A Jeweler's Eye

Date: October 29, 1995, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By John Updike; Lead:

THE STORIES OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV Edited by Dmitri Nabokov. 659 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $35. Text:

RETURN trips to Paradise are risky. The prose of Vladimir Nabokov did loom as a paradise for me when I began to read, in The New Yorker more than 40 years ago, the reminiscences that became chapters of "Speak, Memory" (1951) and the short stories about the touching Russian emigre professor Timofey Pnin, eventually collected in the quasi novel "Pnin" (1957). What startling beauty of phrase, twists of thought, depths of sorrow and bursts of wit! -- this was a rainbow prose that made most others look flat and gray. "Lolita" sensationally followed in 1958, and I settled into an enraptured readership as, capitalizing upon this breakthrough into best-sellerdom, the exquisite but industrious author mingled new productions in his adopted English with lovingly supervised translations from his large oeuvre in his native Russian. The publication now, 18 years after Nabokov's death, of his collected stories, under the editorship of his son and favorite translator, Dmitri Nabokov, offered a threat as well as a treat: a threat, that is, to dull and dampen a faithful reader's old ardor with a ponderous assembly of short fiction originally consumed in the four handy collections, of 13 items each, which the senior Nabokov had issued while alive.

And, in truth, "The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov" is not an easy read -- hard to hold, and rather dense and rich for systematic, consecutive perusal. For those who stay with it, though, the volume recapitulates a brave career. Dmitri, faithful to his father's numerical superstitions, has found an additional, uncollected 13 stories, bringing the total to 65. Of these, only nine were written in English; one was written in French, in Paris, while the Nabokovs were in transit to America, and the rest in Russian, between 1920 and 1940, within the diaspora that had besprinkled Europe with refugees from the Communist revolution. Berlin, with more than a hundred thousand emigres, was the capital of this floating world, and here Nabokov lived from 1923 to 1937. The stories written in this period mostly deal with a remembered, enchanted Russia or an observed population of expatriates, heavy on forlorn eccentrics whose behavior partakes of the provisional nature of their citizenship. Aleksey Lvovich Luzhin (a family name Nabokov would use again) is, in "A Matter of Chance," a waiter on a German train who takes cocaine and for five years has been out of touch with his beloved wife; Captain Ivanov, in "Razor," has found employment as a barber, into whose shop one day strays his Soviet torturer; Lavrentiy Ivanovich Kru zhevnitsyn, in "Lik," wanders France as an actor playing a Russian in a French play, and aptly represents the typical exile, going through the motions on the rickety stage of a borrowed country. There is something charming in the way that Nabokov, an aristocratic scion and autocratic artist, so sympathetically, even gaily, lent his imagination to the raffish, boardinghouse milieu of impecunious exile. His stories appeared in emigre dailies like Rul, in Berlin, and Poslednie Novosti, in Paris, for compensation that but modestly augmented his earnings as a tutor and tennis coach.

Yet, surprisingly, happiness is a recurrent theme. The very oldest tale here, "The Wood-Sprite," recalls "the happiness, the echoing, endless, irreplaceable happiness." In "A Matter of Chance," an aged princess knows "that happy things can only be spoken of in a happy way, without grieving because they have vanished." The narrator of "Beneficence" becomes aware of "the world's tenderness" -- "the world does not represent a struggle at all . . . but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated." The hero of "Details of a Sunset" muses, "Oh, how happy I am . . . how everything around celebrates my happiness," and that of "The Thunderstorm" falls asleep "exhausted by the happiness of my day." All this from a writer who had recently lost his homeland, his fortune and his father, shot on a Berlin stage when Vladimir was 22 years old. Yet the blissful undercurrent continues to run strong in the later fiction: the narrator of "Ultima Thule," a fragment of the last novel Nabokov attempted in Russian, relates that "in moments of happiness, of rapture, when my soul is laid bare, I suddenly feel that there is no extinction beyond the grave."

A strictly nonsectarian fascination with a possible afterlife, and with the precise anatomy of the moment when life becomes death, figures in a novella like "The Eye" and infuses with a queasy transcendence such creations in English as "Pale Fire" and "Ada." Nabokov was a kind of late Wordsworthian romantic, ascribing a metaphysical meaning to the bliss that nature inspired in him. Or less nature itself, perhaps, than its conscious apprehension: he is a poet of consciousness -- of, as he put it in "A Busy Man," "the burden and pressure of human consciousness, that ominous and ludicrous luxury." The mind in its shimmering workings provided his topic and permeated his narrative manner. His stories bubble with asides on their progress or unraveling. "The Reunion" holds a wonderful description of the mental process of recalling a forgotten word. "Parting with consciousness," he tells us in "Mademoiselle O," was "unspeakably repulsive to me."

His youthful passions for lepidopterology, chess and poetry fused to form a prose of unique intensity and trickiness. The visual pursuit of butterflies, in the field and under the examining light, trained his eye to a supernatural acuity; eyes in these short stories are themselves observed microscopically. The heroine of "Sounds" (his first fully achieved story, from 1923) is told, "Your eyes were limpid, as if a pellicle of silken paper had fluttered off them -- the kind that sheathes illustrations in precious books." In "Wingstroke," another lady's eyes "sparkled as if they were dusted with frost," and a male angel's are "elongated, myopic-looking . . . pale-green like predawn air." In "Revenge," we find "wonderful eyes indeed, with pupils like glossy inkdrops on dove-gray satin." And so on, up to the English-language "Vane Sisters," of whom Cynthia has "wide-spaced eyes very much like her sister's, of a frank, frightened blue with dark points in a radial arrangement." In "Recruiting," we learn that self-portraits are difficult "because of a certain tension that always remains in the expression of the eyes." This tension generated an unfailing cascade of bejeweled details, expressed in a language inventively straining at the limits of the expressible. Sensory minutiae -- bicycle tracks in the sandy path of a manorial estate, reflections in a Berlin puddle -- encode the mingled miracles of being and perception.

HIS love of chess and his invention of chess problems encouraged a taste for "combinational" complexity that can be wearisome. "Ultima Thule" and "Solus Rex," pieces of an abandoned novel rather than stories in any case, seemed tedious on this reading, symbolizations of grief and lost kingdoms too remote from their autobiographical referents. When Nabokov too successfully

suppressed the personal note, his deceptive designs could seem merely cruel. Of Ivanov, a weakhearted tutor in "Perfection," we are told that "his thought fluttered and walked up and down the glass pane which for as long as he lived would prevent him from having direct contact with the world." That glass pane sometimes masks with its reflective brightness the display case holding Nabokov's human specimens. Yet he can be movingly empathetic and direct, as in "An Affair of Honor" and "A Slice of Life," so limpidly free of combinational tricks as to feel Chekhovian.

When he began to write stories in English, he sacrificed nothing of verbal ingenuity but addressed his American audience in distinctly emigre accents -- that floating world, swallowed in Hitler's Europe, had to be explained. "The Assistant Producer" and "A Forgotten Poet" have the voice, like his little book on Gogol, of an essay, with an impudent, madcap accent. "The Vane Sisters," with its purely American characters, is too spookily clever for words, but "Scenes From the Life of a Double Monster" and "Lance" show that, had he chosen, he could have tweaked and deepened the shorter form as impressively as he did the novel in his amazing imported English. "Sirin," his Russian pen-name, means "bird of paradise"; it was Nabokov's preening gift to bring Paradise wherever he alighted.

The Silence of Madness in "Signs and Symbols" by Vladimir Nabokov

by Jacqueline Hamrit

March 19, 2006

abstract

In this paper, I try to wonder about the way madness and literature can be linked and/or separated, through the analysis of a short story by the Russian American writer Vladimir Nabokov entitled "Signs and Symbols" as both literature and madness are linked to the issue of reference as well as meaning.. The short story narrates the case of a deranged young man for whom "everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme" and shows how madness, unlike literature, fails in the quest of meaning and is therefore associated to silence, as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida suggested, whereas literature, although sometimes verging on madness, is characterized by the desire to live and to move away from the silence of death.

article

 

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.

     But what does it mean to be mad? For Maurice Blanchot, madness should only exist in the interrogative form. For him, saying Holderlin is mad, corresponds to saying: is he mad?1 Jacques Derrida devoted two texts to madness, "Cogito and the history of madness" written in 1963 and published in Writing and Difference, and "Being just with Freud. The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis" published in Resistances in 1996. Derrida alludes to Foucault when he declares: "To make a history of madness is therefore to make the archaeology of a silence."2 Derrida adds, "And if madness in general, beyond any fictitious and determined historical structure, is the absence of work, then madness is indeed, essentially and generally, silence, stifled speech."3 I shall test this hypothesis, which associates madness with silence, through the analysis of Nabokov’s short story "Signs and Symbols."

     The short story narrates a day--a Friday--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." Confronted with the problem of the choice of a birthday present for their son who was frightened by objects perceived by him as being "vibrant with a malignant activity," the parents decided upon a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars. They were, however, not allowed to visit their son when they arrived at the hospital because he had tried to commit suicide. When back home, the husband retired to his bedroom after the evening meal while the mother examined an album of photographs. After midnight, the husband came back to the living-room and announced that he wished to bring their son back home in order to keep and nurse him. In the middle of the conversation, the telephone rang. It was a wrong number. Some girl had asked to speak to some Charlie. Then, their conversation is once more interrupted by a telephone call which happened to come from the same girl. After the mother had explained her why it was an incorrect number, the couple sat down to their midnight tea. As the husband was re-examining the small jars, spelling out their labels, the telephone rang again. Thus ends the short story.

     The ringing of the telephone sounds like an interruption in a story imbued with silence. 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. Silence is frequently rendered by the perception of noises. Thus, when they took the underground train to go to the hospital," one could hear nothing but the dutiful beating of one’s heart and the rustling of newspapers."4 The bus they took subsequently was "crammed with garrulous high-school children." 5 On their way back, "he kept clearing his throat in a resonant way he had when he was upset"6 and they "did not

exchange a word"7 during the long ride to the underground station. They came back home and dined "in silence," the son’s disease being at the origin of this atmosphere characterizing the resigned world of the family.

