Final Project Part 2

I don't think I'm going to write what most would consider a proper explication for my short story. Mainly I'll just rephrase what I said in class after I presented, because I think anything more would be death by over-analysis.

Essentially, I thought about Nabokov's story from a different perspective than most analyses endorse. What if, for the boy in the story, death is really a form of release? What if he, like the little fledgling bird dying in the puddle, is so tormented by life that he would actually welcome death? This does seem to be the case in the story, given that the boy tries to take his own life several times.

As I was thinking about the directions I wanted to go with the story, I thought back to the essay I'd written on how the past possesses the present in Nabokov and how I'd related Gilgamesh to the boy. For those of you who are less familiar with the story, the horrifically oversimplified gist of it is that Gilgamesh loses his best friend, goes to find eternal life, loses eternal life, and realizes that he didn't really want eternal life in the first place. The actual story, which you can read here, is obviously far more complicated than that.

In the written version of my story, which I as yet have not satisfactorily named, I did hide some numerical references which did not come out in the spoken version. While the written version lacks some of the emotion and inflections that the spoken version had, I think the symbolism and cipher-ness of the story comes out much better in writing.

Final Project Part 1

Here's the story I wrote for my final project. For some reason, I really think it's better written than spoken. I'm not sure what to call it because I'm terrible at naming things (except cars, to which my brain always attaches names for no good reason). I'll post the explication soon, once everyone hopefully has a moment to come to their own conclusions about some things in the story.

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Excerpt from the diary

January 4, 19--

Every night I hear them whispering about me. Sometimes I think I can almost understand the exact words. I see them waving their arms—it’s a code, I know it is. I’m so close to cracking it. But no, they don’t want me to know. They want to be able to talk behind my back with impunity. If I knew what they were saying, they wouldn’t be able to say it anymore, because then I’d know all the nasty things they think about me. I can guess at them now. I’m so close. I think it’s like this: ..-. .-.. -.-- -... --- -.-- ..-. .-.. -.-- .. -.-. .- with all the tapping and waving but then I can’t make out the rest. They’re laughing now. They must change to a different cipher at that point. I don’t know which one.

I’m in a new room, and my parents aren’t here anymore. The room is mostly white, and the bed is uncomfortable. I think everyone thinks I’m crazy. I’m not. I just see and hear more than they do, so of course they don’t understand.

Psychiatrist’s notes

January 4, 19--
New patient admitted today. He’s an interesting case. Every inanimate object has some malicious ulterior motive as far as he’s concerned. I’m going to ask Dr. B---- if he wants to study him. I don’t feel qualified to do more than try to keep him quiet. He doesn’t often become agitated; mostly he’s sullen and sometimes uncooperative. He keeps saying things about the trees and the sky, and we noticed immediately that anything with moving parts terrifies him. I don’t yet know why these objects are of particular significance. This requires more study.

Excerpt from the diary

January 10, 19--

Words words WORDS. I hear them but I don’t know what they mean! It’s infuriating. The people who call themselves doctors keep asking me what I hear and what it means. Do they know how stupid they sound? If I knew, wouldn’t I tell them? But no, they’re stuck in their own little spheres of ignorance, completely unable to comprehend the level of madness I can hear. Am I mad, or is the world mad? Am I the only one who knows what’s really going on? I wish I knew.

Psychiatrist’s notes

January 20, 19--

Slowly we are beginning to shed light on this boy’s affliction. Dr. B---- has been to see him a few times and he’s read all my notes to date, which have been sadly unenlightening. We have found that the boy is intelligent, abnormally so. His IQ is at least 170, though I cannot say for sure how high it is as we ran into problems when we came to the pattern recognition section. I should have known better, but Dr. B---- and I were so curious. Dr. B---- has termed the boy’s affliction “referential mania.” The label is helpful, certainly, but we have so far been unable to solve any of his problems. There is little literature on the subject—thus the reason Dr. B----’s study is so necessary. The boy still thinks he hears coded messages in the tapping of the trees at his window, or sees them in the clouds in the sky when he’s out for his daily walks. While I doubt he will ever be fully cured of his condition, perhaps some progress can be made.

