SOUNDTRACK: DIVINE FITS-“Would That Not Be Nice” (2012).
This song was KCRW’s Today’s Top Tune on August 13, 2012. Divine Fits are a supergroup of sorts with Spoon’s Britt Daniels, New Bomb Turks drummer Sam Brown and Wolf Parade/Handsome Furs member Dan Boeckner. When I heard who was in the band, I was pretty excited to hear the track. But I have to say that this sounds kind of like a over-polished Spoon song with keyboards. Daniels’ voice and musical style are individual enough that he pretty much dominates whatever he does. But at the same time, I feel like the jagged edges that make Spoon so interesting have been removed.
I assume that Boeckner is responsible for the keyboards and the interesting echo effect on the vocals. They add an interesting balance to Daniels, but this doesn’t excite me the way Spoon does.
[READ: August 10, 2012] “Signs and Symbols”
I discovered this story because in my post of Lorrie Moore’s “Referential” someone commented that her story was plagiarized from this one. I had intended to read this Nabokov story immediately so Moore’s would be fresh and I could lay down the “J’accuse.” It’s been a couple of months but I can say that while her story is obviously inspired by this Nabokov–to the point where she uses elements from this story in her own, it’s a different take on the same idea.
But before we do any comparison, let’s look at this story. The story begins by stating that for the fourth time in as many years, a young man’s parents don’t know what to take him for his birthday. The problem is that he is in an institution and many things are forbidden. And also, for their son man-made objects are either hives of evil or gross comforts–more on that shortly. They knew they couldn’t get him a gadget of any kind, so they settled on a basket with a set of colorful jellies. When they travel to him with the gift, everything goes wrong–the train breaks down, there are no busses, and when they finally get there, the nurses inform them that there has been an incident and he cannot see them now. So they return home with the jellies.
The story describes what is wrong with their son as referential mania. It’s an interesting situation, and an article about him had appeared in a scientific monthly. It says that the patient believes that everything happening around him is somehow related to himself. So clouds transmit details about him, trees talk about him, etc. And this was driving him crazy (obviously). He had even tried to kill himself via, what the doctor described as “a masterpiece of inventiveness.”
They returned home and she paged through their photo albums–their lives in Germany and Russia, Minsk, the Revolution, Leipzig, Berlin. And the photographs reveal the onset of this mania: the boy at eight afraid of the wallpaper. Then she reflects on the ugly, vicious, backward children he was placed with when they arrived in America. But she had accepted this for, “living does mean accepting the loss of one joy after another.”
Then, around midnight, her husband awoke, moaning. He felt sick that his son was in the sanitarium and not with them. They simply must bring him home. She agrees and they are looking forward to the morning.
Then the phone rings (at midnight!) and a girl’s voices asked to speak to Charlie. The woman explains it’s the wrong number and hangs up. She admits she was frightened by the phone, but they settle down to their tea. The phone rings again, It is the same girl. The woman again says it is the wrong number. And the phone rings another time.
And that is the end of the plot. The story itself has so much going on, so much that is internal, that “spoiling” the ending is irrelevant. It is in the telling of the story, the emotional heft that really brings this story alive.
So what of this plagiarism? There are a lot of things that are the same in Moore’s story–the jam, the son in an institution, the referential mania. But Moore takes the basics of the Nabokov story and applies them to a couple in a new situation. The couple is not married, this is a boyfriend after her marriage. And her story looks at how the boy’s situation affects the relationship of all three parties. We also get to see the son (who is deliberately left out of Nabokov’s story). The final word of course is that she absolutely admits that Nabokov was the basis of her story (which I think by definition absolves her of the plagiarism charge). But let’s let her explain herself:
Q: Your story in this week’s issue, “Referential,” is a kind of tribute to Vladimir Nabokov’s story “Signs and Symbols,” which also involves a visit to a schizophrenic son in a psychiatric hospital (and was published in The New Yorker in 1948). What are the other elements the two stories share?
A: There are the jams, the photographs, the playing cards, the desire of the child to leave the world, the phone ringing at the end, the sleep problems of the man. There is also the referential mania of the child, which is contagious to the mother and which the story then embraces as well. The Nabokov story is a perfect one, and my hovering over it is intended as an homage and is not meant to be in any way disguised or dishonoring.
Q: In your story, Nabokov’s aging married couple becomes a couple with a troubled, undefined relationship, which is clearly reaching an end. Does this change the situation of the adults vis à vis the child?
A: Yes, somewhat. I do think that there is something elemental about two adult characters and a child. To have the two adults not actually be married, I thought, was a more contemporary situation with its own dilemmas and twists. It places the story outside of Nabokov’s world, though not entirely outside his story. Although, of course, Nabokov is often interested in how much of what happens between people, especially when it involves desire, is a unilateral invention—but perhaps all writers are interested in that.
I don’t mean to take up so much space in a Nabokov post talking about someone else, although it is relevant, and I think also informs the Nabokov story.
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