     We are then informed rather ironically that "the system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly"8 and that it had been called "referential mania" by a certain Herman Brink who stated:

In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy--because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredible 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 which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.9

     I will mainly dwell on the first and last sentences of the description, namely "everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence" and "everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme." The patient imagines that he lives in a closed world of which he is the centre of and the target. It is a narcissistic world losing itself in a megalomaniac "I". The patient suffers from paranoia since he feels superior to others and since he feels hostility and malignity from the persecuting world which, represented by a nature evoking that of the British Romantic poets, spies him wherever he goes and interprets his actions. Reality loses the brilliance of its reference to become a mere sign. He is moreover interpreted, judged, like a patient subjected to a doctor’s observation but he also tries to interpret the world and decode "the undulation of things." He fails, nevertheless, in his quest for meaning because meaning is deprived of the restraint and the security of the law. The relationship between the patient and reality is dual, not split by either the triangular caesura of the referent separating the signified from the signifier, or the otherness of the other cracking the fusion of the "I" with the world. The patient fails in his quest for meaning because he is unable to recognize how"unquenchable"10 reality is, to use Nabokov’s expression, and because he refuses to comply to the law of reality. Imprisoned in a closed world, he fails to be aware of the gaping chasm of meaning which regenerates with the remainder, the law of the other and of the world. This is what Derrida tries to explain when he writes:

What I call " exappropriation" is this double movement whereby I direct towards meaning and try to appropriate it, but both knowing and desiring, whether I admit it or not , desiring that it remains strange to me, transcendent, other, that it remains where there is otherness. If I could totally reappropriate meaning, exhaustively and with no remainder, there would be no meaning. If I do not want to appropriate it, there would be no meaning either.11

     Meaning fails but it is at the same time necessary and this is what the patient is unable to understand because he expands in imagination and is unable to conquer speech which demands

the acknowledgement of the law and the other. Madness is silence because it is deprived of the space of speech.

     Moreover, 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."12 Thus, mise en abyme and situated within or behind or under the story of the sickness of a young boy, there would be another story, that, may be--this is a hypothesis--of the specificity of literature as opposed to madness. Literature would be, in some way, analogous to but also different from madness.

     It is indeed possible to compare literature to madness as both are linked to the issue of reference--the perception of reality and its restoration in the imaginary world--as well as the issue of meaning. The madman, as exemplified in the short story by the son, tries to interpret the world. As for readers or literary critics, they may sometimes give evidence of an interpretative frenzy resembling the experience of a delirium and characterized by a deviation from the straight line of meaning as we know from the etymology of the word "delirium" that it is formed of the Latin word "lira" which means a furrow and the prefix "de" which may signify "out of".

     The short story is indeed a narrative which expands within a certain time. The reader is given information which is sometimes hidden in the text. For example, one may wonder where or who the telephone call at the end of the story comes from. Is it due once more to a wrong number or is it the hospital announcing the death of the son? Death is foreshadowed throughout the story thanks to repetitive details. The mother is indeed dressed in black. On their way back home, the couple encounter "a tiny dead unfledged bird" evoking the son as we had been informed he had tried to fly when he attempted to commit suicide. Symbols which are mentioned in the title of the story become signs the reader has to decipher. The interpretative activity of the reader resembles the experience of madness which, according to Derrida, is "adventurous, perilous, nocturnal and pathetic"13 Literature keeps its secret--we shall never know who telephoned at the end of the story--and madness its mystery--the son is unable to communicate with sane persons.

     The short story unfolds therefore within a lapse of time which, although shortened into a brief day in the life of a couple, is lengthened by waiting and memory. Thus, the couple waits in the underground train because of a breakdown; they wait for the nurse at the hospital. They are facing an uncertain and threatening future. The reader is also aware of the past as the mother examining an album of photographs is overwhelmed by memories--personal memories of Russia, Germany, exile and immigration but also memories of the different ages of her son. To each photograph corresponds a step in the evolution of his sickness. Thus, when he was a baby, "he looked more surprised than most babies."14 At four, he was afraid of animals. Aged six, "he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet and suffered from insomnia."15 Then he suffered from phobias. Thus, through the photographs, the mother wonders about what may have foreshadowed his sickness whose symptoms seem to appear more and more precisely as he grows. Yet, although time does not exist for the patient, his sickness is not merely labelled or classified. The recall of its history allows the reader to perceive how it is a very subjective experience.

     Moreover, insistence is put on the parents’ emotions. Contrary to the apparent indifference of the son due to his retreat and his solitude, the mother suffers. When she was on the bus, "she felt the mounting pressure of tears."16 At night, "she thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness [. . .] "17 Literature is able to reveal the emotional depth of sickness.

     The parents had nevertheless not managed to diagnose their son’s sickness,18 since they had considered his phobias as "the eccentricities of a prodigiously gifted child." This corresponds to the cliché considering madness as a form of genius, as in Nietzsche, Artaud, Van Gogh, etc. Nabokov was adamantly against such a position as he declared during a lecture at Stanford University in 1941:"Genius is the greatest sanity of the spirit."19 Although he admits that inspiration may resemble the experience of madness, the artist, according to him, manages to create a new world whereas the lunatic can only dismember it. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze also considers that literature is healthy and that one does not write with one’s neuroses. According to him, the writer is more a doctor than a patient, a doctor of himself and of his surrounding world. However, Deleuze writes:" The writer carries language out of its furrows, it makes it go delirious. . . . But when delirium becomes a clinical issue, words end up on nothing, nothing is heard or seen through them except the night."20 The madman does not produce anything, madness being for Foucault "the absence of work." In the short story, nothing happens except the ingenious attempts of suicide by the son. The parents, on the contrary, make decisions and choices: they choose their son’s birthday gift, they decide to take their son back home. The son is absent and silent. Saying nothing, he does nothing. The nocturnal atmosphere and the night of madness are rendered by the constant play between light and "the monstrous darkness."21

     If pathological delirium is linked to the night, and if night corresponds to approaching death, sanity is therefore a desire for life. Thus, when the mother noticed that one of the passengers was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman, she indeed felt compassion but she was, we are told, mainly given a shock of wonder. The so important word "wonder" in Nabokov’s work corresponds to the sparkling awareness of the magical beauty of the world and of life. Thus, whereas the patient is said to have no desires, the parents still hope for a recovery being thereby in accordance with Nabokov’s plea for life.

     Madness is also a symbolical prison as we learn that the son "wanted to tear a hole in his world and escape."22 Literature is therefore different from madness because, according to Derrida, it is characterized by its unconditional freedom. In Donner la mort published in 1999 and translated as The Gift of Death, Derrida considers the idea that literature implies the right to say and hide everything. Speech, on the contrary, is stifled in madness and should be freed. One must therefore try to dialogue with madness, approach it but also move away from it in order to be able to live. Writers know this. Joyce, for example, speaking of Ulysses wrote:" In any event this book was terribly daring. A transparent sheet separates it from madness."23One may therefore verge on madness but one must take one’s distances. This is what Derrida explains when he writes :

But this violent liberation of speech is possible and can be pursued only in the extent to which it keeps itself resolutely and consciously at the greatest possible proximity to the abuse that is the usage of speech – just close enough to say violence, to dialogue with itself as irreducible violence, and just far enough to live and live as speech.24 Living is therefore moving away from the silence of death.

(This paper was first published in the French review, Synapse, and is published here with the kind permission of that journal.)  

 

End Notes

1 Cf Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà (Paris : Gallimard, 1973) 65-66.

2 Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference 1967 ( London: Routledge Classics, 2001) 41.

3 Derrida 65.

4 Vladimir Nabokov, "Signs and Symbols," Nabokov’s Dozen 1958 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960) 53

5 Nabokov 53.

6 Nabokov 54.

7 Nabokov 54.

8 Nabokov 54.

9 Nabokov 54-55. Brink is here referring to what psychiatrists call "ideas of reference" which are usually an early form of paranoia or delusion and correspond to a symptom where the patient believes he is connected to various phenomena in the world. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association (Fourth Edition, Washington DC, 1994), these ideas of reference are frequent in Schizotypical Disorders (p 641, 645) and are to be distinguished from "referential delusions" which are frequent in Schizophrenia (p.275) or in Delusional Disorder (p. 238). According to Dr Arnaud Plagnol (whom I wish to thank for having provided me with these references), these ideas of reference are also very frequent in Brief Psychotic Disorders (cf. Plagnol, Arnaud. Espaces de Représentation: Théories élémentaires et Psychopathologie. Edition du CNRS, Paris, 2004, p. 108).

10 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions 1973 (New York : Vintage International, 1990).

11 My translation of the citation situated in Jacques Derrida, Echographies (Paris: Galilée-INA, 1996) 123-24.

12  Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940-77 1990 (London: Vintage, 1991) 117.

13 Derrida, Writing and Difference 39.

14 Nabokov, Nabokov’s Dozen 56.

15 Nabokov, Nabokov’s Dozen 56.

16 Nabokov, Nabokov’s Dozen 54.

17 Nabokov, Nabokov’s Dozen 57.

18 Nabokov, Nabokov’s Dozen 56. In fact, the whole story does revolve around three failures to communicate: the son’s failure to understand his world, the parents’ failure to reach the son; the wrong number. Birds are also traditionally symbols for a messenger, a communicator from the gods or from another person.

19 Vladimir Nabokov, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," Lectures on Literature 1980 (London: Picador, 1983) 377.

20 My translation of a citation situated in Gilles Deleuze, Critique et Clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993) 9.

