WHEN MRS. DALLOWAY SAYS, in her novel’s famous opening line, that she will buy the flowers, she sets a day and a novel in motion. More importantly, she gives us a first look at what will become her dominant character emblem. Virginia Woolf used The Hours as a working title (but happily left it for Michael Cunningham), but she might just as easily have called the book The Flowers. Not every character in every novel has an emblem, but many do. We have only to think of Nero Wolfe’s orchids, Hemingway’s Old Man’s Great DiMaggio, Stephen Dedalus’s “ashplant” walking stick. Those emblems guide our responses to their characters. Objects, images, and places become associated not merely with characters, but with ideas about characters. Some of that is the authors’ doing, of course: Woolf puts the flowers in Clarissa’s arms. But much of the creation of meaning lies with readers. Ultimately, it falls to us to decide what we think it all means.
William Faulkner once said that his favorite among his novels was As I Lay Dying. My admittedly limited experience teaching Faulkner is that it is the favorite of students as well. I have better luck getting them through the whole of that novel than the twelve anthology pages of “Barn Burning.” And I suspect it’s the favorite Faulkner novel of a lot of nonstudents, too. Why? They can get it. On one level, this is a matter of narrative simplicity. Absalom, Absalom! is a darned hard slog. Ditto The Sound and the Fury. The Bundren saga, on the other hand, is a slightly hard slog. A colleague calls it a romp, but I’m not sure I’d go that far. But I don’t think that’s why so many readers prefer it. I think it’s because they can keep the characters straight. No doubt there are a host of reasons why it’s easier to sort characters out from one another in As I Lay Dying than in his other novels. The names at the heads of each interior-monologue-chapter help. And the names are memorable: Anse, Addie, Darl, Jewel (for a man), Cash, Dewey Dell, Vardaman. Okay, I’m good with that. But there’s something else that really helps. Each character has an emblem, some thing or obsession or goal that helps to differentiate him or her from the rest. Anse, in addition to refusing to be “beholden” to anyone outside the family, keeps thinking about a new set of teeth. Jewel has his horse (and his anger), Cash his carpentry and his desire for a “graphophone,” as he transposes the syllables of phonograph, Vardaman the fish he catches and comes to equate with his dead mother, Dewey Dell her pregnancy and desire for an abortion. How do they work? First of all, they’re mnemonics. When we see someone obsessing about his horse or reacting with anger beyond what might be called for in the situation, we know that’s Jewel. No name necessary after the first time or two. And then there’s character structure. Their obsessions provide depth and coloring. Cash uses carpentry to avoid thinking about the reason he’s building that particular box.
1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant. Water moves easiest up and down or straight across.
4. In a house people are upright two thirds of the time. So the seams are made up-and-down. Because the stress is up-and-down.
And so on, for a total of thirteen items, concluding with the best reason, “It makes a neater job.” What’s conspicuously absent from his musings is their real source—that is, what “it” is. It’s a coffin, of course, and readers know that, but Cash doesn’t say it. He does mention graves once, but only in contrast to other dug holes. For all his matter-of-fact tone, he avoids the one fact that matters, namely, that he has built a coffin for his mother. Why? Grief. Or rather, the avoidance of grief. None of the characters properly channel or even acknowledge the grief. Instead, each one plunges into his or her own sphere of interest.
