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King Arthur also symbolizes the modern leader in conflict. He creates a perfect community in Camelot, based on purity of character, only to lose it when his wife falls in love with his finest and purest knight. The conflict between duty and love is one of the great moral oppositions in storytelling, and King Arthur embodies it as well as any character ever has.
Arthur's ally is Merlin, the mentor-magician par excellence. He is a throwback character to the pre-Christian worldview of magic, so he represents knowledge of the deeper forces of nature. He is the ultimate craftsman-artist of nature and human nature, and of human nature as an outgrowth of nature. His spells and advice always begin with a deep understanding of the needs and cravings of the unique person before him.
Arthur's opponents possess a symbolic quality that hundreds of writers have borrowed over the years. His son is Mordred, the evil child whose very name represents death. Mordred's ally is his mother, Morgana (also known as Morgan le Fay), an evil sorceress.
The knights are supermen like Arthur. They stand above the common man not just in their abilities as warriors but also in their purity and greatness of character. They must live by the chivalric code, and they seek the Holy Grail, by which they can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In their journeys, the knights act as Good Samaritans, helping all in need and by their right action proving their purity of heart.
Excalibur and other versions of the King Arthur story are filled with symbolic worlds and objects. The premier symbolic place is Camelot, the Utopian community where members suppress their human craving for individual glory in exchange for the tranquillity and happiness of the whole. This symbolic place is further symbolized by the Round Table. The Round Table is the republic of the great, where all the knights have an equal place at the table, alongside their king.
Excalibur is named after the other major symbolic object of the King Arthur story, the sword. Excalibur is the male symbol of right action, and only the rightful king, whose heart is pure, can draw it from the stone and wield it to form the ideal community.
The symbols of King Arthur infuse our culture and are found in stories such as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Hope and Glory, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Fisher King, and thousands of American Westerns. If you want to use King Arthur symbols, be sure to twist their meaning so they become original to your story.
The Usual Suspects
(by Christopher McQuarrie, 1995) The Usual Suspects tells a unique story in which the main character creates his own symbolic character using the techniques that we've been talking about, while the story is happening. Appropriately named Verbal, he is apparently a small-time crook and ally but is actually the hero, a master criminal (the main opponent), and a storyteller. In telling the customs interrogator what happened, he constructs a terrifying, ruthless character named Keyser Soze. He attaches to this character the symbol of the devil, in such a way that Keyser Soze gains mythical power to the point that just the mention of his name strikes terror in the heart. At the end of the story, the audience learns that Verbal is Keyser Soze, and he is a master criminal in part because he is a master storyteller. The Usual Suspects is great storytelling and symbol making at the highest level.
Star Wars
(by George Lucas, 1977) One of the main reasons Star Wars has been so popular is that it is founded on the technique of symbolic theme. This apparently simple fantasy adventure story has a strong theme that is concentrated in the symbol of the light saber. In this technologically advanced world where people travel at light speed, both heroes and opponents fight with a saber. Obviously, this is not realistic. But it is realistic enough in this world to be an object that can take on thematic power. The light saber symbolizes the samurai code of training and conduct that can be used for good or evil. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of this symbolic object and the theme it represents to the worldwide success of Star Wars.
Forrest Gump
(novel by Winston Groom, screenplay by Eric Roth, 1994) Forrest Gump uses two objects to stand for themes: the feather and the box of chocolates. You could criticize the writers' technique of attaching symbol to theme as heavy-handed. In this everyday world, a feather just floats down from the sky and lands at Forrest's feet. Obviously, the feather represents Forrest's free spirit and open, easygoing way of life. The box of chocolates is even more obvious. Forrest states, "My momma always said, 'Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.'" This is a direct thematic statement of the right way to live connected to a metaphor.
But these two symbols attached to themes work much better than they at first appear, and the reasons are instructive. First, Forrest Gump is a myth form connected to a drama, and the story covers about forty years. So like the feather, the story meanders over space and time with no apparent direction except the general line of history. Second, its hero is a simpleton who thinks in easy-to-remember platitudes. A "normal" character declaring outright that life is like a box of chocolates is preachy. But simple Forrest is pleased by this charming insight, learned from his beloved mother, and so is most of the audience.
Ulysses
(by James Joyce, 1922) Joyce takes the idea of storyteller as magician, symbol maker, and puzzle maker further than any other writer. This has benefits, but it also has costs, most notably moving the audience from an emotional response to one that is intensely intellectual. When you present literally thousands of subtle and even obscure symbols in thousands of tricky ways, you force your reader to become a story scientist or literary sleuth, determined to step as far back as possible to see how this elaborate puzzle is constructed. Like Citizen Kane (though for different reasons), Ulysses is a story that you can admire greatly for its techniques but that is very hard to love. So let's look at its symbol techniques.
