In a message dated 20/12/2004 21:41:40 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik is the one who
probably embodies Nabokov’s net of references most
perfectly. He was one of the 20th century’s most
preeminent and influential Jewish scholars. Born in
1903 in Belarus, to a family renowned for its Talmudic
genius, and a graduate of the University of Berlin
with a doctorate in philosophy, in the early 1930s,
Soloveitchik accepted the position of Chief Rabbi of
Boston – the same city where Nabokov’s “Signs and
Symbols” was written. Soloveitchik wrote numerous
highly influential essays and Torah discourses. His
essay, “American Jewish Experience,” describes the
kind of choices Nabokov’s elderly parents of “Signs
and Symbols” dealt with: the great traumatic
experience of the European Holocaust and its impact on
American Jews (Rabbi Soloveitchik: “Man becomes aware
of the Finite only when he is confronted with death”).
I had been wondering whether it would be a diversion, just a personal association, to mention Rabbi Soloveitchik ("the Rav") in connection with "Signs and Symbols". I am indebted to Yuri Leving for pointing out, what I stupidly hadn't realised, that Boston was a link between them. (Could Boston be the setting of the story?)
The Rav does, in remarkable ways, remind me of VN. Both combined what Snow crudely called "the two cultures" at a profound level. (See VN's ridicule of the Snow-Leavis "debate" in "Strong Opinions".) Soloveitchik was one of the great existential thinkers of the twentieth century (see his book "The Lonely Man of Faith"). At the same time, his university training was not just in philosophy but in mathematics, and his marvellous book "Halakhic Man" relates the moral law to the crystalline objectivity of mathematics and physics (1983: p. 83):
"To what may the matter be compared? To the physicist who concerns himself with mathematical formulae, the laws of mechanics, the laws of electromagnetic phenomena, optics, etc., etc. He joins together 'precept to precept ... line to line' (Isaiah 28: 10, 13), number to number .... these numbers that only are meaningful within the system itself, only meaningful as part of abstract mathematical functions, symbolize the image of existence."
A striking passage of his is this from the same book (1983: note 4, p. 142): "Yes, it is true that during the third Sabbath meal at dusk, as the day of rest declines and man's soul yearns for its Creator and is afraid to depart from that realm of holiness whose name is Sabbath, into the dark and frightening, secular workaday week, we sing the psalm 'The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want; he leadeth me beside the still waters' (Ps. 23), etc., etc., and we believe with our entire hearts in the words of the psalmist. However, this psalm only describes the ultimate destination of homo religiosus, not the path leading to that destination. For the path that eventually will lead to the 'green pastures' and the 'still waters' is not the royal road, but a narrow twisting footway that threads its course along the steep mountain slope, as the terrible abyss yawns at the traveler's feet."
This contrasts with Freud's arrogant assertion at the climax of his dream book when he makes the book say of itself: "Die Traumdeutung [The interpretation of dreams (the book's own title)] is the via regia [royal road] to the knowledge of the unconscious in the life of the soul."
Freud wrote this in full knowledge of the tradition that there was no "royal road": whether it was Euclid explaining to Ptolemy Soter that there was no royal road to geometry, or Hegel ridiculing those who wanted a royal road to "science", or Gerard Manley Hopkins writing that it is fortunate that there is no royal road to poetry.
VN's criticism of Freud and of crude symbolism (see "Rowe's Symbols") is similar to Soloveitchik's criticism of "homo religiosus".
PS. Why, in "Signs and Symbols", does the underground train stop tautologically "between two stations"? It could hardly have stopped between one or three. In VN's writing, as in the Torah, it is safe to assume that no word is superfluous. In "East Coker", in a passage of which this part of "Signs and Symbols" is (deliberately?) reminiscent, Eliot has the underground train stop too long "between stations":
"Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about"
Is the "superfluous" "two" in "Signs and Symbols" a hint that, just as the wife's telling the girl she is reading a letter rather than a number alerts us to the extraordinary number of numbers in the text, these numbers, in turn, are only one stage towards our understanding of the "second" story that VN said was there to be found, and are ultimately superfluous?
Anthony Stadlen