Mr. Stadlen's comments of 12.16 raise some important points in approaching Nabokov's fiction, particularly in marking the distinctions between different styles of narrative voice. The answer to "Why believe even the first sentence...?" is simply that in the case of an omniscient narrator, the reader has little choice. We can, and must, listen closely and sceptically to a Humbert or a Kinbote. They both have agenda's of their own. An omniscient narrator does not. In authorial terms, an untrustworthy narrator is only possible if there is an alternative narrator available. What one would be asking for, in essence, would simply be an entirely different story. An omniscient narrator requires the writer to count on the reader's coming through with the old 'willing suspension of disbelief' stuff.
 
The "incurable madness" of the young man is a condition we're obliged to accept at face value, just as we are the statement that the father's dentures are "hopelessly uncomfortable."  Is the dental plate really beyond hope? Cannot the man get used to it in time? Maybe. But we can't let a rampant literal-mindedness dog us through every such statement. This applies most importantly to the "inaccessibility to normal minds" of the young man's delusions. Dr. Brink is a professional ( the story gives us no reason to suppose otherwise) and the young man's parents have "puzzled out" his condition. To others, though, the young man's delusions are beyond the comprehension of lay people not familiar with psychosis. 
 
What is most engaging about S&S is that it takes place in a recognizeably Nabokovian world, but one from which the sun -- sol -- is now distant and removed. As in Lolita, a casually dressed man is glimpsed through a window, but not for a moment is he mistaken for a nymphet, as happens to H. Humbert, who experiences a "rich flavor of Hell" when the illusion becomes a man in shirt sleeves. An eager squirrel, such as abound in Pnin's world, makes an appearance, but here the boy turns away his gaze. There is a famous chess player, but where Luzhin's world was systematic to the nether pole of lunacy, this fictional world is chaos. The wallpaper causes fear, and patterned wallpaper haunted the fever dreams of young Pnin. There are humiliating difficulties in leaving wartime Europe, just as there were for Pnin and Pnin's creator (the Nansen, or better say nonsense, passport). And, John and Sybil Shade tried to regard warnings of what would come as signs of a prodigiously gifted child. But in S&S we have a deranged son instead of a unprepossessing daughter.
 
There is nothing to suggest that the young man has been institutionalized out of embarrassment either to "the prince" or the young man's parents. The prince's feelings are not described. And anyone who has spent a period of a week or so as sole caregiver to a paranoid schizophrenic adult in an unsecured private home can tell you that it is exhausting and frightening, and gives one a sharp understanding of the value of psychiatric facilities.
 
To the narrative challenge of S & S, it would seem to strain a point to say a contradiction exists between the young man's parents difficulty in selecting a gift for him because he "has no desires," and the statement five paragraphs later that what the young man "really wanted" was to tear a hole in his world and escape. The second statement is clearly in response to a fellow patient's thought that the young man was learning to fly. This is not a contradiction between having no desire that a birthday gift would satisfy, and an apparent desire to die.
 
The problems VN has set himself in writing S & S would be formidable to any storyteller. Notice the doctor's describing a previous suicide as "a masterpiece of inventiveness." Such a statement really does contradict what we know of the young man who is a helpless victim of a hostile universe. Art and artifice are the last things of which he is capable. But VN answers the contradiction in a wonderful metaphor of this world's "incalculable amount of tenderness" as "the beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer -- the reaper -- who casts his simian stoop over us all, beauties and beasts alike, mangled flowers that await the darkness. And within this is the understanding that the humblest, homeliest of us, in acts of compassion, and in hope when there is no hope take on dignity, if not beauty. The mother, trying to advise the caller on her mistake, is heroic. The father, with his bad dentures, old overcoat, and bristling chin, the mother with her cheap black dresses and old photos of a dead past, still insist on love, even when it has died down now to ten little bright pots of jam. They travel by train and by bus across town to take a gift to a son who cannot possible understand what they have done. And their reward for their late-night renewal of hope and the decision to bring their son home, out of harm's way, is the inexorable ringing of a phone that, no matter who the caller, will never bring them one syllable of good news. The abject tenacity of love is the only message they'll ever get, or give.
 