Excerpt from the diary

February 5, 19--

Do they really not understand? I try and try to tell them, but they can’t understand. I suppose it must look a little crazy to them, since they’re so trapped in their little minds and corresponding realities. I don’t think I’d wish my abilities on them, though. It is a terrible thing to be under the scrutiny of all of nature at once, and some human-made things, too.

Psychiatrist’s notes

February 15, 19--

The boy’s parents came to see him today. He did not acknowledge them at all. I don’t know what he’s thinking about. He won’t open up to me. I’m going to keep trying, but it will probably take a lot of time.

Excerpt from the diary

March 10, 19--

Of all the things to try to get me to talk, they pick life. Not just the biological concept of life, but Life with a capital L in the philosophical sense. Don’t they see how stupid that is for someone like me? Every part of my life is watched and cataloged and recorded, not just by them, but by the entire world. Everything is watching all the time. Every breath I take is put in a box somewhere. And they want to talk to me about Life. Their minds could never comprehend my life.

What if I could fly away from here? What if somehow I could get away from this place and go somewhere without watchers? I wonder if such a place exists. If I could only tear through these white walls, I think I might find it. I can’t let the others know, though. They’d try to stop me. They don’t understand. They’d think I was trying to die, when I’m really only trying to find Life.

Psychiatrist’s notes

April 6, 19--

I will never cease to be amazed by the inventiveness of the insane. Today the patient tried to commit suicide. We should have seen the signs, but he has become adept at hiding his plans from us. He would have gone through with it if another patient hadn’t thought he was trying to fly and, ironically, stopped him because he was jealous. I’m still not sure quite how the patient was planning on making his attempt work, but given his tenacity, I think it would have ended with him on the pavement outside one way or another. I’ve moved him to suicide watch. No matter what I do, he won’t talk to me. I’ve tried for over a month now, but I think he believes he’s intellectually superior to me. I don’t doubt that he’s right in absolute terms, as his incomplete IQ test showed us; however, the fact remains that he is the one with the mental imbalance, and I am his doctor, so I must continue to try to help him.

Excerpt from the diary

April 8, 19--

The scrutiny has gotten even worse. The trees noticed that I tried to get away from them and they’re laughing at me now because I couldn’t. Some damned human stopped me. He was jealous of me. Stupid, stupid, stupid! I should have tried it in another place, where no one could see, not even the trees. I must keep trying. This is my only path to Life.

Psychiatrist’s notes

April 10, 19--

The patient’s parents came to visit again today. They try to visit him as much as possible, though sometimes he is so perturbed that it would be risky. Today, though, they were able to see him. He recognized them but then started muttering about tearing a hole in something. I think he means to try suicide again. We will continue to observe him closely. Our focus has now turned from understanding his condition to saving him from himself.

Excerpt from the diary

April 12, 19--

I remember the birds with the hands. I wonder if they know the way to life? Sometimes I see them at night now. There’s one that comes to me. I think she knows, but I’m not sure. She’s outside my window—I have to go to her. I wonder if the numbers eleven, nine, and one have anything to do with her. They keep coming up. I don’t know if they’re ciphers from the trees and the clouds or if they’re the bird asking me to come with her.

Psychiatrist’s notes

May 2, 19--

Again the patient tried to take his life. He keeps talking about numbers and a bird with hands. He’s never mentioned either of these things before.

His parents came to visit today. They brought some jelly for him, I think, but we thought their presence might disturb him more, so we had to send them home. Now I wonder if I should have let them see him. He won’t talk to anyone or respond to any other external stimulus.

Additional Psychiatrist’s notes

May 3, 19--

This morning, just after midnight, the patient succeeded in taking his own life. We’re still not sure how he managed to get out the window. He said something about the bird with hands a few hours before he got out.

Now I have to call his parents.