Character mnemonics are extremely important in the Victorian novel, for obvious reasons. Remember, this is the age of the serialized novel. If your copy of The Edinburgh Review arrived on, say, the tenth of March with the new novel you’ve become obsessed with, it might take you four or five days, tops, to read the two chapters of the current installment, leaving twenty-six or -seven days until the April issue and the next two chapters. I don’t know about you, but in twenty-six days, I can forget my name. I would need a little authorial help. Meet Silas Wegg, authorial helper. Wegg is a “literary” man and seller of ballads who has a wooden leg (a “wegg”?) and a pal named Mr. Venus, who is an undertaker and “articulator of bones.” They’re greedy and unscrupulous and, generally, great fun as minor villains. The major villain is Bradley Headstone, a schoolmaster who does pretty much everything except foam at the mouth to indicate his derangement. His mnemonic, like Mr. Venus’s, is his name. We’re not likely to forget a Bradley Headstone in a month’s time, any more than we would any of Dickens’s great emblematic names: Jaggers, Miss Havisham, Magwitch, Uriah Heep, Mr. Micawber, Quilp, Skimpole, Pecksniff, or that Christmas favorite, Ebenezer Scrooge. Beyond the names, though, Dickens often provides other emblems. Quilp is a dwarf, Bill Sikes has his growl and his dog, Mr. Venus his bones, Micawber his punch and his belief that “something will turn up.” They have limps and prostheses (no writer in history has supplied more characters with wooden legs), facial oddities and peculiarities of hair, sidekicks and talismans. His characters are sometimes described as grotesques, yet it’s grotesquery with a purpose. They must remain not only memorable but vivid for readers over the long stretch of months. Nor is he alone among Victorian serialized novelists. A quick glance, if such a thing is possible, at William Makepeace Thackeray or George Meredith or Anthony Trollope or Thomas Hardy or even the comparatively restrained George Eliot reveals a wealth of vivid and occasionally outlandish figures, especially among minor characters.
Even once the historical wheel had turned and left the serialized novel behind, writers continued to use emblems to express character. We may think of Jay Gatsby in terms of the green light, but the things that mark him out are shirts. Nick Carraway can scarcely take his eyes off Gatsby’s clothes, so items of apparel show up repeatedly in the description. When he goes to Nick’s house to await Daisy’s arrival, for instance, he’s wearing “a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold colored tie.” Doesn’t exactly take a semiologist to interpret those signs, does it? The real show stopper, however, is the scene when Gatsby, giving Nick and Daisy the tour of his house, pauses to throw shirt after shirt after shirt on a table while telling how he has them tailored in London, until he has created a large, disheveled mound of “stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.” Daisy, overcome by materialistic fellow feeling, sinks down among the garments in tears, declaring them “such beautiful shirts” that they make her sad. Without any authorial commentary, Fitzgerald manages to convey volumes about both Gatsby and Daisy—not only their individual character traits but a strong sense of what’s wrong in the relationship between them. Honestly, can two people get any shallower than these two textile mavens? They’re virtually inarticulate about feelings during this meeting that all parties recognize as a disaster, but thank heaven they both speak the language of shirt.
Throughout the modern and postmodern eras, character emblems continue to play a role, although those roles are not always the same. The licorice-flavored Blackjack chewed by the title character in Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato expresses, along with his dribbling a basketball in his Vietnam foxhole, his childlike and often inappropriate soldierly demeanor. In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes’s war wound has plot, character, and thematic implications. It renders him incapable of consummating his relationship with Lady Brett Ashley, thwarting their passion for each other and sending them off on their misadventures, and it speaks more generally to the sterility, sexual and otherwise, of society in the wake of the Great War.
Emblems are particularly useful in that signature modern genre, the mystery, where they can be a sort of shorthand, as Agatha Christie certainly understood. Hercule Poirot is a virtual flotilla of signs, including his “moustaches” and his drink of preference, a small tisane, and Miss Marple has her knitting. These items position the characters in a specific way within their worlds. Even when the first Poirot mystery appeared, for instance, his spats were a sign of a rather old-fashioned fashion plate, a sort of fuddy-duddy dandy. That description pretty neatly summarizes Poirot. Nor did Christie invent anything here. This practice goes back at a minimum to Sherlock Holmes, with his deerstalker (which he actually wears infrequently), his meerschaum pipe, and his seven per cent solution of cocaine. Within a generation, detectives and recurring cops all had their personal talismans, from Lord Peter Wimsey’s monocle to Nick and Nora Charles’s fox terrier, Asta, to Nero Wolfe’s orchids and yellow shirt, on down to the cooking of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser (and come to think of it, is Hawk—or any sidekick—a character emblem? Is Susan Silverman, his longtime, sometime lady friend?) and the blues recordings (female singers, all) of Linda Barnes’s Carlotta Carlyle. On the other hand, if a female detective is 6-foot-1 with flaming red hair, as Carlotta is, does she need any further elaboration?
