Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] SIGNS: First paragraph & the next...
From: <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:40:06 -0400

Dear Beth,
 
I'm not sure whether to come in heavily at this point with the  following:

I am delighted that my Inner Circle Seminar on "Signs and Symbols" on 11  May 
in London is being honoured in this way.

Can I suggest that readers who want to link to the discussion that has  
already taken place turn to the archives of NABOKV-L for December 2004?
 
I praised Alexander Dolinin's essay "The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's  
'Signs and Symbols'" ( _http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dolinin2.htm_ 
(http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dolinin2.htm)   ) as "an important 
breakthough". But I did raise the  question of whether Nabokov intended us to be aware 
that the mother was buying  fish, and later making tea (and perhaps cooking the 
fish) after dark, when it  was already the Jewish Sabbath, when observant Jews 
would do none of these  things. Dolinin and others, including Dmitri Nabokov, 
responded.
 
Meanwhile Alexander Drescher had privately written to me, pointing out  that 
Good Friday and Erev Pesach (the first Seder evening of Passover)  coincided 
in 1947; he said he was writing something on "Signs and  Symbols". I thought he 
must have some evidence for this, and  wrote privately to him that the number 
of paragraphs in the three parts of  story (7,4, 19) could be taken to 
indicate the year and the very open "For the  fourth time in as many years" the date 
(in English or American!) 4/4 (4  April or April 4) of Good Friday/Passover 
1947. I made these suggestions  speculatively, half-frivolously. I believe I 
added that the underground train's  "losing its life-current" for a quarter of 
an hour "between two stations" might  have resonances with stations of the 
Cross, and descent into hell for three  days (the minute hand moving three numbers 
on the clock dial). Also I suggested  a link with Eliot's "East Coker" and 
the underground train, in the tube, [that]  "stops too long between stations": 
"East Coker" contains the line "Still, in  spite of that, we call this Friday 
good." To my amazement, when Sandy published  his article ( 
_http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dreschersigns.htm_ 
(http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/dreschersigns.htm)  ),  he did not have any evidence other than the bizarre 
logic that I had suggested  for the historical date of the events in the story. It 
had been an  inspired hunch. He did, however, give fascinating evidence to 
support my  hypothesis, namely, that in the story's first publication, in The 
New  Yorker, it was edited to have only 18 paragraphs in the third part,  and 
Nabokov's annoyance at this appears to have resonances in "Pnin".
 
Sandy's private email to me also contained a hint that he and I  were 
thinking along similar lines, in that we were both wondering  why no commentator 
considered the possibility that the third telephone call  might be from the son 
himself.
 
Then someone raised the question on NABOKV-L:
 
<< 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.  >> 
To which I responded: 
<< 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? [...]  
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. 
[...]  >> 
My sentence "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," was, of course, a reference 
to Dolinin's  essay. 
This started an  interesting discussion on NABOKV-L between Andrew Brown and 
others,  and myself. Then Sandy Drescher published his essay, but I have seen  
little response to it. 
Anthony  Stadlen  

   

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