On the Meaning(s) of Things

“Now the word symbol scares a good many people off, just as the word art does. They seem to feel that a symbol is some mysterious thing put in arbitrarily by the writer to frighten the common reader—sort of a literary Masonic grip that is only for the initiated.”

—FLANNERY O’CONNOR, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”³⁶

A symbol is more than a sign. A sign represents something expressible: for example, a skull and crossbones = “poison”; a running deer = “Caution: Deer Crossing.” A symbol represents something inexpressible, or having a wide range of potential meanings or interpretations: A thorny rose might represent flawed perfection, or beauty undermined by deceit, or taboo and temptation, etc.

The world is full of symbols. Practically everything can be a metaphor. A window, a puddle, a pair of shoes; a dog, an itch, a road, a mirror, a stone, the far side of the moon—everything stands (or can) for something else. The mirror is a reflection; the stone a burden; the itch an urge; the road a journey (with its implied bends, hazards, and detours). Depending on whose shoes those are, you may or may not want to be in them. And the view through the window may be sunny or foggy—or of a brick wall.

If the world is lousy with symbols, literature is doubly infested, overrun first with symbols intended by authors and then by symbolic meanings discovered by well-meaning critics, scholars, and pedagogues. In grade school most of us endured the silliness of sifting through The Scarlet Letter in search of alternative interpretations of the red A that poor Hester is forced to wear on her bosom

(American, Able, Angel, Adam, Eve’s Apple, The Great Alpha!, Mater Adolerata), or mulling over the holy significance of the Whiteness of the Whale. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, sifting for literary symbols may be the last refuge of dull-witted or lazy English teachers. At best it’s about as challenging as fishing with dynamite; at worst it turns even sensitive and gifted students against literature with a capital L (for Lame).

But symbols do exist in literature. And there are symbols in literature that the author may never have intended. An author needn’t plant symbols deliberately for them to take root and flourish in the minds of readers. That said, contemporary authors treat symbols quite differently than their classical forebears did. In the Metamorphoses, Ovid celebrates gods and goddesses who in turn represent empirical phenomena (Mithra, god of solar fire, protector of abundance; Ceres, goddess of wheat and other food plants). Today’s writers tend to celebrate the meanings of ordinary things.

If Ovid had gods and goddesses, we have windows and wallpaper. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” published in 1894, Mrs. Mallard’s bedroom window is the portal through which a new sense of freedom takes violent possession of her soul soon after she learns of her husband’s death in a railway accident. When the report of Mr. Mallard’s death turns out to be false—and he appears, intact, at their front door—the sudden loss of her newfound freedom leads to her abrupt death. That window, with its patch of blue sky, is the central metaphor or symbol in Chopin’s story.

In an equally famous work by Charlotte Perkins Gilman published just five years later, the windows facing out to a sunny garden are barred, much as the story’s protagonist is barred from leaving the nursery where her physician husband has ordered her to rest and recuperate from what he calls “a temporary nervous depression.”

The story is called “The Yellow Wallpaper”;³⁷ and it is the wallpaper in the nursery, not the barred window, that furnishes the protagonist with a “view” to her own predicament, that of a woman isolated and trapped within the jaundiced patterns of a patriarchal society.

83}SYMBOLIC COLORS & TEA LEAVES:
GOOFING AROUND WITH SYMBOLS

Since everything is relative, nothing is without associations.

Take the color yellow itself. It has both positive and negative connotations. In the positive column: sunlight and bright flowers (happiness, joy); egg yolks (new life); butter (sustenance, luxury). Negative: fear, cowardice, nasty bodily discharges (urine, pus, vomit). There are warning yellows (traffic lights, street signs), screaming yellows, yellows sulfurous, smoldering, and smutty. In Gilman’s story the clash of the imprisoning wallpaper and the natural daylight—different shades of yellow—reflects the irony of the protagonist’s supposed “cure,” thrusting her ever deeper into her “illness” (yellow = pallid, jaundiced, sickly).