21 Nabokov, Nabokov’s Dozen 57

22 Nabokov, Nabokov’s Dozen 54.

23 Quoted in Derrida, Writing and Difference 36.

24 Derrida, Writing and Difference 74.

A Dozen Notes to Nabokov's Short Stories*by Maxim D. Shrayer

1. The Metamorphosis in One Uninterpreted Dream

The question of Vladimir Nabokov's literary debt to Franz Kafka is a puzzling one, clouded as it is by Nabokov's own obfuscatory remarks denying genetic ties with the German-Jewish modernist from Prague (Nabokov's principal statements on Kafka are found in Lectures on Literature, 249-93; Strong Opinions, 57; 151-2; Foreword, Invitation to a Beheading, 6). Between 1923 and 1937, Nabokov made six trips to Prague: in December-January 1923, July 1924, August 1925, May 1930, April 1932, and May 1937 (see Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, 196; 220-21; 232; 235; 243; 271; 354; 378-9). While he apparently was less

fond of Prague than most of its visitors, the westernmost capital of Slavdom -which was also the academic capital of Russia Abroad between the two world wars-did leave a mark in Nabokov's life and art. Prague was the place where Nabokov visited his family (Nabokov's mother died in Prague in 1939 and is buried there at Ols�nske Hrbitovy; the family of Vladimir Petkevic, grandson of Nabokov's sister Olga, still lives in Prague). There he met Marina Tsvetaeva and gave poetry readings.

Franz Kafka left Prague in July 1923 to stay at M�ritz; in August 1923 he went to Berlin, and, after a brief visit to Prague, returned to Schelesen. In September of 1923 Kafka settled with Dora Dymant in Berlin-Steglitz. In March 1924 Kafka traveled to Prague for the last time, and he left Prague in April 1924 for a sanatorium in the Wienerwald, where he died in June 1924. If Nabokov had indeed known of Kafka prior to the French translations of the late 1920s and 1930s-and contrary to his own refutations-Prague would have been a rather likely place for Nabokov to experience Kafka's presence in the air of culture.

In the short story "Mest'" (Revenge, 1924)-originally published in the Berlin newspaper Russkoe �kho-a stereotypically British university professor devises a scheme of punishing his innocent wife for her spectral infidelity. Might the anti-Freudian (or Freudian?) overtones of the professor's conversation with his doomed young wife have overshadowed Nabokov's allusion to Kafka's most famous work? Consider these excerpts from the professor's remarks about his trip to the continent in light of The Metamorphosis (1915):

You know something [...] you and your friends are playing with fire. There can be really terrifying occurrences. One Viennese doctor told me about some incredible metamorphoses [o neveroiatnykh perevoploshcheniiakh] the other day. Some woman [...] when the doctor undressed her [...] was stunned at the sight of her body; it was entirely covered with a reddish sheen, was soft and slimy to the touch, and upon closer examination, he realized that this plump, taut cadaver consisted entirely of narrow, circular bands of skin, as if it were all bound evenly and tightly by invisible strings [...]. And, as the doctor watched, the corpse gradually began to unwind like a huge ball of yarn....Her body was a thin, endless worm [e� telo bylo tonkim, beskonechno dlinnym cherv�m], which was disentangling itself and crawling, slithering out through the crack under the door while, on the bed, there remained a naked, white, still humid skeleton. Yet this woman had a husband, who had once kissed her-kissed that worm (The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov 71; hereafter Stories).

Consider also the following information: Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) first appeared in German in the Berlin journal Die weissen Bl�tter, 10-12 (1915). The first German book edition came out in Leipzig in November 1915; a second edition was published by the same house, Kurt Wolff Verlag, in 1917. While the first Czech translation appeared in book edition in 1929, the first Russian translation did not appear until 1964 (see F. Kafka, Promena, Star� R�se na Morave, 1929; "Rasskazy," tr. S. Apt, Inostrannaia literatura, 1 [1964]: 134-81).

A critic's judgment about a literary influence largely depends on the notion of literary dynamics to which one adheres. If one regards the Prague of the 1920s as a cultural palimpsest, where German and Czech letters were mixing and mingling with Russian �migr� ones, and where a direct textual contact was not a prerequisite for a literary impact, Kafka's trace in Nabokov's "Revenge" would seem plausible. I therefore concur with John Burt Foster Jr., who recently

asked "[whether Nabokov's] conviction that he once saw Kafka on a Berlin streetcar in 1923 [...could ] actually mask some very early, unavowed and fleeting, yet still decisive contact with his writings."

2. Of Canine Angels and Latter-Day Dragons

During the exceptionally prolific year 1924, Nabokov, like an alchemist, mixed elements of Judeo-Christian mythopoetics with the supernatural, pagan, and fairy-tale elements. "Udar kryla" (Wingstroke, 1924), Nabokov's fourth short fiction, culminates in a long sequence with an angel taking part. The scene follows a conversation between the psychologically tormented protagonist, an Englishman named Kern, and a homosexual philosopher of death and dying, an Italian by the name of Monfiori. The conversation is set in an Alpine lodge in Switzerland, and the story seems to have been informed by Nabokov's vacation in the Swiss Alps in 1922 in the company of his Cambridge classmate, the half-Italian Bobby de Calry (Boyd, The Russian Years, 188). Prior to his encounter with the angel, Kern rejects the Biblical God by calling him "gazoobraznoe pozvonochnoe" (gaseous vertebrate), following Monfiori's suggestion that "there is God, after all" (Stories, 36; ms. VN Berg). After his conversation with Monfiori (in whom he confides his decision to die), Kern returns to his room. He is disturbed by barking which emanates from behind the wall. There, in the room next door, lives Isabel, a stunning young Englishwoman and an object of Kern's desire (her image anticipates that of Iris in Look at the Harlequins!). When Kern storms into Isabel's room, he discovers a furry doglike angel who has apparently been making love to her. Kern struggles with the angelic beast and violently overpowers him. Towards the end of the story, Isabel, a fine athlete-whom Kern characterizes as "letuchaia" (literally: airy with all the subtleties of this word's connotations)-jumps in a skiing competition only to die in midflight. The angel's revenge "crucifie[s Isabel] in midair (Stories, 42; "raspiataia v vozdukhe" in the Russian).

In the case of "Drakon" (The Dragon), which, like "Wingstroke," never appeared during the writer's life, Nabokov parodied the medieval topos of dragon-slaying in the setting of a modern industrial society. In this modern fairy-tale, a dragon wakes up hungry in his cave and comes to a big city where two major tobacco companies are at war. One of them uses the dragon to advertise its cigarettes. The other tobacco company literalizes the dragon-slaying metaphor by building a giant knight whose armor is pasted over with the ads of its products. Terrified, the poor dragon flees to die in his cave (Stories, 130; ms. VN Berg). Why were "Wingstroke" and "The Dragon" never published at the time of their completion? Nabokov probably found both stories too artistically schematic, too revealing of their various sources in myth and folklore, and therefore unoriginal. Toward the end of 1924, Nabokov's search for unparalleled metaphysical themes and plots began to lead him away from traditional religious and mythological topoi.

3. Entering the Otherspace

"Venetsianka" ("La Veneziana," 1924) deserves special attention by the students of Nabokov's early works because it employs elements of the fantastical in order to explore the connections among desire, painting, and the otherworld as sources of artistic inspiration and expression. The longest among the early stories and only recently published in the original, "La Veneziana," like its coevals "The Potato Elf" and "Revenge," is set in England. The main triangle of desire entails one McGore, an old art dealer and an adviser to a rich art collector known as the Colonel, McGore's young wife Maureen, and the Colonel's son Frank. McGore has located a rare fifteenth-century Italian canvas and sold it to the Colonel . The presumed author of the painting, Sebastiano Luciani, called Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), was a major Renaissance painter of the

Venetian School, and Nabokov might have seen del Piombo's famous canvas, Ritratto Femminile ("Dorotea"), in Berlin (Gem�ldegalerie, Berlin-Dahlem; the painting appears on the cover of the French edition of Nabokov's early stories to which "La Veneziana" gave its title; see La V�nitienne et autres nouvelles, Paris, 1990). The landscape vista in the background of del Piombo's portrait symbolizes an alluring otherspace, that is a space with a dissimilar set of parameters.

While Maureen and Frank are in the midst of a tempestuous affair in the story, Frank's college roommate, one Simpson, also feels an irresistible attraction to Maureen. More so, after looking at the Colonel's new painting, Simpson notices an uncanny resemblance between Maureen and the woman on the canvas. To add to Simpson's fascination, McGore shares a "secret": years of dealing with paintings have taught him that through an act of concentrated will one can enter the space of a given painting and explore it from within. Simpson is equally drawn to Maureen and the Venetian woman in the painting. At night, literalizing McGore's supernatural metaphor, Simpson walks into the space of the portrait where the beautiful Maureen/La Veneziana offers him a lemon. Simpson "grows" into the canvas, becomes part of its painted space. The story's fantastical spring has now almost unwound itself.

"La Veneziana" embodies several key elements to become central to Nabokov's poetics. Afloat in the story's enchanting and elegant syntax, and never fully synthesized and harmonized, these elements call for scrutiny. One should start paying increasing attention to Nabokov's concern with the problem of entering a space whose parameters differ from the regular space enveloping a character. In addition, Nabokov constructs this otherspace to host visually perfect images. In the case of La Veneziana's portrait, the pictorial space of the canvas becomes charged with the features of the stunning and sensuous Maureen. Frank endows his creation with extraordinary perfection to further his love for the original and thereby not repeat Pygmalion's tragic mistake. In contrast to Frank, his friend Simpson falls in love with an image of idealized feminine beauty which appears to him even better than the possessor of this beauty in flesh and blood. Simpson succumbs to the magnetism of the otherworldly pictorial space, which gleams through an opening in his mundane reality. In his consciousness, the image of beauty wins over beauty itself. To put it differently, when Simpson reads the text of the otherspace within the story by gazing deeply at the portrait, he is compelled to become part of that text. During the act of reading, the reader who follows Simpson in his lunatic exploration thus experiences a textual

simulacrum of the pictorial space which Simpson transgresses in the story. What we have then is a story, a verbal text, which frames another text-the pictorial text of the otherspace rendered by a linguistic medium-and thereby foregrounds a specific model of its reading.

