Nabokov's Signs and symbols

[Mark Kohut]

Okay Folks, high on meds making my head spin like a nabokovian chess
player, I'll
throw off one--my--possible reading of N's second (main) story inside this
one. I'll take
his suggestion as factual, in his way.

VN hated that "witch doctor" Freud and all the ideas he rode in on and
shrinks he spawned,
So, the poor son is hurting and dangerous but all the reasons are
irrelevant as given, wrong numbers,
pattern finding that is itself a kind of madness.

The couple want to bring him home for his safety, safeguarding themselves
too but they are poor emigres who
are clueless about their son.

Two wrong number calls. The world has no answers.

That third call.?

And, yes, it reminds me of the very end of *The Crying of Lot 49* as it
goes unanswered.

Thanks, John. I woudda used it in my class had I known of it.

On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 4:21 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> And there is a good Murakami story that I would bet a jar of jelly on this
> influenced. The existential phone calls one.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Apr 23, 2017, at 9:00 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Nabokov's first story published in the New Yorker in 1948 is a tiny
> > little piece that seems to me very relevant to readers of Pynchon.
> > http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/05/15/symbols-and-signs
> > He told the fiction editor that “a second (main) story is woven into,
> > or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one,” although from
> > my reading this could be a tease, since there's such a heavy
> > metafictional layer exploring our tendencies to "project a world"
> > (COL49) when we're reading. Plus it tied in neatly to the discussion
> > of weather in books had here recently, and Nabokov might be satirising
> > the idea that climate is a conspiracy based on our mood.
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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