Sometimes these emblems can form a sort of motif in their repetition. In A Passage to India, E. M. Forster develops the character of Dr. Aziz through his conveyances, from the polo pony he rides when we first meet him, to the bicycle he rides to dinner with friends and which is stolen there, to the tonga he has to engage when summoned to the English officers’ club (and which is summarily commandeered by a group of English women, forcing him to walk home), to the train he takes for the ill-fated trip into the Malabar Hills, to the police car taking him to jail after his arrest, to the landau he rides in during the celebration of his “victory” in court, and finally to the horses he and Cyril Fielding ride in the novel’s last scene. We track Aziz’s progress, if it can be called that, through his conveyances. In his first appearance, he bicycles to his friend Hamidullah’s, then takes the pony-drawn tonga to the Chandrapore Club when his tire goes flat. To be reminded that the club is whites-only while simultaneously watching English women take his tonga as if by right is to be put in his place quite rudely. Later, after the dismissal of charges, he is swept away by forces quite beyond his control—there’s a near-riot in progress—in the relative grandeur of a landau.
Forster works particular magic with a pair of horses. At one point still fairly early, Aziz plays a friendly chukker of polo against a young British subaltern. This aspiration to the middle class as defined by the occupying British defines the delusions under which the young doctor operates. He can never be treated as an equal, even if the subaltern thinks him a fine fellow. It’s false from the start. He must borrow a pony from his better-heeled friend Hamidullah to practice in the first place, and although he rides well, he’s no natural at the game; rather, he must think his way through it like the outsider he is. The sham camaraderie between Indian physician and English soldier can only exist in the artificial world of the maidan, and only because the two avoid all the differences between them: there is no topic on which they can engage except polo. Aziz again rides a horse at the end of the novel, this time on a sort of farewell outing with his old friend Fielding. They talk; they ride; they quarrel over matters of Indian identity and possible nationhood, topics Aziz could never have discussed with the young subaltern, or with virtually any other English person in the novel. It is precisely because they are friends that they can argue so frankly and even heatedly. Yet the friendship is doomed. In the marvelous final paragraph, the horses answer Fielding’s question about why the two can’t be friends in the here and now of India.
But the horses didn’t want it—they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Great House, that came into view as they issued through the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, “No, not yet,” and the sky said, “No, not there.”
This passage shows the difficulties of genuine friendship, with its missteps and uneven ground, its rocks and impediments, as against the artificially smooth surface and bogus amity of the polo maidan.
These are mere things, conveyances and animals, associated with Aziz, yet they are also the means by which we can evaluate character, explore thematic implications, and gauge the political implications of the narrative. Pretty amazing achievement with just a few modes of travel.
More importantly, look what’s avoided. Dull exposition about character traits. Heavy-handed reminders about what’s important. Overt message statements from the author. None of which is dramatic in the least. Action is dramatic. A triumphant ride in a landau, a spirited chukker on the maidan, even a simple bicycle ride. They move. They show the character doing something. And in doing, he reveals elements of himself. That’s what novels do: they reveal. They’re not very good at explicating, at declaiming, or even at essaying. But they’re excellent at revealing. It was a poet, William Carlos Williams, who said, “No ideas but in things,” but he could just as well have been talking about novels. Here then, is the Law of People and Things: Characters are revealed not only by their actions and their words, but also by the items that surround them. This last element is often overlooked in creative writing texts, which advise the aspiring fictionist to eschew lengthy explanations of character in favor of revelation through actions and words. Sage advice, as far as it goes, but it needs to go a bit beyond. The things—the trinkets and baubles, the essentials and frills, the tools and toys—associated with a character typically reveal aspects of his personality as well as key ingredients of the story: plot, significance, idea, motif, theme.
