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SYMBOLIC OBJECTS
Symbolic objects almost never exist alone in a story because alone they have almost no ability to refer to something else. A web of objects, related by some kind of guiding principle, can form a deep, complex pattern of meaning, usually in support of the theme.
When creating a web of symbolic objects, begin by going back to the designing principle of the story. This is the glue that turns a collection of individual objects into a cluster. Each object then not only refers to another object but also referto and connects with the other symbolic objects in the story.
You can create a web of symbolic objects in any story, but they are easiest to see in certain story forms, especially myth, horror, and Western. These genre's have been written so many times that they have been honed to perfection. That includes objects that have been used so often that they have become recognizable metaphors. They are prefabricated symbols whose meaning the audience understands immediately at some level of conscious thought.
Let's look at the web of symbolic objects in some stories that best represent these highly metaphorical genres.
Myth Symbol Web
Myth is the oldest and to this day the most popular of all story forms. The ancient Greek myths, which are one of the foundation pillars of Western thought, are allegorical and metaphorical, and you should know how they work if you want to use them as the basis for your own story.
These stories always present at least two levels of beings: gods and humans. Don't make the common mistake of thinking that this was necessarily the ancient Greeks' view of how the world really works. The two levels in these stories don't express the belief that gods rule man. Rather, the gods are that aspect of man by which he can achieve excellence or enlightenment. The "gods" are an ingenious psychological model in which a web of characters represents character traits and ways of acting you wish to attain or avoid.
Along with this highly symbolic set of characters, myths use a clearly prescribed set of symbolic objects. When these stories were originally told, audiences knew that these symbols always represented something else, and they knew exactly what the symbols meant. Storytellers achieved their effects by juxtaposing these key symbols over the course of the story.
The most important thing to understand about these metaphorical symbols is that they also represent something within the hero. Here are some of the key symbols in myth and what they probably meant to ancient audiences. Of course, even with these highly metaphorical symbols, there is no fixed meaning; symbols are always ambiguous to some degree.
■ Journey: The life path
■ Labyrinth: Confusion on finding the path to enlightenment
■ Garden: Being at one with the natural law, harmony within oneself and with others
■ Tree: Tree of life
■ Animals (horse, bird, snake): Models on the path to enlightenment or hell
■ Ladder: Stages to enlightenment
■ Underground: Unexplored region of the self, land of the dead
■ Talisman (sword, bow, shield, cloak): Right action
The Odyssey
(by Homer)
I believe that the Odyssey is the most artistic and most influential Greek myth in storytelling history. Its use of symbolic objects is one reason. To see the symbol techniques, you must begin, as always, with the characters.
The first thing you notice about the characters is that Homer has moved from the powerful warrior who fights to the death (the Iliad) to the wily warrior who searches for home and lives. Odysseus is a very good fighter. But he is much more a searcher, a thinker (schemer), and a lover.
This character shift dictates a change in symbolic theme as well, from matriarchy to patriarchy. Instead of a story where the king must die and the mother remains, Odysseus returns to retake the throne. As in most great stories, Odysseus undergoes character change. He returns home the same man but a greater person. This we see by his biggest moral decision: by returning home, Odysseus chooses mortality over immortality.
One of the central oppositions of symbolic character in storytelling is man versus woman. Unlike Odysseus, who learns by journeying, Penelope stays in one place and learns through dreams. She also makes decisions based on her dreams.
Homer builds the web of symbolic objects in the Odyssey based on the characters and the theme. This is why the web is based on male objects: ax, mast, staff, oars, and bow. For the characters, these objects all represent some version of directionality and right action. In contrast to these symbols is the tree that supports Odysseus and Penelope's marriage bed. This is the tree of life, and it represents the idea that marriage is organic. It grows or it decays. When the man wanders too far or too long in his quest for glory (the ultimate warrior value), the marriage and life itself die.
Horror Symbol Web
The horror genre is about the fear of the inhuman entering the human community. It is about crossing the boundaries of a civilized life—between living and dead, rational and irrational, moral and immoral—with destruction the inevitable result. Because horror asks the most fundamental question—what is human and what is inhuman?—the form has taken on a religious mindset. In American and European horror stories, that religious mind-set is Christian. As a result, the character web and symbol web in these stories are almost completely determined by Christian cosmology.
In most horror stories, the hero is reactive, and the main opponent, who pushes the action, is the devil or some version of the devil's minion. The devil is the incarnation of evil, the bad father, who will lead humans to eternal damnation if not stopped. The moral argument in these stories is always couched in simple binary terms: the battle between good and evil.
The symbol web also starts with a binary opposition, and the symbolic, visual expression of good versus evil is light versus dark. The primary symbol on the light side is of course the cross, which has the power to turn back even Satan himself. The dark symbols are often different animals. In pre-Christian myth stories, animals like the horse, stag, bull, ram, and snake were symbols of ideals that would lead a person to right action and a higher self. In Christian symbolism, those animals represent evil action. That's why the devil is horned. Animals like the wolf, ape, bat, and snake represent the lifting of sanctions, the success of passion and the body, and the path to hell. And these symbols exert their greatest power in darkness.