Final Project (ish)

I think I went about five different ways with this project before I finally settled on my current idea, which hopefully will be the one I actually use.

Basically, I'm going to be extremely pretentious and try to write Signs and Symbols from the boy's point of view. I'm 90% certain that I'll do this via two different "diaries." One will be the boy's psychiatrist's notes, which would be a hyper-realistic interpretation of events, and the other will be the boy's supposed diary, which would be a mythologized interpretation of those same events. Because of referential mania, the diary might have to just be the boy's internal monologue. I'm reading and re-reading Nabokov to see if the boy would maybe have been okay with a blank book that he could put his own things in. Perhaps I'll just have to take some artistic license.

Anyway, the main focus of my version of the story is somewhat along the lines of the idea I presented in my last blog post. I also read Joe Schadt's post from the 15th of last month, per Megan's suggestion, and I'm going to incorporate the converse of Joe's idea, that life is a form of death. Death is a form of life, answers are a form of death--it's getting a little mind-twisty at this point, so I'll have to hash that out further in my own head before I try to put it on paper, or worse still, the internet. I may end up making another blog post tomorrow, especially if I have another particularly enlightening lunch hour with my friend.

Before I get into that too much, though, there's the more fundamental issue of what death is. To look into that, still in the context of a story, I'm going to draw on Eliade Chapter 5 (ascent--so for me, death as a magical ascension), Frye Chapter 5 (also ascent), Gilgamesh, Icarus, and probably several others. I want to look into the idea of a cipher, with all the meanings attached thereto, and the numbers Nabokov uses; do they form a pattern, are they some sort of cipher? In honor of Nabokov, there will probably be an anagram at some point as well.

Most of this is going to be all but unrecognizable once it gets into a story, I think, so I'll put the actual analytical bits that I've talked about here into an explication, which might actually just end up confusing the issue even further, now that I think about it. I guess we'll see how that goes. If nothing else, it can be a window into my thought processes and hopefully will provide some sort of clarity in that way.

So there in a nutshell is the fundamental idea for my final project. As I said, I'll probably amend it tomorrow (Tuesday), but for now, this is where I'm going.

Sense and Incomprehensibility

I have to preface this. I have a really strange mind and I swear everything will sort of make sense by the end of this post. Possibly. At least, that's the idea.

So, to get down to brass tacks, when Gerritt said "fuck it" in class today, it got my brain going in Arabic. One of the weirder aspects of my mind is that I always have at least two languages going simultaneously in my head. That's why I sometimes mix up words--well, that and I usually talk too fast. The word for "only" in Arabic is فقط, which is transliterated as "faqaT." It sounds similar-ish so whenever I hear that phrase, my brain tends to go "oh, Arabic" and then it translates back to English because reasons and from "fuck it" I magically get "only." It makes about as much sense to me as I'm sure it does to you all.

Which then sort of but not really leads me to the next place my brain went: what is "it?" And then I realized, since my brain was still thinking in Arabic parallel to English, that there is no word for "it" in Arabic. That is, there are no gender-neutral pronouns in Arabic. In non-linguistics-ese, everything is either a he or a she. There are, for all intents and purposes, no its. For example, a bird is masculine (طائر/TA'ir) but a plane is feminine (طائرة/TA'ira). The words are exactly the same except for the last letter (the circle with the two dots over it, or the lack thereof), which is a feminine marker. So I guess all female birds are actually airplanes. Yeah, I don't know either, and neither do any of the Arabic professors I've ever had. They always just gave me the "are you seriously asking that" look and basically said they don't know so stop asking weird questions. But that's not the point. The point, which I seem to lose track of quickly when it's (!) close to midnight, is that "it" changes from culture to culture. In English, we have an understood antecedent that most people don't generally think about. In Arabic, there's no "it"--just a he or a she, which is functionally the same, but is still philosophically a little different.

