The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols" 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.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."
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).
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