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Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus
(novel by Mary Shelley, 1818; play by Peggy Webling, screenplay by
John L. Balderston and Francis Edward Faragoh & Garrett Fort, 1931) Connecting character to machine was an approach first developed by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. Her human character at the beginning of the story is Dr. Frankenstein. But he is soon elevated to god status as a man who can create life. He creates the machine man, the monster who, because he is manufactured from parts, lacks the fluid motion of a human being. A third character, the hunchback, is the in-between symbolic character, the subhuman man who is shunned as a freak by the human community but works for Dr. Frankenstein. Notice how these symbolic characters are defined and contrasted by simple but clear types. Over the course of the story, it is precisely because he is treated as a lower type, a machine to be chained, burned, and then discarded, that the monster rebels and seeks revenge against his cold, inhuman, godlike father.
Other stories that use the character-as-machine technique are Blade Runner (the replicants), The Terminator (Terminator), 2001: A Space Odyssey (HAL), and The Wizard of Oz (the Tin Woodman).
Other Symbolism
The Sun Also Rises
(by Ernest Hemingway, 1926) The Sun Also Rises is a textbook example of creating a symbolic character without using metaphorical character types like god, animal, or machine. Hemingway sets up a symbolic opposition within hero Jake Barnes by showing a strong, confident man of integrity who is also impotent from a war wound. The combination of strength and impotence creates a character whose essential quality is that of being lost. As a result, he is a deeply ironic man, going from one sensuous moment to the next but unable to function on that basic level. As a man who is not a man, he is a totally realistic character who also comes to stand for a whole generation of men who are simply drifting.
SYMBOL TECHNIQUE: THE SYMBOLIC NAME
Another technique you can use to connect symbol to character is to translate the character's essential principle into a name. A genius at this technique, Charles Dickens created names whose images and sounds immediately identify his characters' fundamental natures. For example, Ebenezer Scrooge is clearly a man who loves money and will do anything to anyone to get it. Uriah Heep may try to hide behind the formal facade of "Uriah," but his essential slimy nature seeps out in "Heep." We know Tiny Tim is the ultimate good boy long before he utters the phrase "God bless us, every one."
Vladimir Nabokov has pointed out that this technique is much less common in post-nineteenth-century fiction. That's probably because the technique can call attention to itself and be too obviously thematic.
Done properly, however, the symbolic name can be a marvelous tool. But it's a tool that usually works best when you are writing a comedy, since comedy tends toward character type.
For example, here are some of the guests at one of Gatsby's parties in The Great Gatsby. Notice how Fitzgerald often lists names that suggest a failed attempt to appear as American aristocracy: the O.R.P Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia; Mrs. Ulysses Swett. He
then follows with the harsh reality of who these people really are or what became of them:
From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and a man named Bunsen, whom I knew at Yale, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires. . . . From farther out on the Island came the Chea-dles and the O.R.P. Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett's automobile ran over his right hand.
Another technique that uses symbolic character names is mixing "real" with fictional characters, such as in Ragtime, The Wind and the Lion, Under world, Carter Beats the Devil, and The Plot Against America. These historical characters are not "real" at all. Their famous legacy has given them an iconic and in some cases godlike quality in the mind of the reader. They become, in effect, the mythical gods and heroes of a nation. Their names have a prefabricated power, like the flag, that the writer can support or cut against.
SYMBOL TECHNIQUE: SYMBOL CONNECTED TO CHARACTER CHANGE
One of the more advanced techniques in the area of character is using a symbol to help track the character change. In this technique, you choose a symbol you want the character to become when he undergoes his change.
To use this technique, focus on the structural framing scenes at the beginning and end of the story. Attach the symbol to the character when you are creating the character's weakness or need. Bring the symbol back at the moment of character change, but with some variation from when you first introduced it.
The Godfather
(novel by Mario Puzo, screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
The Godfather film executes this technique to perfection. The opening scene is a prototypical Godfather experience: a man has come to the Godfather, Vito Corleone, to ask for justice. The scene is essentially a negotiation, and by the end, the man and the Godfather have come to an agreement. In the final line of the scene, the Godfather says, "Someday, and that day may never come, I will ask you for a favor in return." This line, which sums up the negotiation, subtly suggests that a Faustian bargain has just been concluded and that the Godfather is the devil.
The writers apply the devil symbol again near the end of the story when Michael, the new Godfather, attends the christening of his nephew while his minions gun down the heads of the five New York crime families. As part of the baby's christening, the priest asks Michael, "Do you renounce Satan?" Michael responds, "I do renounce him," even as he is becoming Satan by his actions at this very moment. Michael then promises to protect this child for whom he is literally becoming a godfather, even though, as the Godfather, he will have the child's father murdered as soon as the christening is over.
This battle scene is followed by what would normally be a self-revelation scene. But Michael has become the devil, so the writers purposely deprive him of a self-revelation and give it instead to his wife, Kay. She watches from another room as Michael's minions gather around to congratulate him on his new "exalted" position, and the door to the new king of the underworld is closed in her face.
