Crafting a Talisman
It’s always been a part of our nature to notice patterns and assign them meaning. Take the constellations, for example. People looked up at the night’s sky and saw shapes and figures in the random order of the stars, and with one stroke, they connected the dots to reflect their own understanding of the world. It was one of humanity’s first attempts at art.
We had created symbols, an object meant to represent something else. It’s been a western tradition ever since. Just look at the book of Genesis and the story of man’s fall from grace. When Eve commits the world’s first sin–disobeying the word of God–it is not just through action but by taking something physical. Gods orders could have been simpler: “Don’t ignore me.” Or: “Don’t go over there.” But it is the eating of the apple that gets her and Adam in trouble. The apple is a manifestation of that sin. And thanks to the Bible’s enormous influence, apples tend to represent sin throughout the western world. But every text, every work of art, has its own internal logic, symbols bound to them, things that stand in for something else.
One of the best places to turn for this is The Great Gatsby. Throughout the novel, at different lulls in the story, Nick Carraway observes Gatsby standing out on the dock, gazing across the bay at the green light that radiates from Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s home. The green light is a symbol among symbols. First, notice the choice of color. Green is the color of money for one but, also, jealousy–as in he is “green with envy.” That’s no accident on Fitzgerald’s part either. The light itself represents Gatsby’s great longing for the life he could have had with Daisy, a life Tom has and he wants. Part of what prevents that from happening is that Gatsby isn’t old money: He’s a bootlegger. That’s not the kind of man, according to society’s standards, can marry a woman like Daisy. And all of that is communicated with a simple green light.
Symbols are great because they prevent us from ever veering into the melodramatic, from being too “on the nose.” They say what characters cannot say or express. Some are more highlighted than others, of course.
In “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway sets the story in a train station to show the differing paths the couples may take, whether they choose to keep the baby or abort it, as well as whether the couple will stay together or fall apart. However, it’s far more subtle than Fitzgerald’s use of symbolism in The Great Gatsby. It’s almost a throw away line. But it’s there, under the surface.
T. S. Eliot, in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” presents the idea of the objective correlative.
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
This, I believe, broadens our definition of symbolism, and though not quite exactly the same, is helpful in understanding the possibilities of literature. Eliot’s point is that all the elements of story can represent the emotion of the narrative. An object can stand in for jealousy or longing, love or loss, choice or consequence, but so too can it be applied to setting, scenes, structure, plot, dialogue, so on and so forth. We tend to think of symbols as only one part of the narrative, that they exist as symbols themselves, but everything in a story is symbolic. It stands in for something else. Even words themselves are symbols. What does anger look like? Depends on who you ask. What does madness look like? Each case is individual. Even something as simple as a table has different shapes and sizes.
This is what we call signifiers and signifieds. The signifer is what represents the object; the signified is the object itself. As Kenneth Burke once wrote, “Man is the symbol-wielding animal.” It’s a part of our nature. We were born to do it. So keep an eye out for how the elements of a story reflect the heart of it–its theme. It may enhance your understanding of the text, or when done thoughtlessly, it may give you a reason to close it.