Referential Mania and the Literary Critic: Symbols and Signs in Valdimir Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs”

Sigmund Freud is often attributed with saying, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Nabokov could’ve said, “Sometimes a wrong number is just a wrong number.” I am utterly convinced Nabokov functioned on a level “hardened as it were, into a dense tangle of logically interacting illusions, making them totally inaccessible to normal minds.” The man wrote both a brilliant novel about playing chess and the most lyrical novel ever written on the topic of child molestation under the argument that art can make anything beautiful. It can. This piece is about art being used to say nothing at all, but saying nothing lyrically.

“Symbols and Signs” kept me up half the night, typing over Facebook chat with my literary cohort. He and I read A Handmaid’s Tale and discussed Feminist Theory on a Friday night over Facebook instead of going out. We live for this stuff. Yet, I expressed complete vexation over being unable to grok Nabokov. I read it over and over looking for these signs and symbols, from the obvious allusion to the mother seeing “a tiny unfledged bird was helplessly twitching in a puddle” a symbol of her son floundering helplessly in his own mental illness, to the more subtle symbols of death scattered into the tale the mother dressed in black, the train “lost its life,” the bird (again) dying in the puddle. Try as I might, I could not make sense of the three phone calls at the end of the story.

         I thought to link this story back to spring break when my best friend and I staggered several miles back to her house from a party at two am. We walked silently over the hardened crust of snow covering Marquette, a trail made for us by other travelers between mountainous snow banks. In our tired inebriated state we began to puzzle out mysterious text message on her phone. We did not know the number, but my friend confessed the same creep sent her messages on New Year’s. The message said he knew where she lived and he wanted to come over. My friend began to worry and then the mysterious messenger began to call. My friend yelling into the receiver (not quite in caps but bolded) “who is this?”  I took the phone and affected what I hope a firm and maternal tone telling the calling to desist at once or we would report him to her service provider. In my rum-drunk mind this made perfect sense and the ordeal, now over would make a lovely anecdote later.

We arrived at my friend’s house to find a drunken man long red and black flannel shirt standing in the bathroom located directly through the kitchen pissing with the door open. We could see him clearly from the sun porch. The male roommate of the house then ushered him out. My friend had dated this flannel-wearing-stranger several months back. He couldn't keep his drinking within respectable levels (the bar for “respectable" drinking in Marquette, Michigan is pretty low. The next night I would be at the same bar with a local priest who then heard confessions early the following morning. My pious mother urged me to see him but I don’t believe you can start a confession “So padre about last night at the Ore Dock…well you know, you saw.”)

      In our panic my friend and I tried to make meaning of the two am messenger. In my literary panic I tried to make sense of Nabokov. In literature the adage “if a gun is written into a scene it better go off” is almost an unbreakable law. We come to expect the pieces of a story to fit together. I wanted it to make sense I developed a “Referential mania” of my own:

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. If only the interest he provokes were limited to his immediate surroundings, but, alas, it is not! With distance, the torrents of wild scandal increase in volume and volubility. The silhouettes of his blood corpuscles, magnified a million times, flit over vast plains; and still farther away, great mountains of unbearable solidity and height sum up, in terms of granite and groaning firs, the ultimate truth of his being.

       I just wanted to know what the damned phone calls meant! They have to mean something they are in the story! In the story the son is suffering to make sense of his fractured life. As a child he is pulled helplessly from place to place, often in exile with his family. His aunt is killed by the Germans. He believes everything is related that the inhumanities of war and his humanity are linked. It drives him mad that he cannot make sense of the world. It drives critics mad when they cannot make sense of the story. This is Nabokov’s intent. The story is the symbol of the theme in the story. It’s written to arouse “Referential Mania.”

       Nabokov never said much about this piece. I broke down and Googled it, something I never do for short stories class (I’m sorry Keith! I was a woman on the edge!). He is very veiled about this piece. He said simply that two stories were going on at once. He would not say what they were. I do believe the phone calls mean nothing. As all phone calls at two am mean nothing. As life may very well mean nothing, but has lyrical moments.