I’m trying to wrap my head around what you said here… For example, if the streets were busy in my town around 9 am, that would be a realistic symbol that people go to work and school around 9am in my town. And if I include these types of natural symbols in my writing, it adds to the depth and realism of what I write about, and helps me explore the complex connections we see play out around us?
Hey, CT...yes, busy streets at 9am are definitely a sign that people go to work and school around 9am. Whether or not that counts as a "symbol" we can leave to literature professors. My own use of "symbol" above would probably not pass muster with lit professors either.
But your example is a reminder that everything in the world is telling a story, and that it is connected to other things. I don't mean to suggest that every story told by every thing is a riveting story. "Rush hour signifies that people go to work and school around the same time every day" almost seems too obvious a story to be worth paying attention to. But let's consider for a minute what happens when the writer DOES pay attention to the obvious.
Say you're writing a story about a man who has to go to the ER, where he meets a mother and her sick child in a hospital waiting room, and it gives him occasion to think about the sufferings of others. The first part of your story outline looks something like this:
1) Leonard wakes up feeling awful. He thinks maybe it's appendicitis.
2) He drives himself to the hospital.
3) In the ER waiting room he sees a sick child from the "other side of the tracks" whose mother is distraught, not only because her child is sick, but because she's missing work, and her boss has just fired her over the phone.
So you start writing your story, and you show Leonard waking up feeling terrible. He calls in sick. He tries to eat some breakfast. By now he realizes that he's got to get himself to the hospital. So far so good. You've given Leonard a motive for going to the hospital—and, of course, the hospital is where the real action is. That's where Leonard is going to have his life-changing experience. So it's tempting to skip the drive to the hospital. "Holding the left side of his abdomen, Leonard got in his car and drove to the hospital. When he got there, he left his car running beside the entrance and staggered into the ER." You're crushing this story outline. You quickly and efficiently got us to Point 3 of the outline. Leonard has made it to the hospital, and now the really meaningful stuff can begin.
But the attentive reader says, "Wait a minute. It's right after breakfast. As in rush hour? And a guy with an apparent appendicitis just has an uneventful drive to the hospital?"
So Lesson #1 here is that if you DON'T account for the obvious, your reader may be pulled out of the story before they get to what you think of as the "real action."
But also, when you tend to the obvious, you give yourself opportunities to tell a more interesting story. You thought the important thing was just getting Leonard to the hospital. But when you pay attention to the fact that he's driving at 9am, now you've got a man stuck in a car, in terrible pain, neither at home nor at the hospital. You just ratcheted up the drama, which can be useful in itself.
This panicky feeling of being stuck—is he going to remember that when he meets that mother and child in the ER, who are also also stuck without knowing how they're going to get out of their impossible situation? Maybe it changes the way he looks at them. File that away.
As traffic creeps along, Leonard crosses a bridge over the river. Why does he have to cross a bridge to get into the city? Well, the whole reason this city is here at all is that the river powered textile mills a hundred years ago. And there, just on the other side of the river, are the mill-houses where the working poor have always lived. These houses were always ratty, but they're rattier than ever, because the last mill shut down. Leonard lives on the good side of the river, in the suburbs where people like him moved to get away from the kind of people who live in the mill-houses. (Leonard has no way of knowing that his life is about to get turned upside down when he meets a mother and child who are barely hanging on in one of those mill-houses). File that away too.
You may decide that none of that is relevant to Leonard's story. You may, in fact, decide that you'll delay Leonard's appendicitis until 10am so you don't have to worry about rush-hour traffic. That's fine. But when you pay attention to the obvious, even the overly obvious (such as "traffic is bad in the morning"), you don't know what kind of unexpected, less obvious meaning you're going to uncover.
I love this thought and mostly agree. I want to offer a bit of pushback, though, because I really value what you're saying here (not to argue or prove myself right).
I think symbols that are true symbols cannot be arbitrary. I think rings are a good example of a symbol that is actually not arbitrary. There are deep seated and ancient connotations that come with wearing rings, and the wedding ring participates in that imbedded meaning. It both draws from the meaning that has been accumulated and adds to the symbolic value of ring-wearing. The ring always represents some kind of status, usually implying that the wearer has a position of power or of value to someone else who has bestowed the ring on the wearer. Rings simply were not chosen arbitrarily to symbolize the marriage covenant. They are intuitvely a prime way to symbolize the person's status of being loved and valued by another person. That's why it works.
True symbolism cannot be arbitrary.
The symbol itself participates in the reality to which it points. Perhaps another way to way it is that the type and the archetype always have at least some overlap, or else the relationship is false. Meaning is what connects the two, which means that if it is actually doing what symbolism does, it cannot be arbitrary. The symbol must be connected to what it symbolizes by the meaning that it intrisically carries.