The game of attaching symbolical meanings to such things as colors in literature is seductively easy to play. I have a writer friend who invariably interprets whichever paintings of mine hang in my home, launching into a detailed analysis to illuminate my Christian or pagan imagery, discovering unconscious parallels with the Annunciation or with Inanna’s descent into the underworld. Fine with me, though I thought I’d painted an innocent bowl of cherries. (Professional readers of palms and tarot cards do no less, and make livings from it.)

Given that everything is already a metaphor, there’s seldom cause for authors to introduce metaphoric content into their work. If the work has been produced honestly, authentically, with integrity, it’s already there, imbedded in the raw materials.³⁸ All we authors have to do, and only occasionally, is take note of the associations (metaphors) when they occur and reinforce them, through repetition or by some other means: by positioning them more prominently, or pointing to them in a title or chapter heading, or finding other ways (place-names, characters’ names) to thread them through the work.

In early drafts especially, trust your impulses and instincts. Later, as you work to shape and clarify those first impulses, keep an eye open for the very best metaphors: the ones you never planned or intended.

84} HOGSON’S GROPINGS:
A SLIPPERY METAPHORIC TADPOLE

Though symbols arise organically, it takes the conscious work of an artist to weave them into a story so they can be fully appreciated.

In a story of a rural girl’s coming of age, several organic symbols arise, like mushrooms, as if unconsciously, from the soil of the material. An opening scene with Sally and her friends catching tadpoles in a pond not only gets the story off to a good start, but embodies its main theme: As tadpoles must turn into frogs, so little girls must turn into young women.

However, as constructed, the tadpole-catching scene comes off merely as a colorful aside, its symbolic potential unrealized.

Having recognized a good symbol or motif, the trick is to introduce it more than once and in key places. The green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby is a good example. In early drafts of the novel, the green light appears only once, as an atmospheric aside. Having recognized it as an effective symbol, or anyway as a captivating image, Fitzgerald decided to “refrain” it—not just anywhere, but as the novel’s closing image. Recall Chekhov’s rule: “If there’s a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, it should discharge in Act III.” Symbols abide by the same rules as loaded guns.

In our coming-of-age story, the antagonist, Mr. Hogson (Sally’s teacher, who gropes her in the bleachers during a basketball game) should teach not history but biology, forcing his students to dissect frogs (motif reiterated)—an activity that Sally engages in with equal parts fear, repulsion, curiosity, and yes, arousal, as she endures Hogson’s gropings. And Sally’s fear and loathing of him is at least in part a fear and loathing of her own emerging sexual impulses and feelings, over which she has little control, feelings that force her into an adulthood she isn’t prepared for.

My student titled her draft “The History Teacher.” Suggested alternative title: “Tadpoles.”

In another story, the author’s third-person narrator makes repeated allusions to characters in Greek mythology, and especially to Charon, pilot of the ferry that carries the souls of the departed across the River Styx. In class we asked, “Where does your protagonist come by these allusions?” The writer didn’t know.

Then we asked, “What does the narrator do for a living?” The student had no idea.

But in the subsequent draft he knew. He was a mortician.

85}BRIDGES & CHICKEN BONES:
ARMATURES OF MEANING

A fiction writer’s job isn’t just to convey experience vividly and viscerally, through scene and concrete description. It’s to illuminate, to shine the bright light of metaphor and meaning, to make the hidden interrelatedness of things clear enough for those meanings to resonate with readers.

Case in point: A missed opportunity in a story about a drawbridge attendant and his daughter, who wants him to retire before something terrible happens to him and his bridge. The author might reinforce the girders of her story’s metaphoric “bridge.” She could make everything in it relate to bridges, to connections, to transitions. Things should add up. When the narrator reaches out to hug her father, her arms form a metaphoric “bridge” between them, a bridge that each character approaches with a mixture of trepidation and relief.

As writers we should build as many of our own metaphorical bridges as possible to strengthen the connections latent in our stories. We need to pay attention not just to our characters’ actions, including small ones, but to our descriptions—of characters, settings, weather—and to recognize their implications and associations, to seize on these associations and reinforce them.

