I listened to an NPR broadcast awhile ago where children were put in a room with one chair, a table and a plate with one cookie on it. They were told that they could eat the cookie at any time, however, if they did not eat the cookie for ten minutes they would receive two cookies as a reward. Some children had no care and ate the cookie right away, instant gratification never giving thought to the prize they missed out on. Others lasted the ten minutes with no problems or fuss, received their two cookie prize and were on their way. While some children struggled throughout the entire ten minutes. One boy walked circles around the room frantically repeating "TEN MINUTES" over and over again. Yet another girl made it nine minutes and fifty eight seconds before she broke down and ate the one cookie, losing what she was so close to achieving.
I bring this up because we were asked to read Vladimir Nabokov's Signs and Signals, "which is short and should take only ten minutes". It took me right around ten minutes to read the short story and upon completion my mind wanted more time. "TEN MINUTES" is how I felt, for this would never be enough time to try and piece together what the hell is happening in the story. Now I could have reached for the cookie and ate it, meaning use this handy thing called the internet to see what others could tell me about what the hell was happening in the story. But I chose to take another route. I reread the piece, thought about it, told my roommate to read it--he was as mind boggled as I was--thought about it some more and decided to read King Lear to not only get my mind off of Signs and Signals, but to see If I could find similarities between the two.
Referential mania is not exactly what I was experiencing, I do not feel as though I am more intelligent than other men nor do I see conspiracy in everything around me. But something has happened, I have read and reread the material, looked over our notes from class, looked up words I did not know all in an attempt to figure out some sort of meaning to what I had been reading. We were told in class to find something in the story and that we will be led astray from the true meaning. Look for the hidden meaning. Once is chance, twice is coincidence, and three times is Mythology. Then we were told about the jelly jar, the one that seems the most trivial is the most important. Now I read the piece twice before I looked over my notes and now felt as if I had a direction in which to focus my search. Or did I?
Each sign or symbol I see takes me in a new direction. I think I am mything the point. I looked closely at the text, scribbling a few things that stuck out. "Nature shadows him wherever he goes...clouds in the sky start transmitting to one another by means of slow signs...more intelligent than other men...manual alphabet...(running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity...horrible masklike grimace...mirrors...knives would have to be kept in a locked door". This was just the beginning, I had read the short story over and over again paying close attention to every detail of which there are many. The phone rings three times, the jelly, the playing cards, but what I noticed after awhile was the similarities to Shakespeare: shadows, clouds, masks, insanity, mirrors...Then sadly, I had to go to work.
When I got home, I decided to look back at my notes for the entire semester. I wanted to look over shadows--reflections of the reality they represent--and clouds--in the process--looking for answers to what I could have missed. While turning from page to page scouring my scribbled notes, I noticed in the middle of one page I had written flowers and storms p. 50 and for some reason it stuck out to me. So I pulled out Ted Hughes to see what he had to say. It was as though Hughes was not only describing Shakespeare but Nabokov as well:
"In the last plays, which explore the salvation of the lost heroine and the redemption of the tragic hero, a new language appears. In this third language, the metaphorical density dissolves but the sense of complexity, and of packed, many-layered richness, remains. The complexity of knotted metaphor melts, that is, into a musical complexity, a sinuous, melodious orchestration of tones where words have resumed their simple directness without losing their amplitude. Again, this change corresponds to a major change in subject matter on the mythic level. The fatal collision of different worlds, dramatized in the tragedies proper, and in the compacted language of those plays, has been resolved in this new phase, where the hero, instead of causing the heroine's death and thereby bringing about his own, is reborn to her as she is to him. Their rebirth, wherever it occurs, is characterized by brimming passages of this new, simplified, yet enriched music, usually describing storm (the storm of death and rebirth) or flowers (the flowers of death and rebirth), or an ultimate transcendence" (49-50).
I looked at the jelly jars and came upon quince, not knowing what it was I looked it up and saw a picture of the flowering shrub. Now I can see both the flowers of death and rebirth as well as the storm throughout the story being the storm of death and rebirth. The parents, or the father sent his child to the sanitarium where the young man flirts with death multiple times. Similarly, the old man says he cannot sleep because he is dying. Yet blood begins to flow once again through his veins when revelation of bringing his son home hits him. It is the rebirth of father and son. Their lives together will be lived locked in their two bedroom flat. Imprisoned together until their death.
There seem to be many correlations between King Lear and Signs and Symbols yet I am not sure if Nabokov had this in mind for his short story. Ending my thoughts with this connection between flowers, storms, death and rebirth, left many of my theories swinging in the wind. I still have many questions about the meaning behind this short story, but I chose not to eat the one cookie and look up what others could tell me. I wanted to see what I could come up with on my own. As for the "TEN MINUTES" I am fairly sure I spent a little more than ten minutes on this one.
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