I’m trying to wrap my head around what you said here… For example, if the streets were busy in my town around 9 am, that would be a realistic symbol that people go to work and school around 9am in my town. And if I include these types of natural symbols in my writing, it adds to the depth and realism of what I write about, and helps me explore the complex connections we see play out around us?
Hey, CT...yes, busy streets at 9am are definitely a sign that people go to work and school around 9am. Whether or not that counts as a "symbol" we can leave to literature professors. My own use of "symbol" above would probably not pass muster with lit professors either.
But your example is a reminder that everything in the world is telling a story, and that it is connected to other things. I don't mean to suggest that every story told by every thing is a riveting story. "Rush hour signifies that people go to work and school around the same time every day" almost seems too obvious a story to be worth paying attention to. But let's consider for a minute what happens when the writer DOES pay attention to the obvious.
Say you're writing a story about a man who has to go to the ER, where he meets a mother and her sick child in a hospital waiting room, and it gives him occasion to think about the sufferings of others. The first part of your story outline looks something like this:
1) Leonard wakes up feeling awful. He thinks maybe it's appendicitis.
2) He drives himself to the hospital.
3) In the ER waiting room he sees a sick child from the "other side of the tracks" whose mother is distraught, not only because her child is sick, but because she's missing work, and her boss has just fired her over the phone.
So you start writing your story, and you show Leonard waking up feeling terrible. He calls in sick. He tries to eat some breakfast. By now he realizes that he's got to get himself to the hospital. So far so good. You've given Leonard a motive for going to the hospital—and, of course, the hospital is where the real action is. That's where Leonard is going to have his life-changing experience. So it's tempting to skip the drive to the hospital. "Holding the left side of his abdomen, Leonard got in his car and drove to the hospital. When he got there, he left his car running beside the entrance and staggered into the ER." You're crushing this story outline. You quickly and efficiently got us to Point 3 of the outline. Leonard has made it to the hospital, and now the really meaningful stuff can begin.
But the attentive reader says, "Wait a minute. It's right after breakfast. As in rush hour? And a guy with an apparent appendicitis just has an uneventful drive to the hospital?"
So Lesson #1 here is that if you DON'T account for the obvious, your reader may be pulled out of the story before they get to what you think of as the "real action."
But also, when you tend to the obvious, you give yourself opportunities to tell a more interesting story. You thought the important thing was just getting Leonard to the hospital. But when you pay attention to the fact that he's driving at 9am, now you've got a man stuck in a car, in terrible pain, neither at home nor at the hospital. You just ratcheted up the drama, which can be useful in itself.
This panicky feeling of being stuck—is he going to remember that when he meets that mother and child in the ER, who are also also stuck without knowing how they're going to get out of their impossible situation? Maybe it changes the way he looks at them. File that away.
As traffic creeps along, Leonard crosses a bridge over the river. Why does he have to cross a bridge to get into the city? Well, the whole reason this city is here at all is that the river powered textile mills a hundred years ago. And there, just on the other side of the river, are the mill-houses where the working poor have always lived. These houses were always ratty, but they're rattier than ever, because the last mill shut down. Leonard lives on the good side of the river, in the suburbs where people like him moved to get away from the kind of people who live in the mill-houses. (Leonard has no way of knowing that his life is about to get turned upside down when he meets a mother and child who are barely hanging on in one of those mill-houses). File that away too.
You may decide that none of that is relevant to Leonard's story. You may, in fact, decide that you'll delay Leonard's appendicitis until 10am so you don't have to worry about rush-hour traffic. That's fine. But when you pay attention to the obvious, even the overly obvious (such as "traffic is bad in the morning"), you don't know what kind of unexpected, less obvious meaning you're going to uncover.
Hope that helps.
I love this thought and mostly agree. I want to offer a bit of pushback, though, because I really value what you're saying here (not to argue or prove myself right).
I think symbols that are true symbols cannot be arbitrary. I think rings are a good example of a symbol that is actually not arbitrary. There are deep seated and ancient connotations that come with wearing rings, and the wedding ring participates in that imbedded meaning. It both draws from the meaning that has been accumulated and adds to the symbolic value of ring-wearing. The ring always represents some kind of status, usually implying that the wearer has a position of power or of value to someone else who has bestowed the ring on the wearer. Rings simply were not chosen arbitrarily to symbolize the marriage covenant. They are intuitvely a prime way to symbolize the person's status of being loved and valued by another person. That's why it works.
True symbolism cannot be arbitrary.
The symbol itself participates in the reality to which it points. Perhaps another way to way it is that the type and the archetype always have at least some overlap, or else the relationship is false. Meaning is what connects the two, which means that if it is actually doing what symbolism does, it cannot be arbitrary. The symbol must be connected to what it symbolizes by the meaning that it intrisically carries.
The Horse and His Boy is my favorite of the Narnia books.