And so you can now see my mind's descent into the realm of stuff about 0.2% of the world's population actually cares at all about. Speaking of descents, it occurred to me that the working title of the novel I'm very slowly writing on is Descend, so referential mania is again having a heyday in connection with "Signs and Symbols" and the Frye chapter on ascending/descending and my own writing. So it goes.

That's all. Hopefully it made a little sense, perhaps in a rather abstract way. We shall see in the morning, or in class, or something.

How the Past Possesses the Present in "Symbols and Signs"

When we come to the essence of the stories we tell today, every story can really be condensed into a displaced myth of sorts.  Some of them are more obvious than others; these displaced myths are generally allegories and are thus fully intended to be read into at the allegorical level.  Others—possibly most works of fiction published today—are unintentionally mythical because their authors have little to no understanding of the rich cultural tapestry from which their lives and therefore their works have sprung.  Still others, like Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs,” are intentionally displaced to the point where the original myth is difficult to divine.  Such works are often a distillation of several myths into a single piece of literature, be it a full-length novel or a short story like Nabokov’s.

This then begs the question:  what is myth?  There are the obvious answers; the Greco-Roman and Old Norse traditions are prominent examples of ancient stories commonly recognized as myths.  However, this narrow, religion-tinged definition of myth fails to recognize an important aspect of the very myths it cites.  Myths are true—perhaps not in the factual, realistic sense of the word, but in the conceptual, ideological sense, they attain a level of overarching truth that no “realistic” story can ever hope to reach.  Thus, by this definition, any story which conveys a truth about human existence could be considered a mythic story, though maybe not a “proper” myth as it lacks religious connotations.

No doubt to some this definition seems unnecessarily, even somewhat laughably, broad.  Perhaps it is.  However, if we think of mythic stories in this way, it becomes easier to see the ways in which the past and the present and even the future each contain the spirits of the other in the truly mythic stories.

Vladimir Nabokov demonstrated his mastery of the mythic in his short story, “Symbols and Signs.”  “Symbols and Signs” is a nuanced condensing of several traditional myths, and indeed of human experience as a whole, which puts it squarely in the category of mythic story.  There are many mythic concepts present in Nabokov’s story, one of which is possibly the myth of Icarus.  Icarus, the son of Daedalus, famed builder of the labyrinth for the Minotaur on Crete, escaped from the labyrinth with his father on wax wings.  Daedalus warned him not to fly too close to the sun, but he did, and his wings melted and he fell to his death.

The son in Nabokov’s story could be viewed as a sort of modernized analogue of Icarus.  The first clue to this inclusion of the past is the “tiny unfledged bird twitching helplessly in the puddle.”  The second is the son’s attempted escape from his prison of day-to-day life in a reality he is sure is malevolent: 

“The last time the boy had tried to do it, his method had been, in the doctor’s words, a masterpiece of inventiveness; he would have succeeded had not an envious fellow-patient thought he was learning to fly and stopped him just in time. What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.”

Like Icarus, the boy wants to escape through flight, but ultimately is unsuccessful in terms of physical escape.

On the other hand, it could be argued that both Icarus and the boy in Nabokov’s story were actually successful in their bids to escape from their prisons.  Death is certainly an alternative to imprisonment.  This is another recurrent idea in many myths and mythic stories; in fact, it occurs in the oldest known written myth—the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Gilgamesh goes in search of immortality, but finds that immortality is not what he thinks.  No human can live forever; only a legacy can really be immortal.  Gilgamesh comes to see death as an escape from the heartache he experienced in the world of the living as he realizes that immortality would only prolong the pain, not end it.  This is also true to some extent of the boy in Nabokov’s story.  Rather than fearing death like most human beings, he clearly welcomes it as an escape from the torment of his fear-filled life.

In these ways, the past is an integral part of the present related in Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs.”  While Nabokov may not have directly displaced the stories of Icarus and Gilgamesh in “Symbols and Signs,” he echoed their principles.  It is such an echo of the past and of the truth contained therein that identifies a mythic story.  The past is a constant undercurrent to the present, and when we find the undercurrent, we find the rich truths the past and the present have to offer us.