Okay, so how does that work?
It’s a mystery. Seriously. Lots of theories posited but nothing decisive. I put it under the heading of deflection of meaning, by which I mean, broadly, the alchemical process by which a literal thing comes to stand in figuratively for some other thing. This bit of magic is the subject of my previous book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, but this is almost the only time I’ll employ it here, and only because it is so critical to the business of creating character. T. S. Eliot, in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (1922) and elsewhere, gives us a more or less useful term, the “objective correlative,” by which he means the external set of objects that stand in for some internal emotion or condition. The objects provide the concrete, tangible images that allow readers or audiences to grasp the necessarily abstract inner workings of a character. Where Eliot goes wrong, to the extent that he does, is in insisting that the result of the objective correlative is to convey one and only one emotion, so that confusion is impossible. I believe that when very young, Eliot was badly frightened by a double meaning, hence his determination to exert absolute authorial control. Rather, the ambiguity is precisely what intrigues in the objective correlative or character emblem. We can forgive his excess as a product of his age; like so many of the so-called New Critics, he was also a writer, in his case a writer first who was also a critic, and so he and they naturally want to cede power in the writer-reader relationship to the writer, to put the author in authority. What anyone who came of critical age after about 1965 or so will note, however, is that the balance of power has shifted, that readers are the ultimate arbiters of meaning in a work. Besides, the work becomes so much livelier as a space of engagement when the possibilities are more open-ended, when ambiguity, indeterminacy, and irony are all in play.
Consider Stephen’s “ashplant.” Joyce gives Stephen Dedalus a walking stick made of ashwood, an object he acquires first in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and carries through to Ulysses. He employs it sometimes in its designed role, as a cane carried by a young man, sometimes as a fashion accessory, sometimes as a mock sword or a punctuator for his rapier wit, sometimes as a weapon, as when he smashes the chandelier in Bella Cohen’s brothel during the hallucinatory Circe episode of the later novel. When he is beaten by the soldiers, Stephen has his ashplant, along with his hat, restored to him by Leopold Bloom. So then, class, what does Stephen’s ashplant stand for? Oh, it almost certainly has some Freudian possibilities as a phallic symbol, the more so given the character’s doubts about his manhood. And it is without question a crutch of sorts, at times. Is it a device for keeping the world at bay? Probably. Will other readers find other possible explanations and interpretations? Indubitably. Whatever Joyce may have intended, the matter, like the ashplant, is out of his hands. The moment the book was published on February 2, 1922, it ceased to be his and became ours. Thanks all the same, Jim, but further assistance is no longer required of the author; we’ll make the decisions from here on out. Writers can suggest meaning and significance, but ultimately, readers make the final call.
And how are those calls made? Let’s go back to the case(s) of the flowers. At the start of this chapter, I mentioned two characters with emblematic flowers. There are lots more, of course, but two will suffice.
First, Nero Wolfe. Wolfe has many character emblems, so many in fact that I sometimes think the emblems are a substitute for actual characterization. Perhaps this is generally true of fictional detectives; they’re almost always less fully developed than main characters in standard novels, yet they seem to have twice as many tics and signs hanging about them. Wolfe has his great size—a fifth of a ton, we’re told in more than one novel—as well as his personal chef, Fritz; his bottles of beer, always delivered to him already opened and waiting; his dislike of personal contact; his rare books; and his clothing, especially his invariably yellow shirts. You can do a good deal with any of them. In fact, I once heard the famous literary biographer Leon Edel hold forth for many minutes on the significance of a writer named Rex (Latin for king) Stout having a hero named Nero (as in the emperor), whose stature at four hundred pounds is well beyond stout. See the fun you can have with books? But the one emblem that best defines Wolfe is the orchid. He cultivates them in his rooftop greenhouse. Either they or the greenhouse itself figure into the plots of several of the novels and stories. They seem almost anomalous at first, being so delicate and small, so dainty set against his great girth. But both he and they are hothouse creatures. He almost never leaves the brownstone he calls home. Fresh air is anathema to him. Like them, he requires very precise and careful handling in order to bring out his genius. Moreover, they allow him to express his artistic side, to show a passion completely absent in every other area of his existence. When he is troubled or perplexed, he retreats to the greenhouse to commune with his orchids, nearly the only things in his world with which he is never angry. We could learn the things we know about Wolfe without orchids, but they offer a kind of shortcut to that knowledge, both revealing and reinforcing aspects of his character in ways both tangible and vivid.
