The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols"
by Alexander Dolinin
page three of three

In the context of "Signs and Symbols," with its emphasis on numerical sequences and patterning, the transmitted six acquires several meaningful connections and implications. It should be noted at once that the ciphered message comes after midnight, when Saturday, the sixth day of the week, has already begun. The Holocaust background of the story suggests an association with the Star of David, a six-pointed symbol that signifies a union of man with a divine principle. The cipher obviously alludes to the photo of the boy "aged six <...> when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man," which not only evokes his dream of a flight and a bird-headed Sirin, but also echoes the old man's insomnia during the immediate present of the narration. What is even more significant, though, is the relation of the sixth slot on the ten-digit telephone dial to the set of ten jars and, by implication, to the future of the boy and his parents. It parallels the sixth, unread "eloquent label" of the series that comes after "crab apple" and presumably promises a sweeter continuation21--the next stage of metamorphosis that will follow the misery of madness, persecution, old age, and despair. The cipher seems to tell the old woman (and the reader) that her fears (and ours) for "the fate of tenderness" and love in the world are premature, and that her thinking of death as "monstrous darkness" is shortsighted. In other words, it informs her (and the reader) of the central event of the fabula--the eventual death of the boy, though not as annihilation, the meaningless and empty zero, but as transformation, the mystery of rebirth (hence the motive of birthday and the "conspicuous" birthmark in the final paragraph), the meaningful, albeit unnamed "sixth step" in the open, incomplete, unfolding sequence.

The last question to be answered is who is sending the secret message from the other world. The text itself offers the reader only two options. We can choose either the boy or Aunt Rosa--an old lady who "had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths--until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about" (597). The characterization of Aunt Rosa gives some ground for supposing that she is trying to intervene from the beyond and to warn her relatives about a death in the family--all the more so that a parallel to Aunt Maud's sending encoded messages in Pale Fire is self-evident. Yet the connection between the telephone code and the birthday present points to the boy, whose mind is felt in the cunning use of the available signs and symbols. His obsession with codes, alphabets, veiled references, and secret messages makes him capable of inventing an ingenious and simple method to transmit the news of his rebirth, using the available means of communication and the set of ten jars chosen for him as a token of love and care--the last symbolic bond uniting him and his parents. If the boy has escaped, flown away from the prison of his madness and reached a mysterious beyond, in Nabokov's world this would imply that he has regained and expanded his consciousness, and with it, his ability to love, to feel compassion. He sends the message to his parents at a moment when they are planning a reunion with him, and the cipher six reciprocates their selfless sacrifice, indicating that the reunion will soon happen--only not in this life.

This reading of the story is strongly supported by its poetical subtext, alluded to at the end of the second part when the old woman is thinking 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; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches" (597). The image of helpless, innocent children as beautiful but useless flowers mowed or reaped by the simian farmer echoes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "The Reaper and the Flowers," which Nabokov must have read in his childhood (a volume of Longfellow's complete poetical works is listed in the catalogue of V. D. Nabokov's St. Petersburg library):

There is a Reaper whose name is Death,
And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,
And the flowers that grow between.
<...>
"My Lord has need of these flowers gay,"
The Reaper said, and smiled;
"Dear tokens of the earth are they,
Where He was once a child."

"They shall all bloom in the fields of light,
Transplanted by my care,
And saints, upon their garments white,
These sacred blossoms wear."

And the mother gave, in tears and pain,
The flowers she most did love;
She knew she should find them all again
In the fields of light above.

Oh, not in cruelty, not in wrath,
The Reaper came that day;
'Twas an angel visited the green earth,
And took the flowers away.22

In the final analysis, the inner scheme of "Signs and Symbols" is, mutatis mutandis, similar to that of "The Vane Sisters," though the earlier text is much more dramatic and artistically complex. While "The Vane Sisters" seems to have been composed for the sake of an elegant puzzle, the elegant riddle in "Signs and Symbols" was composed for the sake of the narrative. Discovering and solving it does not undermine existing ethical, historicist and psychological interpretations but challenges stale clichés of reader-response criticism. Those who refuse to look for a hidden closure beneath the deceptive openness of "Signs and Symbols" are more guilty of a "referential mania" than their opponents because they, like the insane boy, believe that everything in the world created by Nabokov refers to them and they are free to project their own doubts, uncertainties, and fears upon it. As "clouds in the staring sky" do not "transmit to one another" any information regarding the deranged boy, so Nabokov's texts with an "inside" do not refer to the smug, theory-clad critic--but only to themselves and their creator, though they do allow a "peep unto glory" for the reader who is ready to accept and obey the rules of their game.

21. The list of five jellies by itself looks rather artificial and because of that requires serious examination. Curiously enough, in all editions of the story there is a misprint in the third letter of the third label--beech plum instead of the correct beach plum--but it is impossible to tell whether this was intended or not. As Carol M. Dole observs, "the last letters of the four jellies in the list (apricot, grape, beech plum, quince) form the word theme" (Carol M. Dole, "Innocent Trifles, or 'Signs and Symbols'," Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. XXIV, No.3 [Summer 1987], 303-305), but again this could be a coincidence. If it is indeed an anagram, one should not overlook the fact that last letters of crab apple would form the beginning of a word in an unfinished phrase--most probably to be (as an answer to Hamlet's question), being (the last word of section two), or beyond. It is tempting to conjecture something like "[the] theme's a beyond" using the last letters of a plausible list such as cherry, mango, lemon, guava, mixed berries.

22. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poetical Works in Six Volumes (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), I, 21-22. The poem was inspired by Henry Vaughan's elegy "They are all gone into the world of light!," a meditation on "beauteous death" and after-life that could be a source for Nabokov's image of an "unfledged bird" under a tree that, as we can guess, fell out of its nest. Cf.: "He that hath found some fledged bird's nest, may know / At first sight, if the bird be flown; / But what fair well, or grove he sings in now, / That is to him unknown. // And yet, as Angels in some brighter dreams / Call to the soul, when man doth sleep: / So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes, / And into glory peep" (Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Classics, 1995), 247).

23. See: Michael Wood, The Magician's Doubts, 72.

24. "Signs and Symbols" is not the first text by Nabokov in which a wrong number is connected to the theme of communication with the dead. In Chapter Five of The Gift, such a call triggers Fyodor's fatidic dream of his father's return. The next morning Fyodor finds out that "the luckless person who was getting their number by mistake, had rung up the previous night: this time he had been tremendously agitated, something had happened--something which remained unknown" (Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift [New York: Vintage Books, 1991], 355-356).