END NOTES:

Matters of Symbol, Myth,
& Metaphor

The best things that happen in our writing happen not because we will them, but because we let them happen. This is true of all the arts, of painting and music and film and photography, and of the sciences, too. Of all the attitudes, techniques, and approaches available to us as creators, grim determination is certainly the worst. Though likely to produce results, it’s also a source of nervous ailments—exhaustion, depression, insomnia, anxiety, headaches, stomach cramps, and delusions of grandeur alternating with bouts of low self-esteem.

But the worst of the ailments induced by grim determination is self-consciousness, a state of hyperawareness or overvigilance with respect to one’s own performance. As when a dancer watches his feet, self-consciously produced art is at best forced, overdetermined, and inauthentic.

Nothing is more contradictory than the grim pursuit of the sublime. It’s like trying to make someone love you. It never works. The sublime exists. It presents itself most willingly to those who seek it least aggressively and with the most generous ambitions (see Meditation # 151). This is why artists need humility and faith, and it is perhaps why Vincent van Gogh—whose original ambition was to be a priest—succeeded so well as an artist.

To “believe” in art is to recognize nature’s hidden patterns and symbols. It is to believe in the structure, order, and meaning latent in events that, at face value, seem meaningless and chaotic. The artist/priest coaxes life’s hidden patterns and implications from their dark hiding places into the clear light of day: as a writer, through the medium of words. When language works this magic, it is largely due to what we call style.

Q.HOW DO I KNOW WHETHER I’VE WORKED
ENOUGH SYMBOLS INTO MY NOVEL OR STORY?

A. You don’t, and you really shouldn’t. Symbols are the reader’s problem, not yours. Your job as writer is to recognize them when they occur naturally, and to make the most of them when they do.

And keep in mind that everything is a latent symbol. I have a friend who makes it her business to see the symbolism in everything: clouds, gestures, accidents … Sometimes she drives me crazy with her endless analytical interpretations.

And yet as readers of our own drafts this sort of Freudian excess can pay off. For instance, when we realize that the backyard sinkhole a character has been trying unsuccessfully to fill for years is a symbol of his faithless marriage.

Q.WHAT ABOUT NOVELS AND STORIES THAT
EMPLOY SYMBOLS? CAN YOU RECOMMEND ANY?

A.Since (as my friend will tell you) symbols are everywhere, they’re also everywhere in works of art, especially in great works. Finding them is as easy as looking for them. And so there’s no point, really, in presenting you with a list of works that make special use of symbols, because, like beauty, symbols are in the eye of the beholder.

Just bear in mind—as you read great books—that everything is a potential symbol. The potential is in you, the reader, as much as it is in the book.

Once a story is in the hands of a reader, it’s the reader’s to interpret as he wishes. If a reader decides that Sherlock Holmes’s violin playing symbolizes his repressed homosexual passion for Dr. Watson, then, for that reader, so it is.