I worked on a story for years about a failed young actor, Justin, who, having hitchhiked to New Orleans, ends up sharing the bed of an older homosexual who is also alcoholic. I wrestled, among other things, with my choice for a title. In the beginning I called it “Café Doomed”—the nickname of the restaurant where the protagonist takes a job, and where he meets Don, his future roommate. I liked the title, but wasn’t sure it pointed to the heart of the story, as good titles should. Before I could find the story’s ultimate title, I’d have to uncover its main theme.

It took an image from the story to point the way.

In the scene where Don first shows Justin (the hitchhiker) his very humble apartment, he leads Justin down a narrow alley lined with “tinfoil pans piled high with table scraps and chicken bones.” Don explains that this mess is the doing of his landlord’s daughter, Mildred, who feeds the neighborhood strays.

“Chicken bones?” said Justin.

“More cats and dogs die of Mildred’s generosity than of all other natural causes combined. I guess she thinks it’s better for them to choke to death on a chicken bone than to starve on nothing.”

This bit of dialogue about Don’s landlord’s daughter and those chicken bones pointed the way to the story’s central metaphor and its ultimate title. The story, I realized, is about how the need for love is stronger than the instinct for self-preservation. This theme is underscored by Don’s inability to end his masochistic relationship with Sherman, his former roommate, who abuses him throughout the story. When Justin, who finds in Don a source of protection and affection unavailable to him from his own parents back home, attacks Sherman, Don turns violently on him.

Final title: “The Bones of Love.”

86} TEARING DOWN THE HOUSE:
GOING TO EXTREMES

For a metaphor or symbol to resonate, it should send out tendrils of implication in several directions, pointing both toward and away from its immediate or obvious meanings. It should function on more than one level.

And it should explore those implications to their limits.

In a story titled “Resurrection,” a construction worker vents a lifetime of frustration on a home renovation job he’s been hired to do for a disagreeable couple. That’s a solid, intriguing premise, if that’s the premise. On the one hand Nick seems intent on destroying the home he’s been hired to restore; on the other he seems to want to do the job properly, to code, even if it means sacrificing the authenticity of those lovely two-hundred-year-old beams and wide-planked floors.

Sometimes to restore one must first destroy, and in the end nothing may be left of the original. That’s what’s implied here thematically. But what can we find in Nick’s life that makes this a metaphor, and not just a law of carpentry?

Throughout the story are scattered clues of Nick’s dissatisfaction with his life: his nagging, no-longer-sexually-available wife; his affair with a much younger woman; his bratty, spoiled son; his distaste for his clients. Yet none of these dissatisfactions is sufficiently developed in the story—not enough, anyway, to convince me that Nick would sledgehammer himself out of a lucrative job. What is Nick (metaphorically) banging away at? His wife? His kid? His marriage? His clients? Himself? All of the above? Or is he symbolically “banging” Margie, his young mistress—in which case the words “monotonous, dull thrusts” take on an altogether different meaning?

Adding to the story’s thematic murkiness is the fact that Nick succeeds neither in renovating nor destroying the symbol-laden house. A burst sewage pipe intervenes, robbing Nick of the opportunity to seal his own fate—and robbing readers of the satisfaction of a story that follows through on its own implications.

Some stories demand extremes. Nick could either destroy the house completely, tearing it down to the rafters, or do a superb renovation job that costs him ten times what he’s being paid, using aged wood and old-fashioned plaster and lath. As it is, the story teeters without making a decisive move in either of these tantalizing directions. The burst pipe, as a deus ex machina, wrests the story away from its protagonist. Better to have Nick dismantle it, or tear down his own house for parts with which to restore that of these strangers, leaving himself and his estranged wife to carry on their null marriage in the dismantled, frigid shell of what might have been their happy home.

When it comes to our drafted stories, we’d best all be Freudian or Jungian analysts, and interpret them as though they were other people’s dreams, taking nothing for granted, assuming that our choices weren’t arbitrary, but there for a reason, that everything means something.

