decode "the undulation of things." He fails...
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
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