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Signs and Symbols, Or the Nabokovian Unconscious

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Signs and Symbols, Or the Nabokovian Unconscious Signs and Symbols, or the Nabokovian Unconscious Sigi Jottkandt, in RABATE, J.M. (Ed.). (2019). Knots: Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003002727 “In the beginning was the telephone. We can hear the telephone constantly ringing, this coup de telephone which plays on figures that are apparently random but about which there is so much to say.” - Derrida, Ulysses Gramophone Since its first publication in The New Yorker in 1948, Nabokov's short story “Signs and Symbols” has become one of his most critically celebrated, if famously cryptic, tales. This is largely due to a suggestion Nabokov made to his editor, Katherine A. White, that the story contains an encoded meaning. As Nabokov famously explained, “Signs and Symbols” and “The Vane Sisters” are texts in which “a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one” (Nabokov, Selected Letters 117). But while Nabokov, also famously, divulged the secret of “The Vane Sisters” as an acrostic message encrypted in the first letters of each sentence in the final paragraph, – “Icicles by Cynthia, Meter from me. Sybil” – the “second (main) story” of “Signs and Symbols” remains as yet undeciphered despite the best efforts of the critical tradition.1 The critical detective work focuses on the identity behind the third telephone call. As is well known, “Signs and Symbols” ends with three phone calls – two wrong numbers and a third unanswered one that rings off the tale. In the first two, a girl's “dull little voice” asks to speak to “Charlie.” Crucially, however, the third caller remains a mystery: are we to understand this as the same young woman trying again, despite having had her dialing error already explained to her by the mother (“I will tell you what you are doing: you are turning the letter O instead of the zero”)? Is it a missed message from the hospital informing the parents about their son's successful suicide this time? A call from the couple’s son himself perhaps, who has escaped from the hospital and is now on the run? Or, as in Alexander Dolinin's ingenious reading, a ciphered message of reassurance from the (dead) son calling in from the other world through the number 6? (Dolinin n.p.) One should recall that Nabokov himself had little patience for reading methods that treat words and images merely as signs pointing towards a secondary, “symbolic” signification. Reviewing W.W. Rowe’s Nabokov's Deceptive World (1971), Nabokov is ferocious in his critique: 1 See for example the competing readings in Leving. The various words that Mr. Rowe mistakes for the “symbols” of academic jargon, supposedly planted by an idiotically sly novelist to keep scholars busy, are not labels, not pointers, and certainly not the garbage cans of a Viennese tenement, but live fragments of specific description, rudiments of metaphor, and echoes of creative emotion. (Nabokov, Strong Opinions 305) “The notion of symbol itself has always been abhorrent to me,” he informs us. If we leave aside for a moment the implied reference to Joyce, it is Nabokov's characterization of Freud – the clear occupant of the “Viennese tenement” – as exemplifying detested “symbolic” modes of reading that I wish to pursue initially. For in its claim to detect in one's ordinary speech an encoded message about what polite society throws out, namely sex, psychoanalysis seems to be the worst offender of this type of over-reading. And certainly, Nabokov's repudiation of Freud is legendary. All throughout his essays and his novels, Nabokov takes enormous delight in poking fun at the “Austrian crank with a shabby umbrella” (Nabokov, Strong Opinions 116). His novels are peppered with thinly veiled Freudian “symbols,” which Nabokov also mockingly points out to readers: “We must remember,” Humbert Humbert advises, “that a pistol is the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father's central forelimb” (Nabokov, Lolita 196). But what I would like to explore is what happens if Nabokov's baroque anti-psychoanalytic posturings turn out to have been a distraction – a magician's trick, as it were – designed to focus attention away from he and Freud (as well as Jacques Lacan) have in common. For it is not only their mutual interest in sex – and especially that “nicest” science (Nabokov, Ada 213), incest – that they share. It is also, as the anagram suggests, Freud’s and Nabokov’s central investment in language as the site of puns, double meanings, homophony, jokes – of writing itself as the material inscription of letters. Given these significant points of intersection, how are we to account for Nabokov's legendary antipathy to the talking cure? In his perceptive discussion of this relation, Leland de la Durantaye remarks on the crucial difference of their respective ‘styles.’ He observes that while Nabokov and Freud are equally fascinated with the particularities of the individual, psychoanalysis is driven to subsume them within larger, overarching narratives such as the family romance (de la Durantaye, “Nabokov and Freud” 62). Because of this tendency, Freudian psychoanalysis would be anathema to a writer for whom the essence of art “dwells in the details”(“Nabokov and Freud” 69). Accordingly, in Nabokov’s opinion, psychoanalysis has “something very Bolshevik about it” – there is “an inner policing . symbols killing the individual dream, the thing itself' (“Nabokov and Freud” 61). And admittedly, some of Freud’s statements in his lecture on the dreamwork do read as bad caricatures. It is not only the “pistol” that represents the male genital, one learns in Freud’s Tenth Lecture from his 1920 lecture series, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (through which Nabokov may in fact have first encountered the Viennese quack's work2), but various other objects do as well, forming a compendium of phallic dream symbols, which Freud lists as follows: In the first place, the holy figure 3 is a symbolical substitute for the entire male genital. The more conspicuous and more interesting part of the genital to both sexes, the male organ, has symbolical substitute in objects of like form, those which are long and upright, such as sticks, umbrellas, poles, trees, etc. It is also symbolized by objects that have the characteristic, in common with it, of penetration into the body and consequent injury, hence pointed weapons of every type, knives, daggers, lances, swords, and in the same manner firearms, guns, pistols and the revolver, which is so suitable because of its shape (Freud, General Introduction 60). Freud goes on to explain that these “symbolic” objects include a number of other representatives whose attributes are also evidently shared with the male member: faucets, water cans, fountains, as well as its representation by other objects that have the power of elongation, such as hanging lamps, collapsible pencils, etc. That pencils, quills, nail files, hammers and other instruments are undoubtedly male symbols is a fact connected with a conception of the organ, which likewise is not far to seek (60). Next come references to flight (a figure for “erection”), teeth (“A particularly remarkable dream symbol is that of having one’s teeth fall out, or having them pulled”), clothing (“the cloak represents a man, perhaps not always the genital aspect”), as he warms to his topic: The shoe or slipper is a female genital. Tables and wood have already been mentioned as puzzling but undoubtedly female symbols. Ladders, ascents, steps in relation to their mounting, are certainly symbols of sexual intercourse. [...] The breasts must be included in the genitals, and like the larger hemispheres of the female body are represented by apples, peaches and fruits in general. [...]. The complicated topography of the female genitals accounts for the fact that they are often represented as scenes with cliffs, woods and water, 2 De La Durantaye cites an index card marked “Freud“ in the New York Public Library's Berg collection which reads “Ever since I read him in the Twenties he seemed wrong, absurd, and vulgar.” while the imposing mechanism of the male sex apparatus leads to the use of all manner of very complicated machinery, difficult to describe (61). Reading Freud's litany of sexually-charged dream images alongside Nabokov's “Signs and Symbols,” one wonders if whether Katharine White's proposed (but rejected) subtitle for the tale – “a Holiday Excursion into the Gloomy Precincts of the Modern Psychiatric Novel” – was not so far off the mark after all, for all of these “symbols” are liberally sprinkled throughout Nabokov's (conspicuously tripartite) tale3. For in it one reads how the “underground train” (a piece of Freudian “complicated machinery”) “lost its life current” (Nabokov, Stories 598). How the father first opens then closes his umbrella (599) (“sticks, umbrellas, poles, trees, etc.”). How the son’s gesture is (crucially mis-)understood as attempted flight (599). There is a laborious stair climb: “He walked up to the third landing” [...] he sat down on the steps” (600); a scene of tooth removal: “Straining the corners of his mouth [...] with a horrible masklike grimace, he removed his new hopelessly uncomfortable dental plate and severed the long tusks of saliva connecting him to it” (600); a vision of cliffs: “an idyllic landscape with rocks on a hillside” (601); blossoms: “mangled flowers”4 (601), a coat: “wearing over his nightgown the old overcoat with astrakhan collar” (601); a family member nicknamed the Prince: “In our families we refer to our children as princes, the eldest as the crown-prince” (598). Paper, tables and books – Freud's symbols for women – also make their appearances in the references to playing cards, the photo album, the (threatening) wallpaper, the labels on the fruit jellies (600-601).
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