Dracula
(novel by Bram Stoker, play by Hamilton Deane & John L. Balderston,
script by Garrett Fort, 1931) The vampire Dracula, one of the "undead," is the ultimate creature of the night. He lives off the blood of humans whom he kills or infects to make them his slaves. He sleeps in a coffin, and he will burn to death if he is exposed to sunlight.
Vampires are extremely sensual. T'hey gaze longingly at the hare neck of a victim, and they are overwhelmed by their lust to bite the neck and suck the blood. In vampire stories like Dracula, sex equals death, and the blurring of the line between life and death leads to a sentence far worse than death, which is to live in an unending purgatory, roaming the world in the dark of night.
Dracula has the power to turn into a bat or a wolf, and he usually lives in ruins that are crawling with rats. He is a uniquely European character in that he is a count, a member of the aristocracy. Count Dracula is part of an aging, corrupt aristocracy that parasitically feeds on the common people.
Dracula is extremely powerful at night. But he can be stopped if someone knows his secret. He shrinks at the sight of the crucifix and burns when sprayed with holy water.
Other classic horror stories that play with this symbol set are The Exorcist and The Omen. Carrie uses the same set but reverses its meaning. Here the Christian symbols are associated with bigotry and closed-mindedness, and Carrie kills her evangelical mother by teleporting a crucifix into her heart.
Western Symbol Web
The Western is the last of the great creation myths, because the American West was the last livable frontier on earth. This story form is the n
ational myth of America and has been written and rewritten thousands of times. So it has a highly metaphorical symbol web. The Western is the story of millions of individuals journeying west, taming the wilderness, and building a home. They are led by a lone-warrior hero who can defeat the barbarians and make it safe for the pioneers to form a village. Like Moses, this warrior can lead his people to the Promised Land but not enter it himself. He is doomed to remain unmarried and alone, forever traveling the wilderness until he and it are gone.
The heyday of the Western genre was from about 1880 to 1960. So this story form has always been about a time and place that was already past, even when it first became popular. But it is important to remember that as a creation myth, the Western was always a vision of the future, a national stage of development that Americans had collectively decided they wanted, even though it was set in the past and could not be created in fact.
The vision of the Western is to conquer the land, kill or transform the "lower" "barbarian" races, spread Christianity and civilization, turn nature into wealth, and create the American nation. The designing principle of the Western story form is that the entire process of world history is being repeated on the clean slate of the pristine American wilderness, so America is the world's last chance to regain paradise.
Any national story becomes a religious story, depending on its definition of certain rituals and values and the intensity with which it is believed. Not surprisingly, such a national religious story produces a highly metaphorical symbol web.
The symbol web of the Western begins with the horseman. He is both hunter and warrior, and he is the ultimate expression of the warrior culture. He also takes on certain features of the English national myth of King Arthur. He is the natural knight, a common man of pure and noble character who lives by a moral code of chivalry and right action (known as the Code of the West).
The Western hero does not wear armor, but he wears the second great symbol of this symbol web, the six-gun. The six-gun represents mechanized force, a "sword" of justice that is highly magnified in power. Because of his code and the values of the warrior culture, the cowboy will never draw his gun first. And he must always enforce justice in a showdown in the street, where all can see.
Like the horror story, the Western always expresses binary values of good and evil, and these are signaled by the third major symbol of the web, the hat. The Western hero wears a white hat; the bad man wears black.
The fourth symbol of the form is the badge, which is in the shape of another symbol, the star. The Western hero is always the enforcer of right, often to his own detriment, since his violence usually ostracizes him. He may temporarily join the community in an official way if he becomes a lawman. He imposes the law not just upon the wilderness but also upon the wildness and passion within each person.
The final major symbol of the Western web is the fence. It is always a wooden fence, slight and fragile, and it represents the skin-deep control the new civilization has over the wilderness of nature and the wildness of human nature.
The Western symbol web is used to great effect in stories like The Virginian, Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and the most schematic and metaphorical of all Westerns, Shane.
Shane
(novel by Jack Schaefer, screenplay by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and Jack Sher, 1953) Shane's schematic quality makes it easy to see the Western symbols, but it calls so much attention to those symbols that the audience always has the sense that "I'm watching a classic Western." This is the great risk in using highly metaphorical symbols.
That being said, Shane takes the mythical Western form to its logical extreme. The story tracks a mysterious stranger who, when first seen, is already on a journey. He rides down from the mountain, makes one stop, and then returns to the mountain. The film is a subgenre I call the "traveling angel story," which is found not only in Westerns but also in detective stories (the Hercule Poirot stories), comedies (Crocodile Dundee; Amelie; Chocolat; Good Morning, Vietnam), and musicals (Mary Poppins, The Music Man). In the traveling angel story, the hero enters a community in trouble, helps the inhabitants fix things, and then moves on to help the next community. Here in its Western version, Shane is the traveling warrior angel who fights other warriors (cattlemen) to make it safe for the farmers and the villagers to build a home and a village.
