Symbolism
My understanding of symbolism was dealt a near mortal blow in high school, when we were given an edition of The Old Man and the Sea with a symbol index in the back.
A symbol index is pretty much what it sounds like: a list of story artifacts, with accompanying capsule descriptions of what each of them really means. So if, in the course of your reading you come across something that seems a little symboly, you can flip quickly to the back of the book to confirm your suspicions. Oho! you can say to yourself. I knew that scudding bank of clouds was kind of arbitrarily scuddy. And no wonder! It turns out that it symbolizes our hero’s thwarted sexual longing!
There’s only one way to look at a symbol index: as a dictionary of arbitrary obfuscation. Ie: here’s what the writer really meant, but was too much of a pretentious elliptical prick to just come out and say. I remember finding the whole thing pointless and depressing. Why not just come out and tell us? What’s the point of dragging your readers through this kind of arbitrary indirection? Symbolism, framed this way, becomes little more than an exercise in mildly clever transposition.
It’s taken me two decades to get beyond that experience, and in that time I’ve come to some partial understanding of what symbolism really is. But, first, what it isn’t:
- It’s not a way to get around saying something you don’t want to come out and say because it’s too obvious or silly or embarrassing. You should either say those things, or not say them. Period.
- It’s not about demonstrating your talents for clever allusion. Nobody cares about your mastery of the minutiae of the book of Revelations, dude. Just get to the goddam point (I’m looking at you, Joyce).
- It’s not a way to make your stuff seem more profound. Profundity is a feeling, never a technique.
So what is symbolism, then? It’s a last resort. It’s what you do when you’ve got no other choice.
I’ve talked a lot about the limitations of language in this blog. Clearly, language is a beautiful thing, so crucial to our development as a species that it’s pretty much wired into the hardware. But its powers are largely utilitarian. It does a bang-up job of communicating your desire to buy a grapefruit or run a country or marry your true love, but it kind of fails miserably when it comes time to tell someone how much you love them, or describe your zeal for your country, or expound on your abiding and irrational passion for grapefruits. It’s just not built for that.
Granted, all of this is possible, but it takes a special talent. Ian McKellan does it with Atonement, Craig Thompson with Blankets, Kazuo Ishiguro with Never Let Me Go. I came out of those books — not transformed, exactly, but deeply affected in ways that linger on, years and years later. All these guys managed to slip past the literal wall of my mind into that muddy territory where more elemental, unstructured things live: love and hope and faith and all that stuff. And once they’d done that, I was pretty much theirs.
So how do they manage it? By being great wordsmiths, yes, but also by finding images and characters that transcend the page to reach into our collective consciousness, to stimulate us in ways that go beyond verbal. This is the ultimate power of language, as an artform: it can’t reach these things directly, but it can wend its way into the firmament of shared experience, and draw on that to get what it wants.
And that’s what a symbol is, to me. It’s a way to say what can’t be said, and it draws its power from its ability to illuminate, not create. We have a fund of universal feeling that predates our ability to write, and the only real way to hit people where it hurts is to find your way into it and use what’s there. Music and art have more or less direct access to that place, but words have to work harder: they operate in the corner of our eyes, drawing shapes in the penumbral gloom between consciousness and id — and then waiting for our minds to do the rest.
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