D. Barton Johnson has drawn attention to Nabokov's remark from a 1967 interview: "I think that what I would welcome at the close of a book of mine is a sensation of its world receding in the distance and stopping somewhere there, suspended afar like a picture in a picture: The Artist's Studio by Van Bock" (Strong Opinions, 72-3). Johnson saw in Nabokov's formulation, based on a painting by a fictitious Flemish artist, a model of his "aesthetic cosmology." The real pictorial subtext behind Nabokov's alleged painting is Jan Van Eyck's Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride (aka Wedding Portrait; The National Gallery, London). Johnson concluded that "the two paintings, [...], one imaginary and one real, constitute a concise paradigm of Nabokov's art: ut pictura poesis." Nabokov's lifelong interest in painting might in part be explained by the parallels he saw between the acts of reading a literary text and a pictorial text. In his Cornell lectures, Nabokov discussed this subject: When we

read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting (Lectures on Literature, 3).

An experience very similar to what Nabokov described in his lecture takes place during the act of reading "La Veneziana."

4. Bachman Defictionalized

In March of 1925, following the publication of "Bachman" in the Berlin Russian newspaper Rul' (The Rudder), Nabokov received a peculiar request from one Dr. Bernhard Hirschberg of Frankfurt a/M. Taking Nabokov's short story to be a memoiristic essay or obituary, Hirschberg asked for the permission to translate it into German to be published in "one of the local newspapers." Written in stilted Russian, in one instance bordering on being ungrammatical, the letter to Nabokov follows in a literal English translation:

Dr. med. Bernard HirschebergFrankfurt a/MK�rnerwiese 13

8 March 1928

Dear Sir!Having read your interesting article "Bachman," published in The Rudder, I would like to translate it and print in one

of the local newspapers. As far as I know, the German press has published virtually nothing about the late Bachman.

If you do not have anything against the request to translate your article, please let me know at your earliest convenience.

I remain sincerely yours,

Dr. med. Bernard Hirschberg

(March 8, 1925, letter in Vladimir Nabokov Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, container 8, folder 13).

One day Nabokov's reply might turn up in a German's archive-attached to a time-yellowed translation of "Bachman" and clipped from a culture section of a regional German newspaper.

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* I wish to thank the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies for facilitating my research with a Short-Term Grant during the summer of 1996. I record my gratitude to Mr. Dmitri Nabokov for the permission to access and quote from Nabokov's papers at the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (hereafter VN Berg) and the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (hereafter VN LC). The unpublished materials by Vladimir Nabokov are © copyright by The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. Unless a source of an English translation from the Russian is provided, the translation is mine and literal.

I gratefully acknowledge the help of Vladimir and Pavla Petkevic during my research trip to Prague in April-May 1993, and especially as concerns Nabokov's equivocal relationship with his sister Olga. I take full responsibility for the speculative link between Olga in the story "A Russian Beauty" and Olga Petkevic (n�e Nabokov).

Several works of biography and criticism, listed below in the order of their appearance, have contributed to the making of this piece: V. Stark, "Nabokov-Tsvetaeva: zaochnye dialogi i 'gornie' vstrechi," Zvezda 11 (1996): 150-56; Nikolai Raevskii, "Vospominaniia o Vladimire Nabokove," Prostor 2 (1989): 112-17; Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, New York, 1995; Ronald Hayman, A Biography of Kafka, London, 1996; Gennady Barabtarlo, "Prizrak iz pervogo akta," Zvezda 11 (1996): 140-45; Alan C. Elms, "Nabokov Contra Freud," Uncovering Lives: The Uneasy Alliance of Biography and Psychology, New York, 1994, 162-83; 277-9; Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes: La litt�rature au second degr�, Paris, 1982; Michael Sims, "The Metamorphosis of Franz K.," Darwin's Orchestra: An Almanac of Nature in History and the Arts, New York, 1997, 399-400; John Burt Foster, Jr., "Nabokov and Kafka," Vladimir E. Alexandrov, ed., The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, New York, 1995, 444-51; D. Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression, Ann Arbor, 1985; Leona Toker, Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures, Ithaca, 1988, 93-94; Charles Nicol, "'Ghastly Rich Glass': A Double Essay on 'Spring in Fialta'," Russian Literature Triquarterly 24 (1991): 173-84; Maks Fasmer [Max Vasmer], Etimologicheskii slovar' russkogo iazyka, 4 vols., Moscow, 1964-73; O.A. Kuznetsova, "Don Aminado," P.A. Nikolaev, ed., Russkie pisateli 1800-1917. Biograficheskii slovar', 2, Moscow, 1992, 156-57; Boris Tomashevskii, "Literatura i biografiia," Kniga i

revoliutsiia, 4 (1923): 6-9; Iu [rii]. N. Tynianov, "Literaturnyi fakt," Po�tika. Istoriia literatury. Kino, Moscow, 1977, 255-70.

The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols"by Alexander Dolininpage two of three

Let us see how this system works in "Signs and Symbols," a story that in comparison to "The Vane Sisters" presents a much more difficult case, because it alludes, both directly and obliquely, to several interpretative codes, and our primary task is to select the one that can be applied to a riddle hidden in the text. Critical attention so far has been focused, of course, on the "referential mania" of the insane protagonist, who believes 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 one another, 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 which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. <...> He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things (595-596).

Some critics argue that Nabokov, planting patterned, symbolically charged details, deliberately entraps the reader of "Signs and Symbols" into a sort of over-interpretation similar to the "referential mania" of the insane character, making us read the story as if everything in it were a cipher. Yet the idea of seeing a model for the reader's response in the boy's pan-semiotic approach to reality, however tempting, should be rejected from the very start for several simple reasons. First, "referential mania" is limited to natural phenomena (clouds, trees, sun flecks, pools, air, mountains) and random artifacts (glass surfaces, coats in store windows) but "excludes real people from the conspiracy," while the story deals with human beings in the urban setting and focuses upon cultural systems of communication and transportation: the underground train, the bus, the Russian-language newspaper, the photographs, the cards, the telephone, the labels on the jelly jars. The only exception is the image of "a tiny half-dead unfledged bird" helplessly twitching in a puddle "under a swaying and dripping tree"--a symbolic parallel to the sick boy's situation and his parents' perception of him.

Second, the boy's reading of the world is auto-referential and egocentric (every alleged signifier refers only to the boy himself), while the story concerns three major characters and a dozen minor ones, whether named or unnamed.

Last but not least, "referential mania," unlike the "allusions to trick-reading" in "The Vane Sisters," does not point at any applicable code, as the boy himself is unable to decipher secret messages: he surmises only their "theme" (himself), their intent (evil, malicious, threatening) and their validity (they misinterpret and distort), but not their actual content. So the description of "referential mania" can not serve as a "prompt" suggesting some way of identifying and solving a textual riddle; instead of providing a specific clue, it sets metafictional guidelines, introducing a group of semiotic motifs that refer to the structure of the text itself. If cleared of their psychiatric

smoke screen, the key words in the passage form a kind of instruction for the reader to "puzzle out" an inherent "system" of the story, to look for a "veiled reference" to the boy's fate--its central "theme," to "intercept" and "decode" some "transmitted" message containing "information regarding him," to crack a "cipher" encrypted "in manual alphabet." The boy's paranoia (and, by implication, a fallacy of symbolic reading) lies not in the processes of his thought, but in their misapplication: to comprehend any sign one must first ascertain the signifying system in which it functions.

The metafictional commentary is complemented by Nabokov's stock auto-allusions. It has been noted that the boy's cousin, a "famous chess player" (597), "is perhaps a projection of Luzhin in Nabokov's Defense, who is also a victim of referential mania."11 A metaphorical description of the boy's failed suicide as an attempt "to tear a hole in his world and escape" (595) parallels the final episode of The Defense in which Luzhin makes a "black, star-shaped hole" in the frosted window glass and "drops out of the game."12 In addition, the image of "wonderful birds with human hands and feet" that the boy drew at the age of six (597) can be interpreted as a "veiled reference" to Nabokov's Russian penname Sirin derived from the name of a fairy-tale bird with a human head and breast.13 This implies a connection between the character and the author of the story but, again, does not allow us to deduce a hidden event.

There is also a strong hint at a divinational code, as the three cards that slip from the couch to the floor are conspicuously named (knave of hearts, nine of spades, ace of spades) and form a standard fortune-telling packet or triad. If interpreted according to a traditional Russian system, they seem to foretell some tragic loss (ace of spades), grief and tears (nine of spades) with respect to a single young man (knave of hearts).14 At first glance, the triad refers to the boy and therefore predicts his imminent death, to be announced by the third telephone call. Yet in cardomancy, to quote the Encyclopedia Britannica, "the same 'lie' of the cards may be diversely interpreted to meet different cases" and much depends on the position of a card representing the object of fortune telling. It is significant that Nabokov's divinational "packet" of three cards is "laid" side by side with photographs of the couple's German maid Elsa and her "bestial beau," who in the context of the story personify forces of evil responsible for the suffering of the innocent, for the death of Aunt Rosa and "all the people she had worried about," and for the Holocaust. Their representations then should be regarded as an integral part of the whole "lie"--as quasi-cards standing for the "inquirers" of fortune telling. It is to the dismal fate of blondes Besties at the end of the World War Two that the ominous combination of spades refers: the cards foretell the "monstrous darkness" of disaster and death not to the boy and his parents but to their torturers and butchers, while the fate of the innocent remains untold.

The sequence of three cards and two photograph, however, brings us to the last potential code suggested by the text--to numerical cryptography and numerology. From the very start the narration in "Signs and Symbols" registers and emphasizes numbers (cf.: "For the fourth time in as many years," "a basket with ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars," "a score of years," "of forty years standing"); all the major incidents, images and motives in the text are arranged into well ordered patterns or series. There are allusions to and short sequences of three based on the universal paradigm of birth/life/death and corresponding to the three sections of the story. The couple lives on the third floor; they go through three misfortunes on their way to the hospital (Underground, bus, rain) and encounter three bad omens on their way back (a bird, a crying girl,

and misplaced keys); the name of Soloveichik (from the Russian for nightingale) the old woman's friend, is echoed twice in the truncated, Americanized versions Solov and Sol;15 as we have seen, three cards fall to the floor and, of course, there are three telephone calls in the finale.