Notice the subtlety by which the symbol is applied to the opening framing scene. No one uses the word "devil" in the first scene. The writers attach the symbol to the character by an ingenious construction of the scene where the word "Godfather" comes at the end, just before the final line of dialogue that vaguely hints at a Faustian bargain. It's because of the subtlety with which the symbol is applied, not in spite of it, that this technique has such a dramatic impact on the audience.
SYMBOLIC THEMES
After story symbol and character symbol, the next step in creating a symbol web is to encapsulate entire moral arguments in symbol. This produces the most intense concentration of meaning of all the symbol techniques. For this reason, symbolic theme is a highly risky technique. If done in an obvious, clumsy way, the story feels preachy.
To make a theme symbolic, come up with an image or object that expresses a series of actions that hurt others in some way. Even more power-ful is an image or object that expresses two series of actions—two moral sequences—that are in conflict with each other.
The Scarlet Letter
(by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850) Hawthorne is a master of symbolic theme. The scarlet letter A appears at first glance to represent the simple moral argument against adultery. It is only over the course of the story that this very obvious symbol comes to represent two opposing moral arguments: the absolute, inflexible, and hypocritical argument that chastises Hester in public and the much more fluid and true morality that Hester and her lover have actually lived in private.
Beau Geste
(novel by Christopher Wren, screenplay by Robert Carson Percival, 1939) This story of three brothers who join the French Foreign Legion shows a cruci
al feature of the technique of symbolic theme: it works best when you do it through the plot. In the beginning of the story, the three brothers are children playing a game of King Arthur. While the oldest brother is hiding in a suit of armor, he overhears some information about a family sapphire known as the Blue Water. Years later, as an adult, he steals the jewel and joins the Foreign Legion, all to save his aunt's name and the family's reputation. That knight's armor comes to symbolize an act of chivalry and self-sacrifice, the beau geste that is the central theme of the story. By embedding this symbol in the plot, the writers allow the connection between symbol and theme to evolve and grow over the course of the story.
The Great Gatsby
(by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925) The Great Gatsby showcases a writer with tremendous ability at attaching symbol to theme. Fitzgerald uses a web of three major symbols to crystallize a thematic sequence. These three symbols are the green light, the spectacles
billboard in front of the dump, and the "fresh, green breast of the new world." The thematic sequence works like this:
1. The green light represents modern America. But the original American dream has been perverted to seeking material wealth and the golden girl who is desirable only because she is beautifully wrapped.
2. The spectacles billboard in front of the dump stands for America behind the material surface, totally used up, the mechanical refuse created by America the material. The machine has eaten the garden.
3. The "fresh, green breast of the new world" symbolizes the natural world of America, newly discovered and full of potential for a new way of living, a second chance at a Garden of Eden.
Notice that the symbol sequence is out of chronological order. But it is in the right structural order. Fitzgerald introduces the "fresh, green breast of the new world" on the very last page. This is a brilliant choice, because the lush nature and huge potential of the new world are made shockingly real by their stark contrast to what has actually been done to that new world. And this contrast comes at the very end of the story, after Nick's self-revelation. So structurally, this symbol, and what it stands for, explodes in the minds of the audience as a stunning thematic revelation. This is masterful technique and a part of creating a work of art.
SYMBOL FOR STORY WORLD
In Chapter 6, I talked about many of the techniques used to create the world of the story. Some of these techniques, like miniature, are also symbol techniques. Indeed, one of the most important functions of symbol is to encapsulate an entire world, or set of forces, in a single, understandable image.
Natural worlds like the island, mountain, forest, and ocean have an inherent symbolic power. But you can attach additional symbols to them to heighten or change the meaning audiences normally associate with them. One way to do that is to infuse these places with magical powers. This technique is found in Prospero's island (The Tempest), Circe's island (the Odyssey), the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Forest of Arden in As You Like
It, the Dark Forest in the Harry Potter stories, and the forest of Lothlorien in The Lord of the Rings. Strictly speaking, magic is not a specific symbol but a different set of forces by which the world works. But making a place magical has the same effect as applying a symbol. It concentrates meaning and charges the world with a force field that grabs an audience's imagination.
You can create symbols that convey this supernatural set of forces. An excellent example is in Moonstruck.
Moonstruck
(by John Patrick Shanley, 1987) John Patrick Shanley uses the moon to give a physical manifestation to the notion of fate. This is especially useful in a love story where what is really at stake is not the individual characters as much as the love bet ween them. The audience must feel that this is a great love and that it would be a tragedy if it doesn't grow and last. One way of getting this across to an audience is to show that the love is necessary, that it is fated by powers far greater than these two mere humans. Shanley connects the two main characters, Loretta and Ronny, to the moon by establishing Loretta from the beginning as unlucky in love. This creates a sense of the larger forces at work. Loretta's grandfather tells a group of old men that the moon brings the woman to the man. At dinner, Loretta's uncle, Raymond, tells the story of how Loretta's father, Cosmo, courted her mother, Rose. One night, Raymond woke up to see a huge moon, and when he looked out the window, he saw Cosmo in the street below gazing up at Rose's bedroom.
