Nabokov is unconcerned with a clear delineation of internal (psychological) and external (natural) worlds. Instead he creates a multiplicity of fictional worlds made strange from both internal and external worlds. Let us take his short story ‘Signs and Symbols’ (1948) as an exemplar text in this respect. We fail if we interpret ‘Signs and Symbols’ as a mere window into an external world (as in the Realist mode) and we likewise fail if we interpret the story as a transcription of an internal world (as in the Modernist project). The suspension above this dichotomy is the only place where satisfactory meaning can be found.
This necessitates a severing of the link between signifier and signified, and a redrawing of tenuous strands in many directions. That we cannot say for sure what the third phone call at the end of the story signifies is entirely the point; the multiplicity of possible signifieds suspends us from any one concrete correspondence to a World—internal or external.
Thus, we move from the modernist’s concern with duration and the internal world—Woolf’s ‘luminous halo’—to an erasure of that world entirely. This zeroing of ‘authentic’ internal reality is not a simple return to realist external Reality either, but rather an unmooring of the concept from either the subjective or objective realm: “reality”. Writer Meghan Vicks quotes Nabokov:
“Reality,” wrote Nabokov in his “Afterword” to Lolita (1955), is “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes” [...] Nabokov insist[s] on the impossibility of separating fiction from reality. (71)
We can understand style and form—that is, Word—as generating meaning (World) rather than merely communicating it. The poet or writer then becomes the precondition for the human; the Word the precondition for the World. Notice that this framework says nothing yet about whose perspective this World is from, it is not prima facie from the perspective of either a character, omniscient narrator or author.
Techniques of perspective and focalisation are used to suggest internal worlds of characters, but there are tensions within these constructions which destabilise any such interpretation. The journey to and from the sanatorium is from the mother’s perspective, internally focalised. Nonstandard grammar and word choice are designed to reflect the language immigrants often display, as in ‘already’ and ‘anyhow’ in the following excerpt:
At the time of his birth they had been married already for a long time; a score of years had elapsed, and now they were quite old. Her drab gray hair was done anyhow. She wore cheap black dresses. (172)
The voice of the son comes through in the passage describing his illness.
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. (174)
But ultimately, that we do not know whether the boy and his parents are deluded in thinking the world hostile to them undermines this seeming construction of internal/external divides.
But we need not do away with World altogether: this higher view of a vague yet intricate interplay of signs could itself signify something—a transcendental signified. Vicks identifies this axis around which everything in “Signs and Symbols” turns as Nothingness itself. Cipher, zero and nothing are all signifiers for this Nothingness.
The three main characters are absences: they have no names, no colours, and almost no life (ghostly deathlike appearances of the older couple, the son is institutionalised). That all the minor characters are given names (the Prince even has two!) heightens the void of namelessness which the main characters find themselves in.
The son’s referential mania positions him as another nothing, a lack, an absence which is the transcendental signified which all signifiers circle. The only meaning salvageable from any signifier is from the structure of the system in which it finds itself. Vicks writes that ‘it is the gap in the system, and the lack of an absolute significance, that allows for the proliferation of patterns that make meaning.’ (105)
Viewed in this way, the son is a parable—a metaphor of himself. By participating in a referential mania of our own by interpreting the text—following the signs, decoding the ciphers—we draw him into a “reality”, one of the many infinite “realities” which nothingness, through human freedom, spawns.
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As Shklovsky demands of the true artist, Nabokov certainly ‘makes the world strange’. Appearing in ‘Signs and Symbols’ are objects and people which should be familiar to us—trains, birds, fish dinners, parents and their children—yet they are all described in unfamiliar ways: the train has ‘lost its life current between two stations’, the only sounds remaining beating hearts and rustling newspapers; the bird lays ‘helplessly twitching in a puddle’; the fish is mere ‘pale viticules’ gummed with the toothless mouth of a father who ‘moans’ and ‘staggers’.
The function of this estrangement is twofold: to draw attention to form, and to prolong the duration between apprehension and understanding—Shklovsky’s intrinsically aesthetic process of perception.
The boy suffers from delusions where he imagines all signifiers in the World (save from other people) signify something to do with him. Perhaps he is so punished because of the rigidity of his signifier/signified schema, leaving no room for any aesthetic experience. As a young child he drew ‘wonderful birds with human hands and feet,’ indicating a playfulness with signs and what they signify (no such creature exists in nature!) yet this was also the start of his wretchedness, the insomnia of ‘a grown-up man.’ Perhaps he models all of our descents into adulthood, becoming less playful and more fixed in our cognition.
There are also multiple, single-sentence digressions from the main story to describe completely unrelated scenes. The ‘tiny half-dead unfledged bird … helplessly twitching in a puddle’; the ‘black-trousered man … lying supine on an untidy bed’. Because of their intense foregrounding, and their highly visual nature, these small scenes loudly announce themselves as signs to be interpreted, yet their disparate nature (and indeed the entire story’s enigmatic construction) seem to resist it.
Other clues that critics have attempted to decode in the story include the ten jars of jelly, the names of the minor characters (many are literary references, or personal references to Nabokov’s life), sequences of three (three sections, three main characters, three phone calls, and so on), and the many implicit and explicit references to numbers. These are all fascinating patterns, but it seems to me that by participating in this referential mania, we are missing the point. I think critic David Richter puts it well that by drawing us in to a mania of interpretation, only to make none available, Nabokov ‘makes the reader his ironic victim’. (Leving 224)
Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Johnathan Cape, Beacon, 1967.
Levie, Sophie and Puck Wildschut. “Narrating the unspeakable. Person marking and focalization in Nabokov’s short story ‘Signs and Symbols’.” Journal of Literary Semantics, vol. 43, no. 2, 2014, pp. 87-108. https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2014-0007
Leving, Yuri, editor. Anatomy of a Short Story : Nabokov's Puzzles, Codes, Signs and Symbols. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=943633.
Nabokov, Vladimir. ‘Signs and Symbols’ in The New Yorker. May 7, 1948. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/05/15/symbols-and-signs.
Shklovsky, Viktor. ‘Art as Technique’ in A Theory of Prose. 1917. Acessed at: https://www.paradise.caltech.edu/ist4/lectures/Viktor_Sklovski_Art_as_Technique.pdf.
Vicks, Meghan. Narratives of Nothing in Twentieth-Century Literature. 2011. U Colorado, PhD thesis. CU Scholar, https://scholar.colorado.edu/downloads/fq977t83q.