Even more prominent are sequences of five, some of which result from addition (three cards + two photos; three "nightingale names" + two images of birds). The story begins on Friday, the fifth day of the week; the life of the couple has passed through five locations (Minsk, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig, New York); the woman looks at five photographs of her son that represent five stages of his descent into madness--from a sweet baby to a sour insane boy of ten, "inaccessible to normal minds"; in the end the father reads five "eloquent labels" on the fruit jelly jars--apricot, grape, beech plum, quince, and crab apple: a series that mimics the deterioration of the boy from the sweetest to the sourest (598-599).

At last, there is the longest and singular sequence of "ten different fruit jellies in ten little jars" (594), which is connected to a theme of birth (after all, it is the birthday present) and is mentioned five times in the text.16 Critics have noted that the recurrence of the motif and its conspicuous placement at the most marked points of the text--in the first paragraph, in the beginning of section two, and in the finale--suggest some symbolic significance, but so far have offered mostly vague and sometimes preposterous interpretations.17 Only Gene Barabtarlo, who was the first to notice that the five named flavors of the jellies "are arranged in the order of rising astringency and somehow answer the five photographs of her son that the woman examined an hour earlier," has ingeniously suggested that the set of ten jellies serves as "the key to an invisible over-plot" of the story, though he stopped short of using the master key to unlock a hidden fabula.18

Discussing the enigma of the little jars, it is necessary to keep in mind that the sequence of labels is "spelled out"19 only to the middle point, and we do not know what fruit comes after crab apple. In numerical terms it means that ten is presented here as the double of five, which implies the duality of being, its split into the known/unknown halves. The only thing we can more or less safely bet on is that the jellies in the jars from no. 6 on won't be bitterer than crab apple in the fifth one. If projected upon the life-stories of the insane boy and his parents, this duality infers a jarring question: is there anything for them beyond the misery of their present situation but "the monstrous darkness of death"? As in the case of the ten jars, we know the meaning of the five stages in their lives but do not seem to have any clue to their future.

However, I believe that there is such a clue in the story and that it is succinctly "spelled out" by the old woman when she answers two after-midnight telephone calls from a nameless girl:

"Can I speak to Charlie," said a girl's dull little voice."What number you want? No. That is not the right number." <...>The telephone rang for a second time. The same toneless anxious young voice asked for Charlie."You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing; you are turning the letter O instead of the zero." (598)

The very word "number" repeated three times by the old woman indicates that the reader should give more consideration to her seemingly casual remarks than it has been done in previous criticism. What is most amazing about the old woman's response is that she confronts the

nuisance as a kind of a numerical riddle. The woman actually subjects Charlie's number misdialed by the girl to scrutiny and notices that it differs from their own only by the presence of zero in it (in Arabic, by the way, zero means cipher). So she comes to the conclusion that the cause of the mistake is the replacement of the needed numeral by the letter O--or, in other words, a substitution of a sign for a symbol as, according to dictionary definitions, letters or alphabetical characters are signs while figures and numerals (ciphers) are symbols.

Looking for a plausible explanation of the wrong number, the old woman, in fact, draws attention to the properties of a standard American telephone dial as a crude coding system that consists of 10 (!) symbols (digits from one to zero) and 24 or 26 signs (the English alphabet, sometimes without Q and Z). Since every numeral on the dial from 2 to 9 is equivalent to three or four letters, it can be used for converting letters into digits and vice versa--that is, for enciphering and deciphering. While the woman converts a digit into the letter O, the reader can (and must) go backwards and find out what "cipher" the girl "is turning." With the help of a telephone, this riddle is easily solved: instead of the "empty" zero the girl dials six, which on the telephone dial corresponds to three letters--M, N, and O.

I don't think that the shadow of OMEN in this combination is just a coincidence, because if we look at the numerical value of letter O as a cipher, the girl's mistake becomes literally ominous (in the meaning of "having the significance of an omen"). She knows the correct number for Charlie,20 she is anxious to talk to him, she calls after midnight--which implies the matter is urgent--yet she dials a six instead of a zero not once but twice--which is hardly plausible. It seems that she is acting like a medium (hence her toneless voice), transmitting a secret message in code, the cipher 6, addressed directly to the old woman and her husband. The very fact that the misdialed digit is not named in the text but must be deduced by a simple decoding procedure turns her mistake (like most mistakes in Nabokov's fiction) into the most important clue leading us to the hidden central event of the story, to its "inner scheme."

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Notes

11. Larry R. Andrews, "Deciphering 'Sign and Symbols'," 145. See also: Pekka Tammi, Problems of Nabokov's Poetics: A Narratological Analysis (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1985), 344-345.

12. Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 254.

13. Cf. also Nabokov's self-portrait in his poem "Fame" that, to quote his note, contains an allusion "to the sirin, a fabulous fowl of Slavic mythology, and 'Sirin,' the author's penname": "To myself I appear as an idol, a wizard / bird-headed, emerald gloved, dressed in tights / made of bright-blue scales" (Vladimir Nabokov, Poems and Problems [New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.,1970], 105, 113).

14. It is interesting that in Mlle. le Normande's fortune-telling system, popular in Western Europe, the meaning of these cards is entirely different: the ace of spades represents a female inquirer, the nine of spades--a successful voyage, faithfulness or illusions, and the knave of hearts--love and happiness. See: Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, Prophetical, Educational and Playing Cards (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1912), 369-372.

15. This triad is charged with numerous possibilities for multilingual word-play. In Russian the initial solovei (nightingale), losing a syllable, turns into solov (a form of the adjective solovyi--dull, dazed, limp; cf. also the verb osolovet'--to become dazed) and then into sol' (salt). The paronomasia on solovei / osolovet' was used by Marina Tsvetaeva in her poem "A i prostor u nas tatarskim strelam" (1922): "Ne kurskim solov'em osolovelym." The word solov is a palindrome of volos (hair; cf. a line in Khlebnikov's palindromic verse "Koni, topot, inok:" "Solov zov, voz volos") as well as an anagram of slovo (word). In Nabokov's drafts of the second volume of The Gift, Fyodor puns upon slovo / solovyi, exclaiming: "O russkoe slovo, solovoe slovo..." (O the Russian word, the dull word...). In English solov can be read as so love while sol suggests solitude (from Latin solus as in the title of Nabokov's story "Solus Rex"), the sun (and gold as used in alchemy) and, palindromically, a loss. Therefore, the triad allows two contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, it parallels the boy's pitiful devolution from the "bird phase" to the dazed state of insanity and the ultimate loneliness of death but, on the other, heralds a metamorphosis through Logos and Love to the sun/gold of spiritual rebirth.

16. According to The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, ten "possesses a sense of totality, of fulfillment and that of a return to oneness after the evolution of the cycle of the first nine digits. The Pythagoreans regarded ten as the holiest of numbers. It was the symbol of universal creation <...> If all springs from ten and all returns to it, it is therefore also an image of totality in motion" (Jean Chevalier and Alain Cheerbrant, A Dictionary of Symbols. Translated from the French by John Buchanan-Brown [London, England; New York, N.Y., USA: Penguin Books, 1996], 981).

17. See, for example, Larry R. Andrews's strange idea that the jellies are linked to the parents' feelings of self-assurance and hence "are in some mysterious way a cause of the supposed death" (Larry R. Andrews, "Deciphering 'Signs and Symbols'," 140).

18. Gennady Barabtarlo, "Nabokov's Little Tragedies. (English Short Stories)," 92.

19. The choice of the word here is rather suggestive. Nabokov seems to play on several meanings of "spell out"--to read slowly and with difficulty, to find out by investigation, and to comprehend.

20. The man's name also hints at decoding, because Charlie is a communication code word for the letter c, which, in its turn, signifies a cipher or the numerical value of a cipher letter (for example O=6).

Signs and SymbolsVladimir NabokovIFor the fourth time in as many years they were confronted with the problemof what birthday present to

bring a young man who was incurably derangedin his mind. He had no desires. Man-made objects were to him either hivesof evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone could perceive,or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his abstract world.After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him or frightenhim (anything in the gadget line for instance was taboo), his parentschose a dainty and innocent trifle: a basket with ten different fruitjellies in ten little jars. At the time of his birth they had been married already for a long time; ascore of years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab grayhair was done anyhow. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women ofher age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was allpink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brooksideflowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the fault-findinglight of spring days. Her husband, who in the old country had been afairly successful businessman, was now wholly dependent on his brotherIsaac, a real American of almost forty years standing. They seldom saw himand had nicknamed him “the Prince." That Friday everything went wrong. The underground train lost its lifecurrent between two stations, and for a quarter of an hour one could hearnothing but the dutiful beating of one's heart and the rustling ofnewspapers. The bus they had to take next kept them waiting for ages; andwhen it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school children. Itwas raining hard as they walked up the brown path leading to thesanitarium. There they waited again; and instead of their boy shufflinginto the room as he usually did (his poor face blotched with acne,ill

-shaven, sullen, and confused), a nurse they knew, and did not carefor, appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attemptedto take his life. He was all right, she said, but a visit might disturbhim. The place was so miserably understaffed, and things got mislaid ormixed up so easily, that they decided not to leave their present in theoffice but to bring it to him next time they came. She waited for her husband to open his umbrella and then took his arm. Hekept clearing his throat in a special resonant way he had when he wasupset. They reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the streetand he closed his umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and drippingtree, a tiny half-dead unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in apuddle. During the long ride to the subway station, she and her husband did notexchange a word; and every time she glanced at his old hands (swollenveins, brown-spotted skin), clasped and twitching upon the handle of hisumbrella, she felt the mounting pressure of tears. As she looked aroundtrying to hook her mind onto something, it gave her a kind of soft shock,a mixture of compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the passengers,a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails, was weeping on the shoulderofan older woman. Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled RebeccaBorisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichik -in Minsk,years ago. The last time he had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor'swords, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded, had not anenvious fellow patient thought he was learning to fly -and stopped him.