Shanley then uses the crosscut technique to place the entire family under the power of the moon and connect it with love. In quick succession, Rose gazes out at the huge full moon; Loretta and Ronny, after their first lovemaking, stand together at the window and watch it; and Raymond awakes and tells his wife it's Cosmo's moon, back again. These two old people, long married, are inspired to make love. The sequence ends with the grandfather and his pack of dogs howling at the big moon over the city. The moon becomes the great generator of love, bathing the entire city in moonlight and fairy dust.
You may also want to create a symbol when you write a story in which the world evolves from one stage of society to another, like village to city.
Social forces are highly complex, so a single symbol can be valuable in making these forces real, cohesive, and understandable.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
(stories by James Warner Bellah, screenplay by Frank Nugent and
Laurence Stallings, 1949) This story tracks a captain's last days before retiring from the U.S. Cavalry on a remote western outpost around 1876. Paralleling the end of the captain's professional life is the end of the frontier (the village world) and the warrior values that it embodies. To highlight and focus this change for the audience, writers Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings use the buffalo as a symbol. A big, blustery sergeant, retiring just days before the captain, celebrates with a drink at the post saloon. He says to the bartender, "The old days are gone forever. . . . Did you hear about the buffalo coming back? Herds of them." But the audience knows they won't be back for long, and men like the captain and the sergeant will be gone forever too.
Once Upon a Time in the West
(story by Dario Argento & Bernardo Bertolucci & Sergio Leone; screenplay
by Sergio Leone & Sergio Donati, 1968) This huge, operatic Western begins with the murder of a man and his children at their home in the wilderness. His mail-order bride arrives at the house to find that she is already a widow and the owner of an apparently worthless property in the middle of the American desert. While rummaging through her late husband's possessions, she finds a toy town. This toy town is both a miniature and a symbol of the future, a model of the town the dead man envisioned when the new railroad finally arrives at his doorstep.
Cinema Paradiso
(story by Giuseppe Tornatore, screenplay by Giuseppe Tornatore and
Vanna Paoli, 1989)
The movie house of the title is both the symbol of the entire story and the symbol of the world. It is a cocoon where people come together to experience the magic of movies and in the process create their community. But as the town evolves into a city, the movie house devolves, decaying until it
is replaced by a parking lot. The Utopia dies, and the community fragments and dies as well. This movie house shows the ability of a symbol to concentrate meaning and move an audience to tears.
The Matrix
(by Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski, 1999)
Network
(by Paddy Chayevsky, 1976) If you place your story in something as large and complex as a society or an institution, a symbol is almost required if you want to reach an audience. Both The Matrix and Network owe much of their success to the symbol that represents the story and the social world in which they occur. The terms "matrix" and "network" suggest a single unit that is also a web of enslaving threads. These symbols tell the audience up front that they are entering a complex world of many forces, some of which are hidden from view. This not only warns them to stop trying to figure everything out immediately but also assures them
that fun revelations are on the way.
SYMBOLIC ACTIONS
A single action is normally part of a larger sequence of actions that comprise the plot. Each action is a kind of car in the long train of the hero and opponent competing for the goal. When you make an action symbolic, you connect it to another action or object and so give it charged meaning. Notice that making an action symbolic makes it stand out from the plot sequence. It calls attention to itself, in effect saying, "This action is especially important, and it expresses the theme or character of the story in miniature." So be careful how you use it.
Wuthering Heights
(novel by Emily Bronte, 1847; screenplay by Charles MacArthur and
Ben Hecht, 1939)
When Heathcliff pretends to fight the black knight for Cathy at their "castle" on the moors, he is expressing their make-believe world of romance and Cathy's determination to live in a world of riches and nobility. Heathcliff is also playing out, in miniature, the overall story in which he fights the well-born Linton for Cathy's hand.
Witness
(by Earl W. Wallace & William Kelley, story by William Kelley, 1985) By helping build a barn with the other men while trading glances with Rachel, John is signaling his willingness to leave the violent world of the cop and build a loving bond in a community of peace.
A Tale of Two Cities
(by Charles Dickens, 1859) Like Christ on the cross, Sydney Carton willingly sacrifices his life to the guillotine so that others may live. "It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
Gunca Din
(poem by Rudyard Kipling, story by Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur,
screenplay by Joel Say re & Fred Guiol, 1939) Indian "coolie" Gunga Din wants more than anything to be a soldier in the regiment like the three British soldiers he reveres. In the final battle, with his soldier friends badly wounded and captured, Din blows his bugle, thereby exposing himself to certain death and saving his regiment from walking into a trap.