In a message dated 16/12/2004 16:01:55 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:
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.
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 (for example, in his preface to "Despair" and in "Strong 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?
All we can say from the narrator's account is that the young man has been deposited in the "sanatorium" -- though why, if he is "incurable"? Presumably because he is an embarrassment (evidently "the Prince" wants him to be there and is paying). But evidently Aunt Rosa didn't worry about him (although admittedly this "inaccessib[ility]" is a later development, in the United States), because all those she worried about were put to death by the Germans. She worried about real things: train accidents, bankruptcies, cancer.
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.
For those who would like the young man not to have killed himself, and would prefer the third telephone call still to be from the sign-instead-of-symbol-dialling girl, because the only alternative they can envisage is an official call announcing his suicide, please note that this would entail, as Alexander Dolinin indicates but, oddly, does not mention, the girl's dialling three uncalled-for sixes -- the ominous mark of the Beast.
Anthony Stadlen