Story Symbol and Symbolic Characters
Joyce sets up a web of symbolic characters primarily by overlaying onto his story the characters of the Odyssey, the Christ story, and Hamlet. He supplements his references to these major character webs with references to real people and iconic characters from Ireland's past. This strategy has a number of advantages. First, it connects character to theme: Joyce is trying to create a natural, or humanistic, religion out of his characters' actions. His everyday characters, Bloom, Stephen, and Molly, take on heroic and even godlike qualities, not just by what they do but also by their constant references to other characters like Odysseus, Jesus, and Hamlet.
This technique also places the characters of Ulysses within a great cultural tradition while showing them rebelling from that tradition and emerging as unique individuals. This is exactly the line of character development Stephen is struggling through over the course of the story. Oppressed by his Catholic upbringing and England's domination of Ireland but not wanting to destroy all spirituality, Stephen searches for a way to be his own person and a real artist.
Another advantage to matching characters with characters from other stories is that it gives Joyce a web of character signposts that extend throughout the book. This is immensely helpful when you are writing a story as long and complex as this. Besides being a designing principle, the character signposts allow Joyce to gauge how his leads change over the
course of the story by referring to these same symbolic characters Odysseus, Jesus, Hamlet--in different ways.
Symbolic Actions and Objects
Joyce applies these same techniques of symbolic character to the actions and objects of the story. He constantly compares the actions of Bloom, Stephen, and Molly to Odysseus, Telemachus, and Penelope, and the effect on the reader is both heroic and ironic. Bloom defeats his Cyclops and makes his escape from the dark cave of a bar. Stephen is haunted by his dead mother, just as Odysseus meets his mother in Hades and Hamlet is visited by his murdered father's ghost. Molly stays at home just like Penelope, but unlike the faithful Penelope, she becomes famous there for her infidelity.
The symbolic objects in Ulysses form a vast web of "sacred" things
in Joyce's naturalistic, everyday religion. Both Stephen and Bloom leave their homes without their keys. Stephen has broken his glasses just the day before. But while his real sight is diminished, he has the chance to be a visionary, to gain his artistic sight over the course of the day's journey. An ad for "Plum's Potted Meat"--"A home isn't really a home without it" refers to the lack of the sacred act of sex between Bloom and his wife and the harm it has done to their home. Stephen wields his walking stick like a sword at the chandelier in the brothel and breaks free of the past that holds him like a prison. Bloom believes that Catholic communion is a lollipop for believers, but he and Stephen have a real communion when they share coffee and then cocoa at Bloom's home.
Creating Symbols—Writing Exercise 6
■ Story Symbol Is there a single symbol that expresses the premise, key story twists, central theme, or overall structure of your story? Look again at your premise, your theme, and your one-line description of the story world. Then write a one-line description of the main symbols in your story.
■ Symbolic Characters Determine the symbols for your hero and other characters. Work through the following steps:
1. Look at the entire character web before creating a symbol for a single character.
2. Begin with the opposition between hero and main opponent.
3. Come up with a single aspect of the character or a single emotion you want the character to evoke in the audience.
4. Consider applying a symbol opposition within the character.
5. Repeat the symbol, in association with the character, many times over the course of the story.
6. Each time you repeat the symbol, vary the detail in some way.
■ Character Type Consider connecting one or more of your characters to a character type, especially to gods, animals, and machines.
■ Symbolic Character Change Is there a symbol you can connect to the character change of your hero? If so, look at the scenes where you express the hero's weakness and need at the beginning of the story and his self-revelation at the end.
■ Symbolic Theme Look for a symbol that can encapsulate the main theme of your story. For a symbol to express the theme, it must stand for a series of actions with moral effects. A more advanced thematic symbol is one that stands for two series of moral actions that are in conflict.
■ Symbolic World Determine what symbols you wish to attach to the various elements of the story world, including the natural settings, man-made spaces, technology, and time.
■ Symbolic Actions Are there one or more specific actions that merit symbolic treatment? Figure out a symbol you can attach to each such action to make it stand out.
■ Symbolic Objects Create a web of symbolic objects by first reviewing the designing principle of your story. Make sure that each symbolic object you create fits with this designing principle. Then choose the objects you want to give extra meaning. ■ Symbol Development Chart how each symbol you use changes over the course of the story.
To see some of these techniques of symbol in practice, let's look at The Lord of the Rings.
The Lord of the Rings
(by J.RR Tolkien, 1954-1955) The Lord of the Rings is nothing less than a modern cosmology and mythol-ogy of England. It brings together the story forms of myth, legend, and high romance, along with story and symbol references to Greek and Norse mythology, Christianity, fairy tale, the King Arthur story, and other tales of the knight errant. The Lord of the Rings is allegorical in the sense, as Tolkien said, that it is very applicable to our modern world and time. Allegorical means, among many other things, that the characters, worlds, actions, and objects are, of necessity, highly metaphorical. That doesn't mean they aren't unique or created by the writer. It means the symbols have references that echo against previous symbols, often deep in the audience's mind.
