Signs and Symbols
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In these rare cases, the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence... Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing, in some awful way, messages that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools. Others (such as coats in store windows) are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart. Still others (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surrounds—but alas, it is not! With distance the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over the plains; while still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.
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Clearly enough, the son has taken the reading of signs and symbols too far—taken it to the point of insanity—and in the context of his condition, intensely scrutinising the text for hidden messages would seem to put the reader in the company of a lunatic. But the second thing we need to remember is that Nabokov often uses what we might call a technique of “literary misdirection”—a playful ruse where the surface of the story points us away from the solution. This is especially obvious in the case of The Vane Sisters (where a sentence denying that there is an afterlife forms an acrostic proving that there is one) but it is seen elsewhere as well—in Terra Incognita, Ultima Thule and in Pale Fire. In view of all this, I suggest the following: The implication that looking for signs and symbols in Signs and Symbols would be insane tells the alert reader of Nabokov that this is exactly what he should do.
And this brings me to a third and final point: Nabokov tends to answer important questions and Signs and Symbols leaves us with important questions unanswered—a fact which further suggests that the story has something to hide and serves to shape our expectations about what we might find. What is the reason for the third telephone call and what is the fate of couple’s insane son? It is my view that the story answers both of these questions but to solve the riddle we must first find a middle ground between the innocent oblivion of husband and wife and the referential mania of their son.
As husband and wife waited at a bus stop after the failed attempt to visit their son, they saw that, “a few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny, unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.” On its own, this does say much—but later, two other details give us occasion to return to it. One: The last time the son attempted suicide he was stopped by “an envious fellow patient” who “thought he was learning to fly.” The other: As a boy of six, he drew “wonderful birds with human hands and feet.” The now-explicit association between birds and boy elevates the fallen bird, and the empty nest it leaves behind, into a symbol of maternal loss. Spotted by mother and father on this most unlucky of days, it invites the reader to suspect that the son is fated to die—and the idea is soon reinforced. Just before the telephone rings for the first time, the mother bends to pick up several playing cards that have fallen to the floor. This random hand of cards—dealt, as it were, by fate—comprises the knave of hearts, the nine of spades and the ace of spades. In card reading, the first symbolises an honest young man; the second (the worst card of the whole deck) death; and the third, a bad omen. [3] When the telephone rings for the third time it does so just as the husband reads “Crab Apple”—a fruit that is rarely eaten because of its extreme bitterness—and thus a congruous cue for a telephone call announcing bitter news. The signs and symbols reveal what the story does not say: The couple’s son has committed suicide.
Vera Nabokov once declared that potustoronnost, or “the beyond,” was her husband’s “main theme.” And there is, finally, an element of this gleaming at the edges of the darkness of Signs and Symbols. Note, for example, the fairy tale-like nature of the ending—the fact that the climax, which occurs at the stroke of midnight, follows the Rule of Three: There are two telephone calls before the third, final and decisive one. The first two, as noted, were from a young girl dialling the wrong number. But in the fairy tale atmosphere, and knowing Nabokov’s meticulous preordination of detail, it is tempting to reconsider the significance of that dull but oddly insistent little voice asking for Charlie. When Signs and Symbols was published in The New Yorker, the editor of the magazine wanted to make a number of emendations—including the change of “beech plum” to the correct “beach plum.” Nabokov objected strongly. Alexander Drescher opines that “beech” is therefore not an author’s solecism but the elderly Jewish man's misreading of the label—intentionally evocative of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp because buchenwald means “beech woods.” There is a reason for mentioning this little piece of marginalia: It gives readers of Nabokov permission to atomise his spelling and etymology for narrative clues. And when we look up the meaning of the name “Charles” we discover that it derives from the Germanic noun karlaz meaning, “free man.” “What he had really wanted to do,” reflects the mother as she recalls her son’s previous suicide attempt, “was to tear a hole in his world and escape.” Her son, we may conclude, has at last flown the nest and become a free man—a fact known to the mysterious messenger from the Beyond who now seeks him.
And this brings me to a third and final point: Nabokov tends to answer important questions and Signs and Symbols leaves us with important questions unanswered—a fact which further suggests that the story has something to hide and serves to shape our expectations about what we might find. What is the reason for the third telephone call and what is the fate of couple’s insane son? It is my view that the story answers both of these questions but to solve the riddle we must first find a middle ground between the innocent oblivion of husband and wife and the referential mania of their son.
As husband and wife waited at a bus stop after the failed attempt to visit their son, they saw that, “a few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny, unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle.” On its own, this does say much—but later, two other details give us occasion to return to it. One: The last time the son attempted suicide he was stopped by “an envious fellow patient” who “thought he was learning to fly.” The other: As a boy of six, he drew “wonderful birds with human hands and feet.” The now-explicit association between birds and boy elevates the fallen bird, and the empty nest it leaves behind, into a symbol of maternal loss. Spotted by mother and father on this most unlucky of days, it invites the reader to suspect that the son is fated to die—and the idea is soon reinforced. Just before the telephone rings for the first time, the mother bends to pick up several playing cards that have fallen to the floor. This random hand of cards—dealt, as it were, by fate—comprises the knave of hearts, the nine of spades and the ace of spades. In card reading, the first symbolises an honest young man; the second (the worst card of the whole deck) death; and the third, a bad omen. [3] When the telephone rings for the third time it does so just as the husband reads “Crab Apple”—a fruit that is rarely eaten because of its extreme bitterness—and thus a congruous cue for a telephone call announcing bitter news. The signs and symbols reveal what the story does not say: The couple’s son has committed suicide.
