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Uses of Symbols
Symbols operating at the level of individual words and combinations of words called images are crucial to the art of poetry, and for their discussions of poetry that follows. In this section, we will briefly consider how writers of fiction employ symbols in conjunction with setting, plot, and character.
SETTING AND SYMBOL. In a number of the examples used in the preceding section of setting – Hardy’s Egdon Heath, Crane’s snow-surrounded blue hotel, Roderick Usher’s house, and the city streets through which Robin Molineux roams in search of his kinsman – we noted how the details of setting are used functionally to extend, clarify, and reinforce the author’s employ the seasons of the year and the time of day because of the traditional associations these have for the reader. These identifications are not arbitrary ones, for in each of the works cited the author deliberately calls attention to the setting, not once but on several occasions, in a way that suggest that it is integrally related to his larger purposes. In the case of Hardy and Crane, it is to call attention to the thematic implications of the work; in the case of Poe and Howthorne, it is to help reveal the personalities of their characters. Setting in fiction that goes beyond mere backdrop is often used in such symbolic ways. Symbolic settings are particularly useful to authors when they frame and encompasses the events of plot and thus provide the work as a whole with an overarching pattern of unity.
PLOT AND SYMBOL. Single events of plot, large and small, or plots in their entirety often function symbolically. “Moby-Dick”’s literally filled with examples of the former, and in each of the cases cited here, Melville deliberately calls the reader’s attention to the event by setting it off in a brief, appropriately titled chapter that forces the reader to consider its larger significance. In Chapter XXX (“The Pipe”), Ahab hurls his pipe into the sea (“This thing is meant for sereneness, to send up mild white vapors among mild white hairs, not among iron-grey locks like mine. I’ll smoke no more”), an act that suggests Ahab’s lack of inner tranquility and his growing social isolation from the members of his crew. In confirmation of his interpretation, the alert reader will recall two earlier scenes in the Spouter-Inn at Bedford, where Ishmael and his new-found friend, the giant harpooner Queequeg, share a pipe together in celebration of the ancient ritual of friendship and solidarity. Later in the novel (Chapter CXVIII, “The Quadrant”), as the “Pequod” approaches its appointed rendezvous with the great white whale, Ahab seizes the ship’s quadrant and smashes it (“no longer will I guide my earthly way be thee”) a symbolic gesture signaling the monomaniacal captain’s arrogant assertion of his own power and omnipotence; from the moment onward, the destiny of ship and crew is to be squarely in his own hands.
In both examples, Melville encourages his reader to seek larger significance and meaning in what might otherwise overlooked as small and apparently insignificant actions. And in both examples, our ability to interpret these actions correctly – to see their symbolic importance – increases our understanding of Captain Ahab. In most instances, however, the author will not be so obliging. Although it is certainly true that even the most commonplace or event – even to the level of a gesture, if it is a spontaneous and unconscious one – can carry symbolic meaning, it is often difficult, at least upon first reading, to tell for certain whether the symbolism is involved. Its symbolic character may not become clear until we have finished the work and look backward to see how the individual parts of the plot relate to the whole. In Hawthorne’s My Kinsman, Major Molineux, for example, it may not be clear until the end of the story that each of the separate incidents that punctuate Robin’s journey in search of his kinsman form a chain of symbolic events that constitutes a plot falls into a symbolic pattern, as in My Kinsman, Major Molineux, the events are often archetypal. Such a plot, that is, conforms to basic patterns or human behavior so deeply rooted in our experience that they recur ritualistically, time and time again, in the events of myth, folklore, and narrative literature.
In fiction, perhaps, the most frequently encountered archetypal pattern is the journey or “quest”, in which young men and women undergo a series of trials and ordeals that finally confirms their coming of age and new-found maturity.
CHARACTER AND SYMBOL. Symbolism is frequently employed as a way of deepening our understanding of character. Some characters are given symbolic names to suggest underlying moral, intellectual, or emotional qualities. The name “Robin Molineux”, for example, suggests springtime, youth, and the innocence, while the name “Roger Chillingsworth” (Hester Prynne’s husband in The Scarlet Letter) suggests cold intellectuality and lack of human warmth, in keeping with his demonic character. The objects assigned to characters function in the same way: the heavy oak cudgel that Robin carries with him into the city is a symbol of his youthful aggressiveness; Miranda’s attraction to the carved wedding ring which her brother has discovered in the grave in Katherine Anne Porter’s story symbolizes her vague intimation of the role in life she is destined to play; the gun which Dave covets in Richard Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man is a symbol of the masculine independence which is not yet his; Ahab’s ivory leg, the badge of his first encounter with Moby Dick, serves to objectify the physic wound that gnaws at him from within; and the house in which Emily Griegson has lived so long in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily functions as an analog to Emily herself, “lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay” alone and apart.
But while the personalities of major characters are often revealed and clarified through the use of symbols rooted in the language that describes them, their very complexity as human beings usually prevents their being defined by a single symbol. This is not true of minor characters, especially those who are flat and one-dimensional and are “constructed round a single idea or quality.” Fiction is filled with such individuals. The girl in James Joyce’s Araby, significantly known only as “Mangan’s sister,” in whose service and religious-like adoration the narrator visits the bazaar, symbolizes the mystery, enchantment, and “otherness” that typifies and objectifies a young boy’s first love. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, and the Accountant who sit on the deck of the “Nellie” in the “brooding gloom” of evening listening to Marlow recount the his journey in search of Kurtz symbolize the type of men who are incapable of appreciating or understanding the moral complexity of experience.
Self-satisfied, complacent men, who have become successful by mastering the practical affairs of the world, they are “too dull even to know [that they, too,] are being assaulted by the powers of darkness.” And, finally, there is Old Man Warner in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, who as a participant in the lottery on seventy-six previous occasions and as its chief defender (“There’s always been a lottery”) symbolizes blind subservience to an established ritual that has long since ceased to have a rational purpose. Symbolism thus enhances fictions by holding “the parts of literary work together in the service of the whole” in such a way as to help readers organize and enlarge their experience of the work. This is not to say that a work of fiction containing symbolism is inherently better than or superior to one that does not. Nor is it to say that the use of symbolism in and of itself can make a given work successful. Is it to say that symbolism, when employed as an integral and organic part of the language and structure of a work of fiction, can stimulate and release the imagination – which is, after all, one of the chief goals of any form of art.