■ Story Symbol The story symbol, of course, is right in the title. The ring is the object of unlimited power that everyone craves. He who possesses it becomes a lord, with godlike powers. But that lord will inevitably be destructive. The ring is the great temptation that will pull someone from a moral, happy life. And its lure never ends. ■ Symbolic Characters The strength of this incredibly textured story is the rich web of symbolic characters. This is not simply man versus man, man versus animal, or man versus machine. These characters are defined and distinguished by good versus evil, by levels of power (god, wizard, man, Hobbit), and by species (man, elf, dwarf, Orc, goblin, Ent, and ghost). Myth works by character type, which is one reason it has epic scope but little subtlety in how it depicts people. By setting up such a complex and textured web of character types,
Tolkien and his audience get to have their character cake and eat it too. This is an important lesson for any writer using symbolic characters, especially if you are writing a myth-based story.
In Tolkien's character oppositions, good is symbolized by characters who sacrifice, Gandalf and Sam; by the warrior-king Aragorn, who can heal as well as kill; and by those who are one with nature and who have gained mastery of self rather than mastery over others, Galadriel and Tom Bombadil. Tolkien's hero is not the great warrior but the little "man," Hobbit Frodo Baggins, whose greatness of heart allows him to be the most heroic of all. Like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, Frodo is a new kind of myth hero, defined not by the strength of his arms but by the depth of his humanity.
The opponents also possess great symbolic power. Morgoth is the original evil character who predates this story and is part of the history Tolkien created for The Lord of the Rings. Like Mordred of King Arthur, Maugrim of The Chronicles of Narnia, and Voldemort of the Harry Potter stories (English writers just love giving the bad guy a name with "mor" in it, perhaps because "mor" sounds like the French word for "death"), Morgoth conjures up in the minds of the audience the first antigod, Satan, and he is associated in name and action with death. Sauron is the main opponent in The Lord of the Rings; he is evil both because he seeks absolute power and because he will use it to wreak total destruction on Middle Earth. Saruman is a kind of switch character of evil who began as a wizard sent to fight Sauron but was poisoned by the taste of absolute power. Other opponents—Gollum, the Nazgul, the Ores, the spider Shelob, and the Balrog—are various symbolic expressions of envy, hatred, brutality, and destruction.
■ Symbolic Theme As always in a good story (and especially in an allegory), all the elements are founded on the thematic line and oppositions. For Tolkien, that means a Christian thematic structure emphasizing good versus evil. Evil is defined here by the love for and use of power. Good comes from caring for living things, and the highest good is to sacrifice, especially one's own life, for another.
■ Symbolic Worlds The visual subworlds of The Lord of the Rings are as richly textured and symbolic as the character web. These worlds are also both natural and supernatural. Even the man-made spaces are
infused with and extend out of the natural environment. Like the characters, these symbolic subworlds are set in opposition. In the forest world, there is the beautiful, harmonic Lothlorien and the forest of the treelike beings, the Ents, versus the evil Milkwood. The good forest worlds are also set in opposition to the mountain world, which is where the evil forces live. Sauron rules from the mountain lair of Mordor, behind the massive Morannon gate (more "mor"). The Misty Mountains are the site of the underground caverns of Moria, where the heroes visit the "underworld." Frodo passes through the Dead Marshes, a graveyard for those who have died in battle.
The "human" communities express this same natural symbolism. Like Lothlorien, which is a Utopia built around trees, Rivendell is a Utopia built around water and plants. The Shire, home of the Hobbits, is a village embedded in a tamed, agricultural world. These communities stand in contrast to mountain fortresses such as Mordor, Isengard, and Helm's Deep, which are founded on raw power. ■ Symbolic Objects The Lord of the Rings is based on the quest for and possession of symbolic objects, and these are largely dug from the ground or forged in fire. Most important, of cour
se, is the One Ring that Sauron forged in the fires of the volcano of Mount Doom. It symbolizes the desire for false values and absolute power, and whoever owns it will inevitably become totally evil and corrupt. Another circular symbol of evil is the Eye of Sauron that sees all from the top of the Dark Tower and helps Sauron in his quest for the ring.
Like King Arthur's Excalibur, Anduril, which means "flame of the west," is the sword of right action and must only be wielded by the rightful heir to the throne. Where Excalibur was stuck in stone, Anduril was broken and must be reforged so that Aragorn can defeat the forces of evil and regain his throne. Aragorn is a unique warrior-king in his use of the plant Athelas, which has the power to heal. Like Achilles, he is a fighter of great skill, but he is also in communion with nature and is an agent of life.
Of course, these are just a few of the symbols that Tolkien uses in the epic The Lord of the Rings. Study it carefully to master many of the techniques of symbol-making.
PLOT IS the most underestimated of all the major storytelling skills. Most writers know the importance of character and dialogue, though they may not know how to write them well. But when it comes to plot, they think they'll just figure it out when the time comes—which of course never happens.
Because plot involves the intricate weaving of characters and actions over the course of the entire story, it is inherently complex. It must be extremely detailed yet also hang together as a whole. Often the failure of a single plot event can bring the entire story down.