Vera Nabokov once declared that potustoronnost, or “the beyond,” was her husband’s “main theme.” And there is, finally, an element of this gleaming at the edges of the darkness of Signs and Symbols. Note, for example, the fairy tale-like nature of the ending—the fact that the climax, which occurs at the stroke of midnight, follows the Rule of Three: There are two telephone calls before the third, final and decisive one. The first two, as noted, were from a young girl dialling the wrong number. But in the fairy tale atmosphere, and knowing Nabokov’s meticulous preordination of detail, it is tempting to reconsider the significance of that dull but oddly insistent little voice asking for Charlie. When Signs and Symbols was published in The New Yorker, the editor of the magazine wanted to make a number of emendations—including the change of “beech plum” to the correct “beach plum.” Nabokov objected strongly. Alexander Drescher opines that “beech” is therefore not an author’s solecism but the elderly Jewish man's misreading of the label—intentionally evocative of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp because buchenwald means “beech woods.” There is a reason for mentioning this little piece of marginalia: It gives readers of Nabokov permission to atomise his spelling and etymology for narrative clues. And when we look up the meaning of the name “Charles” we discover that it derives from the Germanic noun karlaz meaning, “free man.” “What he had really wanted to do,” reflects the mother as she recalls her son’s previous suicide attempt, “was to tear a hole in his world and escape.” Her son, we may conclude, has at last flown the nest and become a free man—a fact known to the mysterious messenger from the Beyond who now seeks him.
[1] The “conspiracy of coincidences” between Shade’s poem and Kinbote’s text have divided critics into three camps: Shadeans, who argue that Kinbote is the invention of Shade; Kinboteans, who argue that Shade is the invention of Kinbote; and a third camp which argues that the question of attribution is by design undecidable—evidence for the Kinbotean view is perfectly and deliberately balanced with evidence for the Shadean view so that the novel approximates the effect of that well-known optical illusion used in the psychology of perception—an image of a duck that can, with equal justification, be seen as a rabbit. Here, too, it is suggested that the "solution" is that there is no solution.
[2] As she browses through the photographs, we gain some knowledge of the family’s past—that they are European Jews who came to America to escape the turmoil of revolution and war; that their son was ten the year they left; that he slowly descended into madness after they arrived.
[3] A photograph of “the maid Elsa and her bestial beau” is also retrieved from the floor and (like the boy’s fear of “a certain picture in a book which merely shows an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree”) one isn’t quite sure what to do with it. These two stray details are somewhat like two important-looking metal components left on the workbench after you have finished assembling (or thought you had finished assembling) some complicated machine. However, it is profitable to look into the symbolic meanings of the “wheel.” It represents “fortune” in Tarot reading; “revolutionary change with universal consequences” in Buddhism; and is also a symbol of Nazism in the form of the Schwarze Sonne or “sun wheel.” The son’s fear, notably, predates the family’s emigration to America and so concurs with a time that this trio of Jewish refuges were living in Europe under the lengthening shadow of Nazism. If some of the boy’s weird phobias contain tangential but veridical elements of precognition, he might well fear this picture. I suspect we are also being invited to speculate that the “fat faced fiancee” of the German maid Elsa became a member of the Nazi Party. And if emigration to America, and placement in a special school with “ugly, vicious, backwards children,” played a role in the boy’s deteriorating mental health, then Nazism is part of the web of causes leading to the son’s suicide and the photograph’s inclusion in the “hand dealt by fate” is explained.
[2] As she browses through the photographs, we gain some knowledge of the family’s past—that they are European Jews who came to America to escape the turmoil of revolution and war; that their son was ten the year they left; that he slowly descended into madness after they arrived.
[3] A photograph of “the maid Elsa and her bestial beau” is also retrieved from the floor and (like the boy’s fear of “a certain picture in a book which merely shows an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the one branch of a leafless tree”) one isn’t quite sure what to do with it. These two stray details are somewhat like two important-looking metal components left on the workbench after you have finished assembling (or thought you had finished assembling) some complicated machine. However, it is profitable to look into the symbolic meanings of the “wheel.” It represents “fortune” in Tarot reading; “revolutionary change with universal consequences” in Buddhism; and is also a symbol of Nazism in the form of the Schwarze Sonne or “sun wheel.” The son’s fear, notably, predates the family’s emigration to America and so concurs with a time that this trio of Jewish refuges were living in Europe under the lengthening shadow of Nazism. If some of the boy’s weird phobias contain tangential but veridical elements of precognition, he might well fear this picture. I suspect we are also being invited to speculate that the “fat faced fiancee” of the German maid Elsa became a member of the Nazi Party. And if emigration to America, and placement in a special school with “ugly, vicious, backwards children,” played a role in the boy’s deteriorating mental health, then Nazism is part of the web of causes leading to the son’s suicide and the photograph’s inclusion in the “hand dealt by fate” is explained.