 
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Donald B. Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 9:59 PM
Subject: Fwd: Re: Signs and Symbols: Soloveichik



----- Forwarded message from STADLEN@aol.com -----
    Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 09:22:20 EST
    From: STADLEN@aol.com

> Returning back to Signs and Symbols, can anyone explain the pattern of
> names: Mrs. Sol (the next door neighbor?) and Dr. Solov (family's doctor)
> surrounding, in the story line, Soloveichik (the one whom daughter of
> Rebecca Borisovna married in Minsk)? Should we believe to scientific monthly
> article (authored by Dr. Brink) and to the parents that real people are
> excluded from the 'referential mania' conspiracy? I could almost believe it
> if not for this chain of names flagging something in the story.
>

Why should we believe even the first sentence of this story? What does it
mean for someone to be "incurably deranged in his mind"? I ask this in all
seriousness as a psychotherapist, so-called. Someone like Nabokov who writes
about,
and even impersonates, as narrator, what we may loosely, or not so loosely,
call madmen, has to decide, or at least decide not to decide, whether these
persons are responsible agents subject to the moral law, or some kind of
subhuman
whose actions are not, in a true sense, actions at all, but merely the outcome
of some process gone wrong in the human-looking entity that still bears a
human name. Nabokov meets this challenge magnificently, by making it crystal
clear, both within his fiction (for example, in "Despair", "Lolita" and "Pale
Fire") and outside it (for example, in his preface to "Despair" and in "Strong
Opinions"), that he sees his madmen as moral agents. It is true that, at times,
Nabokov seems less certain of this position, as when he says that Raskolnikov
should be medically examined. But Hermann, Humbert and Kinbote would be of no
interest if they were mere automatons, lacking human autonomy and
responsibility.

So who is this narrator who tells us at the outset that the son in "Signs and
Symbols" is "incurably deranged"? I would not believe this if told it by a
psychiatrist or psychotherapist about a real person. Why should I believe it
here?

Similarly with the young man's allegedly being "inaccessible to normal
minds". If this were true, how could the self-styled "normal minds" know, for
instance, that the "inaccessible" one has "no desires"? Indeed, how could the
learned Dr Brink write his paper about him?

All we can say from the narrator's account is that the young man has been
deposited in the "sanatorium" -- though why, if he is "incurable"? Presumably
because he is an embarrassment (evidently "the Prince" wants him to be there and
is paying). But evidently Aunt Rosa didn't worry about him (although
admittedly this "inaccessib[ility]" is a later development, in the United
States),
because all those she worried about were put to death by the Germans. She
worried
about real things: train accidents, bankruptcies, cancer.

The untrustworthiness of this narrator is apparent from the contradictory
sentences: "He had no desires", and "What he really wanted to do was to tear a
hole in his world and escape".

Who is making these contradictory attributions? The first appears to be the
narrator's endorsement of an attribution by both parents. The second appears to
be the narrator's endorsement of an attribution by the mother, or perhaps the
endorsement of the mother's endorsement of an attribution by the doctor.

Such is the spell of this mere unsubstantiated assertion about the young
man's inaccessibility and incurablity that, as far as I know, nobody has
suggested
a simple possible explanation of the third telephone call. It appears to be
easier for people to envisage the young man's posthumously affecting somebody
else's telephone call than to think that he might simply make one himself,
while still alive.

These parents, who supposedly know that their son has no desires although he
is inaccessible to their normal minds, seem curiously uncurious about him.
They do not even ask the nurse how he had tried to kill himself. The mother
merely reflects on what the doctor had told her about the last attempt.

What makes readers so certain that the young man could not have been
uncertain in his "suicide attempts"? If he is such a genius, surely his second
attempt
should have succeeded, after the bad luck of a patient stopping his last
attempt?

Why is it so clear that the young man does not want to come home? Why should
we accept the (unattributed) assertion that he wants to "escape" from the
"world" rather than from incarceration in a "sanatorium"?

Is it not at least possible that he can only get unobserved access to a
telephone after midnight, or that he has escaped from the "sanatorium", or that
he
has "telepathically" or intuitively or calculatingly realised it may have
started to dawn on his parents (after four years, and after several suicidal
gestures by himself) that he might actually be better off with them?

I know there are other dimensions and depths to this story, but let us as a
precondition "get real" about what goes on in the families of people who are
alleged to be "inaccessible" and "incurably deranged" in their minds.

For those who would like the young man not to have killed himself, and would
prefer the third telephone call still to be from the
sign-instead-of-symbol-dialling girl, because the only alternative they can
envisage is an official
call announcing his suicide, please note that this would entail, as Alexander
Dolinin indicates but, oddly, does not mention, the girl's dialling three
uncalled-for sixes -- the ominous mark of the Beast.