87} SKELETONS IN THE CABINET:
SYMBOLIC FURNISHINGS

Sometimes we need to look more deeply into what we already recognize as symbols, to exploit their capacity for meanings.

An elderly woman struggles to fend off a contractor who has been hired by her children to remodel her kitchen. In the remodeling he’ll have to destroy a cabinet built by her late husband—a piece of furniture that symbolizes both her bittersweet marriage and her own place within the family.

In his play The Price, Arthur Miller puts furniture to great symbolic use: The “price” for which an armoire is sold represents the value of a forsaken life. Here my student does likewise. And the writing is good; the details are precise and convincing. I get a clear picture of the old woman’s home, and especially of her staircase with its “photographs arranged like the stations of the cross.” (Given the painful arthritis that accompanies the protagonist down those stairs, and her subsequent martyrdom to a cause, the implications of this simile can’t be ignored.)

What’s missing is what’s inside that cabinet symbolically, or what should be inside it. The cabinet is supposed to represent the old woman’s marriage, and her love for her deceased husband and his dedication to her. And there is the suggestion of a rift between children and parents—or at least between children and father— since in their eagerness to provide their mother with a convenient, modern kitchen, her offspring show little attachment to their father’s handiwork (and, by implication, to their dead father). But then, the old woman herself showed indifference to the cabinet: After all, she did agree to have her kitchen remodeled. Why does she react so strongly now that it’s too late, with the contractor about to go at the cabinet with his crowbar?

My guess is there’s more to this story than the problem of what to do about an old cabinet. There’s the story of a marriage between a husband who never failed to do things in a half-assed way (witness that poorly built, warped cabinet) and a wife who loved and, at times, and with good reason, hated him—him and that damned cabinet he built for her because he was too cheap to buy her the Hoosier cabinet she wanted. Yet she won’t desecrate his memory.

Open your symbolic cabinets. You’ll find skeletons in there.

88}THE OPPORTUNISTIC FIG TREE:
SYMBOLS IN SEARCH OF A STORY

Since we can’t always rely on readers to discern, let alone properly interpret, our symbols, our stories should benefit from, but not depend on, such interpretations.

In a story about a daughter coming to terms with her mother’s invalidism, the narrating daughter’s complex attitude toward death and decay is symbolized by a fig tree growing incongruously in the hospital courtyard—a symbol that, as things stand, takes the place of a plot, rather than augmenting it.

As symbols of sex and death go, that fig tree couldn’t be riper. Old and New Testaments alike burst with symbolic figs, starting with the fig leaves that Adam and Eve turn into bikinis, and proceeding through the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree (Matt. 21: 18-22) to the Redemption of the Fig Tree (Luke 13: 6-9)—with the fruit symbolizing God’s bounty and blessing or, when withered, Yahweh’s judgment and the coming Apocalypse. Figs play a symbolic role not just in Christianity, but in Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism. Siddhartha found his bodhi (enlightenment) under a sacred fig. On a more earthly plane, figs are neither flowers nor fruits, but both. They date back to the Mesozoic era, seventy million years ago, and bloom year round. Fig trees are also opportunistic. Nearly every ruined farmhouse in Europe has one growing up through its rotting rafters as a harbinger of barrenness and decrepitude, a tree whose roots supplant other, more polite forms of life.

But take the fig tree and its allusions away from our story and little if any story remains. Just as The Great Gatsby would survive without the green lantern at the end of Daisy’s dock, a story ought to survive (even flourish) without its symbols. What’s missing from my student’s story is conflict. Mom’s reluctance to accept her old age isn’t conflict enough. In fact—and in spite of her vertigo— she’s good-humored, so it’s hard to understand why her daughter is so upset with her. The closest thing to an emotional journey in the story is that taken by the daughter as she contemplates the heavily symbolic fig tree—an emotional journey that, because it’s so thinly motivated, feels sentimentally forced.

The author should consider organizing this story around a solid central conflict. Then the symbolic fig tree won’t grow out of nowhere. It will take root in firmer soil, and bear its golden ripe fruit less awkwardly and obviously.

Though a symbol or symbols may enhance a story, they are not substitutes for one.