Signs and symbols nabokov meaning

Vladimir Nabokov – “Signs and Symbols”

KEY TERMS:

Formalism (New Criticism) – In literary theory, formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. The formalistic approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context.

Formalism rose to prominence in the early twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on the artist and individual creative genius, and instead placed the text itself back into the spotlight to show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it. Two schools of formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from the end of the Second World War through the 1970s.

Features? – word choice, symbolism, POV, setting, tone, metaphor, diction, etc., etc.

Reader-Response Criticism – is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader (or "audience") and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts "real existence" to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored. New Criticism had emphasized that only that which is within a text is part of the meaning of a text.

TEXTUAL EVIDENCE:

Protagonists:

· “At the time of his birth they had been married already for a long time” (1108)

· “now they were quite old” (1108)

· “She wore cheap black dresses” (1109)

· “Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the fault-finding light of spring days” (1109)

· “Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was now wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty years standing. They seldom saw him and had nicknamed him ‘the Prince’” (1109)

Referential Mania: (a fictional illness)

· “The system of his delusions had been the subject of an elaborate paper in a scientific monthly, which the doctor at the sanitarium had given to them to read. But long before that, she and her husband had puzzled it out for themselves. “Referential mania,” the article had called it. 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 each other, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His in-most 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 that he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. All around him, there are spies. Some of them are detached observers, like glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others, again (running water, storms), are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him, and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away” (1109-1110)

Plot events:

· “That Friday everything went wrong” (1109)

· “The underground train lost its life current between two stations” (1109)

· “The bus they had to take next kept them waiting for ages; and when it did come, it was crammed with garrulous high-school children” (1109)

· “It was raining hard as they walked up the brown path leading to the sanitarium” (1109)

· “instead of their boy shuffling into the room as he usually did (his poor face blotched with acne, ill-shaven, sullen, and confused), a nurse they knew, and did not care for, appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life” (1109)

· “They reached the bus-stop shelter on the other side of the street and he closed his umbrella. A few feet away, under a swaying and dripping tree, a tiny half-dead unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle” (1109)

· “The last time he tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness” (1109)

· “he would have succeeded, had not an envious fellow patient thought he was learning to fly – and stopped him” (1109)

· PHOTO ALBUMS – “As a baby he looked more surprised than most babies. From a fold in the album, a German maid they had had in Leipzig and fat-faced fiancé fell out. Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin, Leipzig, a slanting house badly out of focus” (1110)

· “Aunt Rose, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans had put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about” (1110-1111)

· “Age six – that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet, and suffered from insomnia like a grown-up man” (1111)

· “This, and much more, she accepted – for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case – mere possibilities of improvement. 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; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer” (1111)

The ending:

· “The telephone rang. It was an unusual hour for their telephone to ring” (1112)

· Wrong number – “Her hand went to her old tired heart” (1112)

· “It frightened me,” she said (1112)

· “The telephone rang a second time. The same toneless anxious young voice asked for Charlie” (1112)

· “You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing: you are turning the letter O instead of zero” (1112)

· “While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and re-examined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, red little jars. His clumsy moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels: apricot, grape, beech plum, quince. He had got to crab apple, when the telephone rang again” (1112)

JQ – How does this story manipulate the reader’s interpretation through the use of “signs and symbols”? How does Nabokov put the reader in a “suicidal” state of mind by the end of the story?