And what of Clarissa Dalloway? On a purely practical level, she needs flowers for her party that evening: what, after all, is a gathering without a bit of floral decoration? Flowers present lead to flowers past and memories of being a girl in flower many years earlier. The imagery is more troubled than with Wolfe’s orchids, however—perhaps to be expected of a more complex, layered narrative. Clarissa collects the flowers at the shop as promised, of course, and their reflection in a window catches the eye of the doomed, frantic ex-soldier Septimus Warren Smith when the car backfires in the street. He can’t be sure what the reflection is an image of—a tree perhaps, even the tree behind which his dead comrade Evans hides throughout the day—but he is sure the image is fraught with meaning especially for him. Or perhaps merely fraught. And there is a fitting image of the reader’s enterprise: an image that catches our eye, suggesting some secondary thing of whose meaning we can’t quite be certain and whose significance is vague at best. We are forced, like Septimus, to invent, to select for ourselves from a catalog of dim possibilities the one or two most likely or most comforting or perhaps least implausible.
The holder of those flowers is herself a fading bloom, brought low to earth in her own autumn by time and hardship (she now has a bad heart as a result of influenza during the epidemic of 1918). Yet she hearkens back to her own springtime, a season marked with flowers, and to other uses of them, particularly to Sally Seton’s arrangement of stemless flower heads floating in a bowl of water, a youthful statement that shocked their elders. Are those shocking flowers emblematic of an equally shocking attraction between the two girls, which found its expression in a single kiss Sally gave Clarissa? Is the brevity of floral life emblematic of the transient nature of Clarissa’s own or an ironic commentary on the permanence of relationships, since not only the memories of that long-ago time but the persons involved all reappear during Clarissa’s day and evening? Is the obvious sexual nature of flowers, which exist after all not for our pleasure but for propagation of the species, a reminder of human sexual nature as embodied by her blooming daughter, Elizabeth, or a commentary on the diminished (and always ambiguous) sexuality of Clarissa, who, past the age of childbearing, now sleeps alone in a “narrow bed”? Woolf isn’t telling. She offers, suggests, intimates, but never explains. As with the stocking Mrs. Ramsay knits in To the Lighthouse, of which the critic Erich Auerbach made so much in his famous chapter, “The Brown Stocking,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), where he observed that there is no “authorized” or authorial reality in this modern novel, as there would have been in a traditional work. Instead, external objects and events stand as mere markers for moments in time and as occasions for the characters’ internal realities to assert themselves. Indeed, as with the lighthouse itself, or Mr. Ramsay’s peripatetic verse recitations, the brown stocking can and does mean many different things, changing from moment to moment and character to character. The same with Clarissa’s narrow bed, or Peter Walsh’s pocketknife, or Miss Kilman’s shabby mackintosh. So what to make of all those flowers? Woolf prudently leaves that to someone else. Any volunteers?
This is why we readers get the big money. From the merest threads, from hints and allegations, we weave something we believe to be solid and permanent. We find reality in characters who never existed, find internal motivation and emotion from the things they carry, construct whole people from outlines and sketches. It is, in the language of book reviewers, a bravura performance. Maybe we deserve the royalty checks. Just, for safety’s sake, don’t hold your breath.