Dear List,
I wonder if anyone has a
shareable copy on-line of William Carroll’s “Nabokov’s Signs
and Symbols.” It was published in A Book of Things about Vladimir
Nabokov, edited by Carl Proffer, 203-17. Ann Arbor:Ardis, 1974.
Part One: Paragraph Three:
We have
reason to surmise that the story takes place during a rainy Friday in spring.
I’m not as certain that the old couple’s mentally deranged son is
sixteen-years old (four times x 4?) and had been committed to an understaffed
sanatorium from age 12.
When the young man’s parents set out
for their birthday visit they had trouble with the “underground train” (on
paragraph four it gets designated as the “subway”) that “lost his life current
between two stations” for fifteen minutes. Their bus was late to arrive and
noisy (garrulous high-school adolescents in a red bus were also elements of
disturbance in “The Visit to the Museum”).
After another long wait
the parents were informed that their boy had once again attempted on his life
(on paragraph six, we learn that the boy might have, by great “inventiveness”,
envisioned himself as, perhaps, endowed with wings like an angel, and he
wanted “to tear a hole in his world and escape”).
The couple leaves the clinic with their present, fearing it might get
mislaid.
The father’s heart ailments (intimated as the “dutiful beating of one’s heart” after the interval in
which the train “lost its life current” and the
menace of a stroke we shall read about later on, may be linked to his son’s
mental “fits” (these may be compared to Shade’s in Pale Fire, Pnin’s and
even to Kinbote’s nebular anguish.)
The word "station" might be
suggestive of some kind of stage in a mental transformation that gives rise to a
"syncope" (like a loss of life current in the interval bt.two
stations)
Paragraph Four:
Wife and
husband share an umbrella and she takes his arm before they cross the street to
take the returning bus to the subway. The old man was upset and resonantly
cleared his throat at regular intervals. A half-dead bird that had fallen from
his nest was “helplessly twitching in a
puddle.”
I’m doubtful about relating the unfledged bird to the
sick boy. The first is surely beyond help, either from its parents or from any
kind of external "beneficent" intervention.
The old man’s hands are visible
and similarly “twitching upon the handle of his
umbrella” (paragraph five). This comparison enhances the idea of
helplessness of the very young and the very old.
Jansy Mello