What he really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper ina scientific monthly, but long before that she and her husband had puzzledit out for themselves. "Referential mania," Herman Brink had called it. Inthese very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happeningaround him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. Heexcludes real people from the conspiracy -because he considers himself tobe so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows himwherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, bymeans of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. Hisinmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darklygesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patternsrepresenting in some awful way messages which he must intercept.Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of thespies are detached observers, such are glass surfaces and still pools;others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchersat heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the pointof insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterprethis actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute andmodule of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very airhe exhales is indexed and filed away. If only the interest he provokeswere limited to his immediate surroundings -but alas it is not! Withdistance the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility.The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flitover vast plains; and still farther, great mountains of unbearablesolidity and height sum up in terms of granite and groaning firs theultimate truth of his being. IIWhen they emerg

ed from the thunder and foul air of the subway, the lastdregs of the day were mixed with the street lights. She wanted to buy somefish for supper, so she handed him the basket of jelly jars, telling himto go home. He walked up to the third landing and then remembered he hadgiven her his keys earlier in the day. In silence he sat down on the steps and in silence rose when some tenminutes later she came, heavily trudging upstairs, wanly smiling, shakingher head in deprecation of her silliness. They entered their two-room flatand he at once went to the mirror. Straining the corners of his mouthapart by means of his thumbs, with a horrible masklike grimace, he removedhis new hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate and severed the long tusksof saliva connecting him to it. He read his Russian-language newspaperwhile she laid the table. Still reading, he ate the pale victuals thatneeded no teeth. She knew his moods andwas also silent. When he had gone to bed, she remained in the living room with her pack ofsoiled cards and her old albums. Across the narrow yard where the raintinkled in the dark against some battered ash cans, windows were blandlyalight and in one of them a black-trousered man with his bare elbowsraised could be seen lying supine on a untidy bed. She pulled the blinddown and examined the photographs. As a baby he looked more surprised thanmost babies. From a fold in the album, a German maid they had had inLeipzig and her fat-faced fiance fell out. Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig,Berlin, Leipzig, a slanting house front badly out of focus. Four yearsold, in a park: moodily, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking away from

an eager squirrel as he would from any other stranger. Aunt Rosa, afussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world ofbad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths--until theGermans put her to death, together with all the people she had worriedabout. Age six -that was when he drew wonderful birds with human handsand feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, nowa famous chess player. He again, aged about eight, already difficult tounderstand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of a certainpicture in a book which merely showed an idyllic landscape with rocks on ahillside and an old cart wheel hanging from the branch of a leafless tree.Aged ten: the year they left Europe. The shame, the pity, the humiliatingdifficulties, the ugly, vicious, backward children he was within thatspecial school. And then came a time in his life, coinciding with a longconvalescence after pneumonia, when those little phobias of his which hisparents had stubbornly regarded as the eccentricities of a prodigiouslygifted child hardened as it were into a dense tangle of logicallyinteracting illusions, making him totally inaccessible to normal minds. This, and much more, she accepted -for after all living did mean acceptingthe loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case –merepossibilities of improvement. She thought of the endless waves of painthat for some reason or other she and her husband had to endure; of theinvisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of theincalculable am

ount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate ofthis tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed intomadness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners;of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have towatch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, asthe monstrous darkness approaches. IIIIt was past midnight when from the living room she heard her husband moan;and presently he staggered in, wearing over his nightgown the old overcoatwith astrakhan collar which he much preferred to the nice blue bathrobe hehad. "I can't sleep," he cried."Why," she asked, "why can't you sleep? You were tired.""I can't sleep because I am dying," he said and lay down on the couch."Is it your stomach? Do you want me to call Dr. Solov?""No doctors, no doctors," he moaned, "To the devil with doctors! We mustget him out of there quick. Otherwise we'll be responsible. Responsible!"he repeated and hurled himself into a sitting position, both feet on thefloor, thumping his forehead with his clenched fist. "All right," she said quietly, "we shall bring him home tomorrow morning.""I would like some tea," said her husband and retired to the bathroom.Bending with difficulty, she retrieved some playing cards and a photographor two that had slipped from the couch to the floor: knave of hearts, nineof spades, ace of spades, Elsa and her bestial beau. He returned in highspirits, saying in a loud voice: "I have it all figured out. We will give him the bedroom. Each of us willspend part of the night near him and the other part on this couch. Byturns. We will have the doctor see him at least twice a week. It does notmatter what thePrince says. He won't have to say much anyway because itwill come out cheaper."

THE REFERENTIAL MANIA OF"SIGNS AND SYMBOLS":READING NABOKOV'S SHORT STORYÁlvaro GARRIDO MORENO

Universidad de ZaragozaLife is a message scribbled in the darkAnonymousVladimir V. Nabokov,Pale FireIVladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov often expressed his feeling of intenseconfinement within the cell of artistic imagination:The type of the artist who is always in exile even though he maynever have left the ancestral hall or the paternal parish is a well-known biographical figure with whom I feel some affinity. (quotedin Tanner 1971: 35)1

This remark engages with a whole gallery of characters and narrativedevelopments in Nabokov's fiction which write and rewrite the sameclaustrophobic obsession of the individuals who experience intenseisolation of consciousness: either the mad artist like Cincinnatus, Fyodor,Sineosov, Van and Ada, Hugh Person or Krug, or else the criminal artistlike Alex, Rex, Hermann, Humbert Humbert or Van Veen. Consciousnessand subjectivity are for Nabokov the fundamental dimension of existence,the greatest and ultimate mystery, at the same time the scenario for bothfreedom and exile.2

Nabokov's fiction writes and rewrites the solipsisticstruggle for liberation from the constraints of consciousness throughimagination, through art as the only means of catching a glimpse oftranscendence. His belief in the primacy and universality of subjectiveexperience involves, in turn, a concomitant belief in the individualimagination (especially through art) as a primal source of truth; in aninterview he declared:Average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of indi-vidual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture(Tanner 1971: 33).The metaphors underpinning this statement are extremely revealing ofNabokov's conception, or rather fiction, of the artistic performance. Suchfiction, as I read it, presupposes a double division of experience. Theobjects of average reality are separated from the transcendental purifyingrealities they signify, and the individual consciousness is separated bothfrom average reality and from the transcendental realm of uncorruptedtruth. The act of individual creation based on these assumptions is an actthat brings about a change in man's relation to the world of average reality.It animates an otherwise inanimate texture, as it were, withoutanima,without life, that incurably rots and stinks —these words posit the need fora healing and purifying creation as an ethical imperative. Thus thesubjective process of creation animates, gives true life to a reality doomedotherwise to inertia and putrefaction in virtue of its averageness, itsstandardness, a coinage debased in the daily ex

change. Such a perceptionof reality results from the enactment of a struggle which may take the artistto the very brink of truth. The individual creator must avoid at all costs aperception which is average and must become sensitive to a texture that isnot commonly accepted or standardized —but which in fact is more real ortrue than average reality:I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters ofmy novels some treasured item of my past, it would pine away inthe artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although itlingered on my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appealhad gone and, presently, it became more closely identified with mynovel than with my former self, where it had seemed to be safefrom the intrusion of the artist. Houses have crumbled in mymemory as soundlessly as they did in the mute films of yore, andthe portrait of my old French governess, whom I once lent to a boyin one of my books, is fading fast, now that it is engulfed in thedescription of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own. The manin me revolts against the fictionist, and here is my desperate attemptto save what is left of poor Mademoiselle. (Nabokov 1960b: 95)The figure of the artist who partakes of some aristocratic disdain for themasses labouring heavily in more constricted and straitened versions ofreality matches the solipsistic consciousness in the works of Pound, Eliot,Woolf, Joyce or Faulkner. Nabokov's characters have their peculiarfeatures and inscribe peculiar sets of assumptions in his work, but if anybackground is needed for or against them, it is within this tradition thatthey fall. In fact, "Signs and Symbols" —signed "Boston 1948"— ispermeated by some features of the non-totalizable topography of classicalmodernism.3

This short narrative presents a decadent family: they are asterile old couple of Chekhovian exiles whose son is "incurably derangedin his mind"; their economical situation has brought about his internment ina sanatorium which is "miserably understaffed"; this damaged family makeends meet thanks to the charity of a rich relative, the husband's brother,presumably another Jewish emigrant who has been able to buy his way intothe American society and become a "real American." However, thesituation of this family has not always been so distressing and arduous: inthe old country, in Leipzig, he had been a "fairly successful businessman"and they enjoyed a comfortable life, for they even had a "German maid." IfI were to qualify this depiction of a family with one word —somethingwhich, of course, is unpermissible— an apt epithet might be"Faulknerian," or "Chekhovian": an elderly couple (the "silvery" beardedhusband needs a dental plate, suffers from a stomach disease and eats "palevictuals," his wife's "tired old heart" "trudges heavily upstairs"), too old tobe able to procreate any longer, whose phobic only son is driven to suicideby the claustrophobia of his obsession, present a landscape of hopelesssterility; they cling haggardly to their golden past: he has not been able tolearn to speak fluently the language of his new country; he has created adefence, as it were, against the corruption of his relief-giving memory: he

reads "his Russian language newspaper" and wears over his nightgown "theold overcoat with astrakhan collar" which he much prefers to his newbathrobe; she unsleeps the night examining old photographs. There issomething Eliotic, I feel, about the celebration of a life-returning spring ina world already enjoying death and avoiding natural regeneration: themother does not wear any makeup, unlike her neighbour, who rebelsagainst the poignancy of the "fault-finding light of spring days" with anawkward pink and mauve embalment and artificial flowers. The narrativesequentiality of "Signs and Symbols" is also inhabited by the structures ofFaulkner's, Woolf's or Joyce's novels: the narrator, the open ending, thetopography of narrative "clues." I will return to this when discussing theassumptions about the reading process which sustain "Signs andSymbols."However, the critical readings of Nabokov do not seem to agree as tothe presence of Anglo-Saxon modernist writing in Nabokov's text: it seemsthere is an uncanny tension in the pathos of his solipsistic characters. Thewriting of solipsism and of its transcendence through artistic imagination,through the animation of a subjectively perceived texture, is divided in"Signs and Symbols" —into signs and symbols. Nabokov's story inscribesthe affirmation of artistic "creative" language in a general economy thatprevents its affirmation.IIThe pathos of "Signs and Symbols" depends on and is constituted by thedramatization of the clash between different modes of perception andinterpretation of reality and their hierarchization, that is, between two waysof reading: the "average" reading and the "subjective" reading.4

