A. Stadlen comments on Rilke's stories about an
omniscient God once so absent-minded that he couldn't return a
lost bird to its original forest. He explains that God, in the
Torah, puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself not to flood the world
again...So even on the traditional belief that God is the narrator of the Torah
(the five books of Moses), God the narrator explicitly describes himself as
in need of the reader even to remind him of his own name. He is some way short
of omniscient. He is not Aristotle's unmoved mover. Rabbi Abraham Heschel calls
him the most moved mover...So why should even a narrator who does not use the first
person be thought of as omniscient, if God doesn't claim to
be?
Jansy Mello: I'm almost certain that I understand
Nabokov's hints about "postustoronnost" ( "the other-world") and enjoy how they
gained literary expression in his various works. Your quote about God as
"the most moved mover" is very beautiful and also revelatory
of your vision. I believe in psychoanalysis, but I don't see the point of
discussing Freud when I know VN might have invented "unconscious motives and
symbols" as a trap constructed with the information he had at that
time about Freud.
In a way I could say that my faith lies in the
"omniscient narration" that is peculiar to the
unconscious... Nevertheless, it seems that we can agree
about the vagueness of label such as "omniscient narrator", specially
when he speaks in a singular first person.
In "Signs and Symbols" Nabokov allied two strategies. We know
that realistic stories are most often open and leave the reader wondering
about "what will happen next". In these the world of the story coincides
with the world we experience. Fantastic stories take us to a world with unknown
rules and codes and we frequently learn beforehand about "future"
( the story is closed, as VN once wrote about "Lolita"). In such
circumstances the reader is left wondering about "what is actually
happening now". In S&S we are puzzled about real life
and a third phone-call while, simultaneously, we are invited to
investigate a present event that seems to elude us. We may thus experience from
the inside a "mysterious dimension" and inhabit two worlds, while firmly planted
in the one we still have faith in.
If we move towards Signs and Symbols, Part 2, we find in the
first chapter: "When they emerged from the thunder
and foul air of the subway, the last dregs of the day were mixed with the
streetlights. She wanted to buy some fish for supper, so she handed him the
basket of jelly jars, telling him to go home. He walked up to the third
landing and then remembered he had given her his keys earlier in the
day." and in the second chapter: "In silence he sat down on the steps and in silence rose when some
ten minutes later she came, heavily trudging upstairs, wanly smiling, shaking
her head in deprecation of her silliness. They entered their two-room flat[... ]
he ate the pale victuals that needed no teeth. She knew his moods and was also
silent."
After I selected pieces from various paragraphs besides the
two mentioned above I noticed something:
part one: "She waited for her husband to open
his umbrella and then took his arm."
part two:"he had given her his keys earlier in the
day" ; "They entered their two-room flat"
part three:"He returned in high spirits, saying in
a loud voice: I have it all figured out. We will give him the bedroom. Each of
us will spend part of the night near him and the other part on this couch".
Most of the initiatives seem to be the woman's. When she realized
she'd forgotten about the keys she immediately rushed home and,
probably, without buying the fish she intended to cook for dinner.
After taking off his dentures her husband ate "pale
victuals" prepared for a toothless mouth ( what kind of colourless, mushy
food is implied? Would he eat it every night?)
The thunder and foul air reminds the reader of the rain outside the
underground shelter: noise and discomfort outside and inside...
These sentences also bring up the dire circumstances in
which they live (only one set of keys, perhaps only one
umbrella, a two-room flat with one bed and a couch) and their
closeness. There is no special place in their flat for a son and, should they
keep him at home, they would have be separated in turns to keep him under
surveillance during the night. Still, this rotatory shift is quite
peculiar:
Why couldn't one of the parents stay with the boy all night
long?
In such a small apartment, why would it be necessary to sleep with him in
the same bed and not let him use the couch?
Why was a special surveillance
needed during the night? What happened at night that would be so
exausting to those that were lying at his side that they had to be
relieved of duty after some time?