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.

A Certifiable Fruitcake

In class tonight, I had this thought right in the middle but didn't want to give voice to it because I hadn't refined it enough yet. What if the way forward and back, up and down, is the same because there is no way? What if we are stationary bits of cipher in the midst of an infinite and incomprehensible Reality that whirls around us, adding to and taking away from our little nothings? Then there's only one direction to go--nowhere, because everywhere and everything and everytime are coming at us all at once.

In an apparently unrelated turn of events, I had my iPod on shuffle on my way home tonight. The second song that came on was this song by Foo Fighters. I actually hadn't thought about this song as being particularly deeply philosophical before, since I always thought it was about either rioting or some backstabbing/fickle friend/lover. Now I can't figure out if it's that or solipsist or inspired by Finnegans Wake. "I'm finished making sense / Done pleading ignorance." WHAT. I thought about it for a while and then I realized I was still driving so I should probably think about that.

And then, about three songs later--possibly more because I skipped some stuff in between--this other song by Seether came on (warning: PG-13 content, just saying). I feel like it's significant but I don't totally know why yet. Maybe it has to do with reality spinning all around and nobody feels like they belong so we're all faking. That's really cynical. "Who's to know if your soul will fade at all / The one you sold to fool the world / You lost your self esteem along the way, yeah / Good God, you're coming up with reasons / Good God, you're dragging it out / Good God, it's the changing of the seasons..." If anyone has other ideas about why that's of great import, please tell me. Or perhaps it's merely referential mania kicking in; thus in part the title of this post.

AND THEN. This song came on immediately after (another warning: semi-chauvinistic innuendo in two languages). There are two things about it that struck me. First is one of the lyrics: "...back like a crawfish in the name of progress." Bit of a stretch, but I almost backed my car into my garage door when I heard it, mostly because I'm now fairly certain I'm getting a Nabokov-worthy case of referential mania. Second was the fact that it's in English and Hebrew. I speak Arabic, which is a cousin of Hebrew, so every time I hear this song, I hear all these cognate Arabic/Hebrew words amid an ocean of kshhkkki kvisi faelsdlguasdgj that makes zero sense to me. It's again a little like Finnegans Wake--the same sense of "I should know what's going on" coupled with "hey that sounds really cool and I don't necessarily care that I don't know what's going on."

(Yes, I do have very weird taste in music. Fun factoid: via those songs, you just went to at least three different countries. You're welcome for the cultural experience.)

Last thing, I promise. This is more of an epistle than I thought it would be, though hopefully I haven't pulled too many comma-ridden Saint Paul sentences on you all yet. Anyway, as I was settling myself in for a nice, relaxing, popcorn-for-the-brain read in the form of a Clive Cussler novel (don't judge), I came to the last part of the novel. Part V: Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down. Again, WHAT. I nearly threw the book. Incidentally, that part of the book is about flushing Hitler's ashes down the White House toilet, but as far as I'm concerned, such niggling details are immaterial. We had just finished discussing Ring Around the Rosy and then I find a reference to it in a completely unrelated, semi-lowbrow book. I don't even know.

It's at this point that I realize I will go certifiably insane if I keep thinking about this because Reality is trying to knock a hole in my brain and I can't handle it. So I guess I'll just leave this here and you all can kick it around if you like.

Life Imitates Art

Shriek to me, O Muse, shriek, for I am dull and deaf.
Of lofty thoughts and myths of aeons past, scream,
Else I, in my little ant's reality, will not hear you,
Nor understand the import of the past,
Nor see the bones beneath my feet of soaring towers
And vast empires of thought, once great,
Now built upon by other minds,
Which, standing on the shoulders of giants
Neither acknowledge the giants' existence, if they ever knew of it,
Nor the depths from which the giants triumphantly climbed
And said, "Now, look, I stand upon the mountaintop,"
And were then trampled pitilessly by modern ants,
Who, lacking knowledge of the giants' legendary travail,
Thought themselves in all ways truly giants,
Even as they diminished themselves through their own ignorance.

From my perspective as a myopic ant muddling about on the shoulders of giants, I can begin to see the landscape from which the giant has come. The scope of the literary works we read this week is breathtaking, and I know we've only scratched the surface. What particularly struck me this week was the short story, "Where are you going, where have you been?" and the way in which life sometimes so disturbingly imitates myth. Where, though, did the myth come from? Did myth imitate life at first, or is it an extrapolation of grand, sweeping themes in life that never exactly happened, but strongly influence life all the same? Is life an allegory for myth, or myth an allegory for life? Perhaps it's some combination of all these ideas. Perhaps myth and reality, so to speak, are so inextricably bound that it's often impossible to tell where one stops and the other begins. Maybe neither ever stops.

The concept in Eliot's work of everything being "now" also stood out to me, since it seemed to be echoed through every piece we read. People living in the past did not think of it as the past. It was their present. In that regard, everything really is happening right now--everything that has happened and everything that will happen is contained in a solitary moment, be it as memory or as action or as potential. As King Solomon once observed, somewhat dispiritedly, there is nothing new under the sun. That is both a comfort and a curse; it is a comfort in that everything that happens now has happened and will happen, and a curse, especially for the individualist, because nothing is novel in the truest sense of the term. But yet, there is also the new, because it is now, and it is not something we have personally experienced. In that sense, everything is somewhat paradoxically new.