The exile couple's son is secluded in a sanatorium because of hisstrange "system of delusions": "referential mania.""Referential mania," Herman Brink had called it. In these very rarecases the patientimaginesthat everything happening around him isaveiled referenceto his personality and existence. (Nabokov, SS54. My emphasis.)This boy is trapped in "a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions"whereby he considers the movement of trees, the sounds of the mountain,the surfaces of still pools and store windows to be the activity of an awfulconspiracy threatening his personality and existence. For him, "[e]verything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme"; for him,"phenomenal nature" is a huge coded message which, within the folds of itscoding, carries information regarding him; natural phenomena such asclouds, firs, rivers, pools, are veiled references, they are relational objectsintertwined through a strange hidden logic which withdraws them fromtheir literality in the realm of phenomenality in order to name what doesnot belong to this realm, to name this boy's ultimate truth. They areciphers, that is, messages whose referent is an

other message; they arefigures of his personality and existence. His reading of the world aroundhim is —as I read it—figural,as opposed to the average literal one, theone shared by, among others, his mother, scholars like Herman Brink whowrite papers "in a scientific monthly," and us, that is, the people who arenot incurably deranged in their minds. But we shall soon realize how theseassumptions or illusions are inmediately outplayed by this narrative —particularly the latter.The dramatization of the binary opposition real/fictional is to be foundat all levels: the son is caught by means of a dense tangle of illusions, offictional objects imaginedbyfigural language; he inhabits a fictional realmhe has brought about around him by subjectively animating average reality.Such dramatization leads logically to a consideration of figural languageand fiction as derivative activities that depend for their existence on theliteral and real ones. Moreover, their beauty and existence is threatened byliterality, in much the same way that beautiful weeds are menaced andmangled by the farmer:She thought of the endless waves of pain that for some reason orother she and her husband had to endure; of the invisible giantshurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculableamount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this ten-derness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed intomadness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unsweptcorners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer andhelplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leavemangled flowers in its wake as the monstrous darkness approaches.(SS 57)Creative imagination, fiction, figurality, are thought of by average minds asbeautiful weeds, parasitical, suspect, pernicious, secondary.Nabokov, then, has been often read as privileging —in the aristocratichierarchy-producing fashion referred to above— the second term in theseoppositions (figural and fictional), identifying them with the special gifts ofcreative imagination whereby the human mind may catch a glimpse of theultimate truth of his being, of transcendence. However, the pathos of"Signs and Symbols," as I read it, is somehow distanced, biased, is theecho of the pathos of the romantic isolation of a young imaginative mindbent on self-destruction — a recurrent theme in Nabokov's short stories(Boyd 1992: 550).5

Some statements produce a quaint weaving ofmeanings in the sorrowful portrayal of the son: he is a "prodigiously giftedchild" who "considers himself to be so much more intelligent than othermen." The hierarchization of this character, isolated, creative, pathetic, thetype of the Chekhovian decadent romantic artist, physically weak (he hadsuffered from pneumonia and insomnia), is disrupted at source, not only by

those mocking (remarkable) remarks, but by the pointing out of, andobedience to, a linguistic necessity: "Signs and Symbols" displaces andundoes the oppositions literal/figural and real/fictional which sustain thegiven order of priorities of logocentrism. The deviations of the son'sderanged consciousness are repeated by his mother: her son painfullyelaborates fictional patterns derived from the real ones around him —outsidehim,outsidelanguage— and whose theme is his own personalityand existence. But she is already trapped in the overwhelming law of theveiled reference:[I]t gave her a kind of soft shock, a mixture of compassion andwonder, to notice that one of the passengers, a girl with dark hairand grubby red toenails, was weeping on the shoulder of an olderwoman.Whom did that woman resemble? She resembled RebeccaBorisovna, whose daughter had married one of the Soloveichiks —in Minsk, years ago.(SS 56. My emphasis.)Her perception of the features of the woman who is sitting in front of her inthe bus leads her mind to "hook on" to a presence that is not part of herimmediate environment "[d]uring the long ride": the presence of RebeccaBorisovna, of her daughter, of a marriage, of the Soloveichiks, of longgone Minsk. It is the presence of an absence, it is a fictional presence; it isa story unleashed by the veiled reference to the physical appearance of awoman within a bus.The same logic which relates physical objects to a narrative account—to her past, to the clues of the existence to which her husband stubbornlyclings— of "incredibly detailed information regarding" her, is at workwhen she is examining the photographs from her old albums —in asituation of longed for isolation at night, alone in the living-room whereshe has pulled the blinds down. The coordination of the two activities inthe sentence "She pulled the blind down and examined the photographs,"creates an intimate link between these two modes of action, isolatingherself from outside activity to interpret the messages coded in and by herphotographs; in Nabokov's tale, isolation is somehow the condition ofintrospection —which much resembles her son's mania:From a fold in the album, a German maid they had had in Leipzigand her fat-faced fiancé fell out. Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig,Berlin, Leipzig, a slanting house badly out of focus. Four years old,in a park: moodily, shyly, with puckered forehead, looking awayfrom an eager squirrel as he would from any other stranger. AuntRosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in atremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancer-ous growths —until the Germans put her to death, together with allthe people she had worried about. Aged six —that was when hedrew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and sufferedfrom insomnia like a grown-up man. His cousin, now a famouschess player. He again, aged about eight, already difficult tounderstand, afraid of the wallpaper in the passage, afraid of acertain picture in a book which merely showed an idyllic landscapewith rocks on a hillside and an old cart wheel hanging from thebranch of a leafless tree. Aged ten: the year they left Europe. The

shame, the pity, the humiliating difficulties, the ugly, vicious,backward children he was with in that special school. (SS 56)The echoes, "silhouettes," or rather —to extend Nabokov in a Nabokovianway— the ghosts of modernist experimental stream (extreme?) ofconsciousness narrative devices "flit over" and within this quote. Thegrammatical structure of this paragraph creates —but also, by this verysame move, destroys— immediacy of experience by obliterating the termsusually sustaining the rendering of experience, by this detour of languagecalled zeugma. There are no verbs designating the physical activity of thiswoman while she examines each photo, her movements, nor is there any(literal) mention of the objects, of each fold in the album, each photo.Instead, the narrator's omnipresent words overlap, blur, embody the oldwoman's language —almost completely, for there is still the ironic distancemarked by "they"—, trying to efface the presence of outside reality inorder to release the contents of this mother's consciousness —by now, a setup familiar to us: the obliteration of phenomenality as a condition forintrospection and imagination— the activity of this special form ofimagination called memory. The law of the referential mania spreads itsimplications at every moment in this paragraph. The photographs, physicalobjects, "man-made" objects which copy —and distort dimensionally—physical objects, reveal incredibly detailed information regarding her.Moreover, she does not name these man-made objects by means of(supposedly) literal terms: she does not design them using the terms "aphotograph of ...." Instead, she names them directing her languagebackwards to the resources of memory, of imagination. It is not aphotograph of a woman and a man that falls out of the album: it is a"German maid they had had in Leipzig and her fat-faced fiancé"; such areading repeats the features of her son's mania, for the woman in thephotograph (later we know her literal name, Elsa) is read only in terms ofher past relationship to the family: a Germanmaid they had hadin Leipzig;a maid, in Leipzig, terms —like any other— which designate and dependon a relation, the professional engagement of that woman with the family,with the past of the family. Furthermore, the man who appears in thephotograph is read only in relation to the family, for he isher fiancé,another relational term : this man is the boyfriend of a German maid of thefamily when they lived in Leipzig. Moreover, the qualifier "fat-faced"(later "bestial") testifies to the inevitability of a subjective "slanting" in anyreading or interpretation of the world: probably we could not properlylocate these words within Elsa's mind —if we were allowed to do so, whichwe are not.The dictatorial partiality of subjectivity describes a picture of "rockson a hillside andan old cart wheel hanging from the branch of a leaflesstree" as an "idyllic

landscape" [my emphasis]. The imprisoning anddevouring nature of subjectivity inhabits the following sequence: "Theshame, the pity, the humiliating difficulties, the ugly vicious backwardchildren he was with in that special school." This loving mother's words forthe sanatorium —"special school"— are euphemisms for (and used by)institutions that treat mental deviation, and have the effect of creating anopaque screen over what would otherwise be dangerously unsettlingdefinitions. She applies to her son's former fellow-patients a group of termswhich easily apply to her own beloved child: his son's "poor face" is "illshaven," "blotched with acne," words the reader readily relates to termslike ugly or vicious; besides, the other children are depicted as"backward," a word which is at odds with the description of her son asbeing "totally inaccessible to normal minds," falling in the region of theinstitutional euphemistic strategy above mentioned.The (non)logic of the veiled reference is also at work when the photo-graph of the "wild-eyed old lady" directs the mother's consciousness to anarrative of "bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths,"the German invasion and the Soah; this woman is calledAuntRosa. Thephotograph of a boy, "hiscousin "[my emphasis] —again relationalterms—, reveals a glimpse of a brilliant career as chess player. Aphotograph of her six-year-old son brings about —and around— the storyof his quaint drawings and his distressing insomnia.The overwhelming pointing-to-something-else of both readings prob-lematizes the ontological status of reality. In the first section of "Signs andSymbols" referential mania was named in —by— a non-manic reading, ina reading that denominated natural phenomena by their literal averagename. The link between an object and his name was safe there, stable, thisstability being (institutionally) guaranteed by the capacity to detectdeviations from literal reading, from the perception of things as they reallyare, the capacity to perceive and name, or rather, to both name andperceive a fir as a fir, a mountain as a mountain, a store window as a storewindow, and not "sullenly confuse" them with anything else. Her son'sbehaviour is "a very rare case," which sets him apart from average modelsof conduct. It is a "system of delusions," "a dense tangle of logicallyinteracting illusions." The wordsillusionanddelusionde-nominatedifficulties, mistakes, deviations from average perception which,nevertheless, by their relational and derived (and derivative) nature,involve average straightforward perception. They are produced, accordingto literal reading, by the impossibility of reading literally, that is, they are