Anthony Stadlen

----- End forwarded message -----

In a message dated 16/12/2004 16:01:55 GMT Standard Time, chtodel@gss.ucsb.edu writes:

Returning back to Signs and Symbols, can anyone explain the pattern of
names: Mrs. Sol (the next door neighbor?) and Dr. Solov (family's doctor)
surrounding, in the story line, Soloveichik (the one whom daughter of
Rebecca Borisovna married in Minsk)? Should we believe to scientific monthly
article (authored by Dr. Brink) and to the parents that real people are
excluded from the 'referential mania' conspiracy? I could almost believe it
if not for this chain of names flagging something in the story.


Why should we believe even the first sentence of this story? What does it mean for someone to be "incurably deranged in his mind"? I ask this in all seriousness as a psychotherapist, so-called. Someone like Nabokov who writes about, and even impersonates, as narrator, what we may loosely, or not so loosely, call madmen, has to decide, or at least decide not to decide, whether these persons are responsible agents subject to the moral law, or some kind of subhuman whose actions are not, in a true sense, actions at all, but merely the outcome of some process gone wrong in the human-looking entity that still bears a human name. Nabokov meets this challenge magnificently, by making it crystal clear, both within his fiction (for example, in "Despair", "Lolita" and "Pale Fire") and outside it (for example, in his preface to "Despair" and in "Strong Opinions"), that he sees his madmen as moral agents. It is true that, at times, Nabokov seems less certain of this position, as when he says that Raskolnikov should be medically examined. But Hermann, Humbert and Kinbote would be of no interest if they were mere automatons, lacking human autonomy and responsibility.

So who is this narrator who tells us at the outset that the son in "Signs and Symbols" is "incurably deranged"? I would not believe this if told it by a psychiatrist or psychotherapist about a real person. Why should I believe it here?

Similarly with the young man's allegedly being "inaccessible to normal minds". If this were true, how could the self-styled "normal minds" know, for instance, that the "inaccessible" one has "no desires"? Indeed, how could the learned Dr Brink write his paper about him? 

All we can say from the narrator's account is that the young man has been deposited in the "sanatorium" -- though why, if he is "incurable"? Presumably because he is an embarrassment (evidently "the Prince" wants him to be there and is paying). But evidently Aunt Rosa didn't worry about him (although admittedly this "inaccessib[ility]" is a later development, in the United States), because all those she worried about were put to death by the Germans. She worried about real things: train accidents, bankruptcies, cancer.

The untrustworthiness of this narrator is apparent from the contradictory sentences: "He had no desires", and "What he really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape".

Who is making these contradictory attributions? The first appears to be the narrator's endorsement of an attribution by both parents. The second appears to be the narrator's endorsement of an attribution by the mother, or perhaps the endorsement of the mother's endorsement of an attribution by the doctor.

Such is the spell of this mere unsubstantiated assertion about the young man's inaccessibility and incurablity that, as far as I know, nobody has suggested a simple possible explanation of the third telephone call. It appears to be easier for people to envisage the young man's posthumously affecting somebody else's telephone call than to think that he might simply make one himself, while still alive.

These parents, who supposedly know that their son has no desires although he is inaccessible to their normal minds, seem curiously uncurious about him. They do not even ask the nurse how he had tried to kill himself. The mother merely reflects on what the doctor had told her about the last attempt.

What makes readers so certain that the young man could not have been uncertain in his "suicide attempts"? If he is such a genius, surely his second attempt should have succeeded, after the bad luck of a patient stopping his last attempt?

Why is it so clear that the young man does not want to come home? Why should we accept the (unattributed) assertion that he wants to "escape" from the "world" rather than from incarceration in a "sanatorium"?

Is it not at least possible that he can only get unobserved access to a telephone after midnight, or that he has escaped from the "sanatorium", or that he has "telepathically" or intuitively or calculatingly realised it may have started to dawn on his parents (after four years, and after several suicidal gestures by himself) that he might actually be better off with them?

I know there are other dimensions and depths to this story, but let us as a precondition "get real" about what goes on in the families of people who are alleged to be "inaccessible" and "incurably deranged" in their minds.

For those who would like the young man not to have killed himself, and would prefer the third telephone call still to be from the sign-instead-of-symbol-dialling girl, because the only alternative they can envisage is an official call announcing his suicide, please note that this would entail, as Alexander Dolinin indicates but, oddly, does not mention, the girl's dialling three uncalled-for sixes -- the ominous mark of the Beast.

Anthony Stadlen