Lynchers at Heart: De-ciphering "Signs and Symbols"

Abstract

Abstract:"Lynchers at Heart: De-ciphering 'Signs and Symbols," offers a new reading of Nabokov's celebrated story. First, it locates a hostile narrative presence, a homodiegetic (or even paradiegetic) narrator within the story, who works to portray the protagonists' situation as bleakly as possible. Second, it views the story as an attack by numbers on both art and the heart. The status of numbers in particular, and of de-coding strategies in general, is fraught in Nabokov's work, as the author himself seems to have both succumbed to and resisted interpretive 'calculation' in composing his fiction. "Signs and Systems," however should be read as the work that provides his most compelling defense of "incalculability."