It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow

-40-If you want a character to be cleansed, symbolically, let him walk through the rain to get somewhere. On the other hand, if he falls down, he’ll be covered in mud and therefore more stained than before.

Does He Mean That?

Usually, yes, (even if it’s unintentional) because of all the reading writers do they may not realize they’re using symbols and themes the way he is.

…More Than It’s Gonna Hurt You: Concerning Violence

-41- Violence is one of the most personal and even intimate acts between human beings, but it can also be cultural and societal in its implications. It can be symbolic, thematic, biblical, etc. Violence in real life is simply aggression—it doesn’t contain meaning beyond the act itself.

-42- There are two types of violence in literature: specific injury that authors cause characters to visit on one another or on themselves, and narrative violence that causes characters to harm in general.

-43- Authors kill off characters for these reasons: make action happen, cause plot complications, end plot complications, put other characters under stress.

-44- I know of creative writing teachers who feel Faulkner is the single greatest danger to budding fiction writers. So alluring is his penchant for violence that the imitation Faulknerian story will have a rape, three cases of incest, a stabbing, two shootings, and a suicide by drowning, all in two thousand words.

-45- When [accidents and illnesses] happen in literature they’re not really accidents.

-46- What does this type of misfortune represent thematically? What famous or mythic death does this one resemble? Thy this sort of violence and not some other?

Is That a Symbol?

Sure, why not?

-47- The problem with symbols is that people expect them to mean ONE thing in particular, when it doesn’t have to—it can mean whatever it means to you.

-48- If a symbol only has one meaning then the story is an allegory—where everything has a one-to-one basis.

-49- We bring an individual history to our reading, a mix of previous readings, to be sure, but also a history that includes, but is not limited to, educational attainment, gender, race, class,faith, social involvement and philosophical inclination. These factors will inevitably influence what we understand in our reading, and nowhere is this individuality clearer than in the matter of symbolism.

-50- One of the pleasures of literary scholarship lies in encountering different and even conflicting interpretation, since the great work allows for a considerable range of possible interpretations

-51- Action and events can also be symbolic.

-52- Ask questions of the text: what’s the writer doing with this image, this object, this act; what possibilities are suggested by the movement of the narrative or lyric; and most important, what does it FEEL like it’s doing?

-53- The more you exercise the symbolic imagination, the better and quicker it works.

-54- A reader’s imagination is the act of one creative intelligence engaging another.