Shane also has a highly symbolic character web. There is the angel-like hero versus the satanic gunslinger; the family-man farmer (named Joseph) versus the grizzled, ruthless, unmarried cattleman; the ideal wife and mother (named Marian); and the child, a boy who worships the man who is good with a gun. These abstract characters are presented with almost no individual detail. For example, Shane has some ghost in his past involving the use of guns, but it's never explained. As a result, the characters are just very appealing metaphors.
All the standard Western symbols are here in their purest form. The gun is crucial to any Western. But in Shane, it's placed at the center of the theme. The film asks the question by which every man in the story is judged: Do you have the courage to use the gun? The cattlemen hate the farmers because they put up fences. The farmers fight the cattlemen so they can build a real town with laws and a church. Shane wears light buckskin; the evil gunslinger wears black. The farmers buy supplies with which
they can build their homes a( the general store. But the store has a door that opens into the saloon where the cattlemen drink and light and kill. Shane tries to build a new life of home and family when lie's in the general store, but he can't help being sucked into the saloon and back to his old life as a lone warrior who is great with a gun.
This isn't to say that Shane is a bad piece of storytelling. It has a certain power precisely because its symbol web is so clean, so well drawn. There is no padding here. But for that same reason, it feels like a schematic story, with a moral argument that is just this side of moral philosophy, as almost all religious stories are.
SYMBOL TECHNIQUE: REVERSING THE SYMBOL WEB
The great flaw of using a prefabricated metaphorical symbol web is that it is so self-conscious and predictable that the story becomes a blueprint for the audience, not a lived experience. But in this flaw lies a tremendous opportunity. You can use the audience's knowledge of the form and the symbol web to reverse it. In this technique, you use all the symbols in the web but twist them so that their meaning is very different from what the audience expects. This forces them to rethink all their expectations. You can do this with any story that has well-known symbols. When you are working in a specific genre like myth, horror, or Western, this technique is known as undercutting the genre.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller
(novel by Edmund Naughton, screenplay by Robert Altman &
Brian McKay, 1971) McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a great film with a brilliant script. A big part of its brilliance lies in its strategy for reversing the classic Western symbols. This reversal of symbols is an outgrowth of the traditional Western theme. Instead of characters bringing civilization to the wilderness, McCabe and Mrs. Miller shows an entrepreneur who builds a town from out of the wilderness and who is destroyed by big business.
The reverse symbolism begins with the main character. McCabe is a gambler and dandy who makes a fortune by opening a whorehouse. He creates a community out of the western wilderness through the capital-
ism of sex. The second main character, the love of McCabe's life, is a madam who smokes opium.
The visual subworlds also reverse the classic symbols. The town is nor the rational grid of clapboard buildings on the flat, dry plain of the Southwest. It's a makeshift wood and tent town carved out of the lush, rainy forest of the Northwest. Instead of a bustling community under the benevolent gaze of the marshal, this town is fragmented and half-built, with listless, isolated individuals who stare suspiciously at any stranger.
The key symbolic action of the Western is the showdown, and this too is reversed. The classic showdown happens in the middle of the main street where the whole town can
see. The cowboy hero waits for the bad man to draw first, still beats him, and reaffirms right action and law and order for the growing community. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the hero, who is anything but a lawman, is chased all over town by three killers during a blinding snowstorm. None of the townspeople see or care about McCabe's right action or whether the town's leader lives or dies. They are off dousing the flames of a church that no one attends.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller flips the symbolic objects of classic Westerns as well. The law does not exist. The church sits empty. In the showdown, one of the killers hides behind a building and picks off McCabe with a shotgun. McCabe, who only appears to be dead, shoots the killer between the eyes using a hidden derringer (in classic Westerns, the weapon of women!). Instead of the chaps and white, wide-brimmed hat of the cowboy, McCabe wears an eastern suit and a bowler.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, with its strategy of undercutting a genre, gives us some of the best techniques for making old metaphorical symbols new. It is an education in great storytelling and a landmark of American film.
Examples of Symbol Web
The best way to learn the techniques of symbol web is to see them in use. As we look at different stories, you will notice these techniques apply equally well in a wide array of story forms.
Excalibur
(novel Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, screenplay by
Rospo Pallenberg and John Moorman, 1981) If the Western is the national myth of the United States, you could argue that the King Arthur story is the national myth of England. Its power and appeal are so vast that this one tale informs thousands of stories throughout Western storytelling. For that reason alone, we as modern-day storytellers should know how its crucial symbols work. As always, we begin with the character symbols.
King Arthur is not just a man and not just a king. He is the modern centaur, the metal horseman. As such, he is the first superman, the Man of Steel, the male taken to the extreme. He is the ultimate embodiment of warrior culture. He represents courage, strength, right action, and establishing justice through combat in front of others. Ironically, as masculinity taken to the extreme, he lives by a code of chivalry that places woman high on a pedestal of absolute purity. This turns the entire female gender into a symbol, divided into the Christian binary opposites of Madonna and whore.