produced by figural reading. Literal terms are disfigured, drawn away fromtheir realm and thrown aside —de-ranged— into a different realm: theobjects of phenomenal nature are displaced from their natural location inthe ordered system of average reality to designate such things as giants,conspiracies or spies. This displacement, which feeds on the firm ground ofliterality, is nothing but a momentary —as the semantic play fieldsuggested by "illusion" and "delusion" indicates— swoon of language, afainting fit, a sudden malaise which feeds on the texture of literality andderanges this healthy system. The illusions and delusions of figurality andfictionality are —I am echoing J. Hillis Miller (Hartman 1979: 271-273)—something of a parasite, like "beautiful weeds" that uncomfortably appearin the tidy rows of crops within the economy of the farm. However, theseweeds are sometimes indistinguishable from the flowers of crops. Weedsand crops grow entwined in a mutual invasion because both have the samenatural drive, to the same beating energy which fights bravely to emergeeverywhere, menacing and squeezing in the stability of the farmer's caringselection or animation of a specific vegetal texture within the manifoldrealm of nature. Literality and figurality somehow blur the frontiers of theiropposition, and even reverse its terms, when objects of phenomenal nature,such as photographs, are thrown beyond their realm to designate theobjects of this peculiar form of fiction we call memory —in Nabokov'sworks, memory requires the animation of creative imagination (Clark1986: 108-109). Thus, reality and fiction subjectively intermingle in thedense tangle of levels of meaning deployed by the term "imagination."There is no way out of figurality, nor is there a way out of fiction. We —I,the reader, Nabokov, the mother, the son— are plotting beings(proleptically and analeptically), and also plotted beings, for we inhabit theplots of other beings. In "Signs and Symbols" the metaphoricaldenomination "the Prince," which carries with it the seed of the fictionalmilieu inhabited by the now depending husband, becomes later the usualname for his brother:". . . We will have the doctor see him at least twice a week. It doesnot matter what the Prince says. He won't have to say much anywaybecause it will come out cheaper." (SS 58)Yet there is a contradiction —one among many— in what I have saidso far about Nabokov's emphasis and aristocratic affirmation ofimagination as the only means to prevent reality from rotting away, sinceimagination, figurality, fictionality, appear to be not the means but thecondition of any reading of reality, that is, of reality. The inscription andreversal of the logocentric hierarchization literal/figural and real/fictionalin "Signs and Symbols" produce a double, paradoxical logic: if averagereality, the reality of normal minds is also the product of imagination,resulting from the animation of a subjectively perceived texture, governedby the deferring strategy of the veiled reference, then any attempt to(pathetically) favour subjectivity and imagination over normal reality issmashed, "crushed." The pathos of this story urges the reader to grant a

privilege to solipisistic imagination while the possibility of such granting iseliminated.IIIThe animation of a subjectively perceived texture is for Nabokov a matterof finding unexpected relationships and patterns between and within unno-ticed details. In one of his first poems the Apostles are disgusted by the vi-sion of worms leaking from the swollen corpse of a dog, but Christ is theonly one who marvels about the pure whiteness of the corpse's teeth (Boyd1992: 318-319). The narrators ofTransparent Thingsrecognize in a pencilthe presence of the tree and, furthermore, the moment of its falling on.Nabokov luxuriated in the perception of the unforeseen qualities andcoincidences in the geometry of snow, in a pothook, in the wing of abutterfly, in the chink between the inner shutters:On a summer morning, in the legendary Russia of my boyhood, myfirst glance upon awakening was for the chink between the innershutters. If it disclosed a watery pallor, one had better not openthem at all, and so be spared the sight of a sullen day sitting for itspicture in a puddle. How resentfully one would deduce, from a lineof dull light, the leaden sky, the sodden sand, the gruel-like mess ofbroken blossoms under the lilacs —and that flat, fallow leaf (thefirst casualty of the season) pasted upon a wet garden bench.But if the chink was a long glint of dewy brilliancy, then Imade haste to have the window yield its treasure. With one blow,the room would be cleft into light and shade. The foliage of birchesmoving in the sun had the translucent green of tone grapes, and incontrast to this was the dark velvet of trees against a blue of ex-traordinary intensity, the like of which I rediscovered only manyyears later, in the montane zone of Colorado.From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with arectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. Ifmy first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought wasfor the butterflies it would engender. (Nabokov 1960b: 119-120)6

The watery pallor of a line of light is also a veiled reference to a "sullen"future. The brilliancy of the glinting chink is the embryo of myriads ofbutterflies. A choir of sounds becomes related backwards over a past timespan to some paragraphs within a book, and forward to a future delightfulexperience:After making my way to some pine groves and alder scrub I cameto the bog. No sooner had my ear caught the hum of diptera aroundme, the guttural cry of a snipe overhead, the gulping sound of themorass under my foot, than I knew I would find here quite specialArctic butterflies, whose pictures, or, still better, nonillustrateddescriptions I had worshipped for several seasons (Nabokov 1960b:138).Patterns that relate elements from different regions of experience areinherent in, and created by, figurality as a mode of perceivingrelationships, of finding parallels, of sending alternatives. The

experiencing of patterns cannot escape from figural language.The perception of patterns of Nabokov's characters is also displayedby the narrator of "Signs and Symbols." This narrator, whoseconsciousness is almost always married to the consciousness of thecharacter of the mother and speaks for it without ever using "I," also usesfigures to render the existence of unexpected patterns. The modernist newsense of the spatial dimension, which was a reading of the New Scienceand of Bergsonian relativism, is thematized in "the last dregs of the daywere mixed with the street lights" or "he removed his hopelesslyuncomfortable dental plate and severed the long tusks of saliva connectinghim to it." The characterization of the father as a pathetically decadentfigure is powerfully inscribed in the following figural (metaphorical andmetonymical) sequence:A few feet away, under a swaying and dipping tree, a tiny half deadunfledged bird washelplessly twitchingin a puddle.During the long ride to the Underground station, she and herhusband did not exchange a word; and every time she glanced athis old hands (swollen veins, brown-spotted skin), clasped andtwitchingupon the handle of his umbrella, she felt the pressure ofmounting tears. (SS 54. My emphasis)For Nabokov —if we allow ourselves another (the same) swoon intogeneralization— the perception of patterns is not just a ludic investigation.It is not a merely hedonistic practice, but the way to avoid putrefaction:I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet,after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the patternupon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment oftimelessness —in a landscape selected at random— is when I standamong rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, andbehind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It islike a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A senseof oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it mayconcern —to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tenderghosts humouring a lucky mortal. (Nabokov 1960b: 139)This densely figural fragment has something of the account of a mysticalexperience. The observation of patterns is the "hard to explain"interpretation of the veiled reference to this "something else" which standsbehind aesthetic joy and ecstasy, which secures a contact with either "thecontrapuntal genius of human fate" or with "tender ghosts humouring alucky mortal," that is, a glimpse of transcendence, of true reality. As myepigraph puts it, "Life is a message scribbled in the dark" (Cooper 1983:17). The attempt to transcend solipsism is one of Nabokov's major themesand constantly writes the beating existence ofsomething else,oftranscendental existence. The narrator inThe Gift:The unfortunate image of a "road," to which the human mind hasbecome accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion:we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other worldsurrounds us always and is not at all the end of some pilgrimage. Inour earthly house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until

a given time, is closed; but air comes in through the cracks.(Nabokov 1979: 549)Oxford English Dictionaryoffers for symbol:symbols usually refer religious dogma,truths,they are reflections or expressions of thelogos(vgr., 1,1a, 2a); on oneoccasion (2b), thesesymbols are intimately connected with transcendence, becoming changed into thebody andblood of Christ.There remain also, as I conceive it, some other basic (seemingly) distinctive features. All themeanings offered for the wordsignshare the notion of a mark attached for technical uses, asa result of a deliberate act of stamping, printing or imprinting in order to distinguish theobject or referent from the others, basically through the inscription of one's relation to thisobject. As for the wordsymbol, this relationship seems to be given (and not deliberatelyattached), dictated by some utterly different design, by the obedience to a foundinglogoswhich can only present itself through representation by symbols — which is definitelycomplicated by the fictional character pointed to by the sequences "formal authoritativestatement orsummary" and "a formula, a motto, a maxim;occas.asummary, a synopsis."This divergence vanishes, or rather becomes unreadable, when we read in SIGN 9, 10a and10b, that the intimacy with some transcendental otherness also inhabits the nooks andnoughts (and notes) of the word "sign," or when we read in SIGN 11 how this conventionalmark, when born on a banner or a flag also stands for something inmaterial or abstract, as abeing, idea or quality, or else when we read in SYMBOL 3 that this conventional mark isalso conventionally used among disciplines (including and included in SIGN 2c, 11a and11b). The apparent disparity between these two terms appears to be groundless in "Signs andSymbols," though neither "Signs and Symbols" nor my reading can avoid its constantinscription. The wordssignandsymbolform (without forming) a dense tangle of allusionswhich is at once tangled and disentangled by their definitions in a dictionary, whoseexpression is, it may be, the odd relationship they maintain in the title "Signs and Symbols,"where they are linked by "and," and at the same time separated by this"and" which abolishesany identity between the two.8. Which, tempted by a "referential de Mania" for contingent riddling phonetic associa-tions and considering who this "me" is —a Spanish student writing his essay for an Englishgraduate seminar— foreshadows a rather gloomy future for me. This somehow affirms in"Signs and Symbols" the (un)definition of life as the constant loss of mere possibilities of im-provement, or as J. Hillis Miller reads this: "To live is to read, or rather to commit again andagain the failure which is the human lot" (1986: 67).

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