How the past possesses the present in Signs and Symbols

  Ahhh Nabokov, we meet again. I thought I was done baffling in the intricate details that seem to point in so many different directions, but here I am again. As I have mentioned before I read this piece the first time for a Mythologies class last semester. My past, the first reading of this short story, has once again collided with my present, this class. So here I go...

First I shall (following Dante's four levels of interpretation discussed in class) look at this story literally. Literally Signs and Symbols is about a unnamed, older couple with a teenage son who suffers form referential mania. The parents decide upon a seemingly harmless gift to give the boy for his birthday, 10 jars of fruit jellies in assorted colors, and make their way to the insane asylum. The couple encounters much trouble in their journey (it says "That Friday, their son's birthday, everything went wrong.") and when they arrive the nurse tells them that their son had tried to commit suicide for the second time. Discouraged, the couple returns home after noticing several odd things along the way; "a tiny unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle" and "a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails-- was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman." When they get back to the apartment the woman goes out to buy some fish leaving the man locked out. They eat dinner, read the Russian-language newspaper and the man goes to bed. The woman looks through photo albums and sees pictures of the boy, "a German maid they had had in Leipzig," and "Aunt Rosa." She reflects on the boy and her life until the man comes out crying that he can't sleep because he is dying. He says it is very important that they get the boy out "Otherwise, we'll be responsible." The woman agrees and then receives two phone calls from someone looking for "Charlie." After explaining what the caller was doing wrong and hanging up, the phone rings a third time.
Literally this is a sad odd sort of story about an older couple with lots of specific details. That's it.

Next I'm going to dive in to the more complex of Dante's levels of interpretations allegorical/spiritual, moral, and analogical. I am not completely confident in my own definitions of his levels so bear with me if I confuse them.

Next the allegorical... There are lots of potential allegories in Signs and Symbols so I will only give a few. One example of an allegorical interpretation is that the "tiny unfledged bird (that) was helplessly twitching in a puddle" is actually the boy drowning in a sea of insane ciphers he must interpret. Also the "girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails... weeping on the should of an older woman" might be a representation or foreshadowing of the woman after her son's presumed suicide. The woman mentions "beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer" which might be an allegory for life and death; the "beautiful weeds" being those with mental problems specifically, or people in general, and the farmer being death who ultimately kills the weeds. One last example would be the final kind of fruit jelly that the father examines before the third phone call: crab apple. Apples have stereotypically been associated with the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good an evil in the garden of Eden. Knowing this one could say that the crab apple jelly represents a fall, a gaining of knowledge, a death, which alludes to the presumed successful suicide of the boy.  

My moral interpretation of Signs and Symbols is that the story is telling us NOT to do exactly what I am doing now; reading in to this. I think Nabokov is clever in writing a story with so many seemingly significant details that can be interpreted in to telling us not to try and interpret the world too far. In the story the boy's condition of referential mania is described by saying in his world "everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme." In essence, the boy thinks everything in the world has some hidden meaning that pertains to him. By the end of this story it becomes clear what happens to people who live life this way (death, or suicide), so clearly this is a warning against such a lifestyle.

In class we talked about a couple anagogical interpretations while in class. The one we discussed last year in mythologies what that this story is actually a displacement of the story of Icarus. The boy wants to "tear a hole in the world and escape" and "thought he was learning to fly" both which can be linked to how Icarus and his father were trying to escape from the city by flying away. We also talked about how this could be a displacement of the story of Job in the Bible. In the Bible Job looses everything in his life while still holding on to his belief in God. The story says "That Friday, their son's birthday, everything went wrong." The couple runs in to a series of bad things that day, ending with the death of their son. Just like Job, they lost their family. Both of these interprtations fit the story and there are probably many others. 

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

Is this the end? Have I reached the beginning? I know more now about the illusions behind Nabokov's Signs and Symbols than I did after my first reading and class that used this short story but I hesitate to say that I am at the end of my exploring. There must be more secrets that Nabokov is hiding. For now I will leave those unseen signs and symbols for another day.