A Potted Lecture on Symbols and Creative Writing
A major difference (some would say the major difference) between man and the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to symbolise. By this I mean the capacity to take object ‘A’ and make it stand for object ‘B’ without there being a natural connection between the two.
Symbols are not signs. Signs have a natural connection with the thing that they signify. For example, large black clouds of an anvil shape towering high into the sky signify the likelihood of thunderstorms. And how!
The black squiggles you are looking at on this screen, which are known, collectively as writing, are symbols. They are, in truth, just black squiggles on the screen (or, more often, on paper) – objects ‘A’ – and only acquire meaning as a result of our agreement that they stand for object ‘B’. There is no connection in nature between the black squiggles that make up the word ‘water’ and the wet stuff upon which life depends and which, in its usual excess, is such a nuisance to civilised living in Scotland.
Symbols don’t just exist as black squiggles, though. Take the picture of the ‘Tree of Life’ which hung as a poster on many a student’s bedroom wall in the 60s and 70s. Sure, it’s a tree, of sorts, but it symbolises – stands for – well,’ life’, I suppose. The picture of Che Guevara – another favourite poster – is certainly a picture of a good-looking, youngish-looking fellow but it was also a symbol of revolutionary struggle and student angst.
More symbols? How about rectangular bits of cloth printed with stars and stripes, or a hammer and sickle or… ok, you complete the list. An alien would have no idea what those bits of material symbolise, any more than he/she/it would know about the symbolism inherent in the picture of Che or the Tree of Life.
How about a gold ring on the third finger, left hand, of a woman living in England; or a globe sitting atop an elephant; or mourners wearing black in the UK, or the saffron robes of Buddhists? There are symbols aplenty in our lives. They are a universal feature of human existence through the ages (the cave paintings at Lascaux!) and they raise our existence, some might argue, above the level of the primitive to the level of the civilised. Then again, as an aside, some others might argues that the phrase ‘civilised human behaviour’ is an oxymoron. No matter.
Or how about symbols as speech? The spoken word is not the same as the written word. There is no natural connection between the written word ‘clerk’ and its expression as a spoken word. You doubt it? In which case, ask an Englishman to say ‘clerk’ and then an American. Similarly ‘tomato’. And yet ‘speech’ requires the objectification of meaning, just as writing does, or a flag does, or a wedding ring does. Speech takes the form of sound waves rather than any pictorial or other form of representation. The ‘encoder’ creates a message in his brain and his voice box, tongue, teeth and lips combine to turn an expression of breath into sound-waves of a certain kind which, when they hit the ear of the listener, are transmitted to the brain and decoded accordingly. Speech takes a physical form just as writing or any other physical representation of a symbol does.
And so, and so, we would generally conclude that the ability to symbolise is ‘a good thing’ even though (swastikas, the initials KKK and so on) specific symbols are abhorrent to many of us (not all of us, of course, or such symbols wouldn’t exist).
However, symbols are tricky little things. And they are tricky because of their threefold functions and the fact that, for the uncritical, it is often difficult to differentiate between these functions.
1 They re-present reality – a reality that is unequivocally true.
Falling into this category are symbols like mathematical figures. Who would doubt the following: 1+1 = 2? Or, for example, the universal indicators of male and female (which I don’t have on my keyboard here but which are formed by circles with an arrow or a plus tacked thereon)? Or what are known as semantic primitives, examples of which are colours or elements in the periodic tables? (But, please note that even these ‘truths’ are open to debate on the basis that they can be thought of as relative to different – socially derived – conceptual structures.) By and large, such symbols are to be trusted. Most people agree they mean exactly what they say on the tin. But, they are rare beasts.
2 They confuse or obfuscate reality – a reality that is equivocally true.
Consider the word ‘tree’. Say it out loud if you wish. What sort of tree flashed in front of your mind’s eye when you saw that word? Because one surely did.
Was it a fir tree, an oak, or was it, because I have mentioned it previously and people are nothing if not suggestible, a ‘Tree of Life’? You can bet it wasn’t the same as my tree. Mine was a Christmas tree, complete with tinsel, lights and a fairy at the top. Idiosyncratic interpretation of a symbol, as I said! And if you and I have problems agreeing about what tree we are talking about without getting involved in definitional polemics, how much more bothersome are words like ‘democracy’, ‘truth’, ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’ Or, to take a topical example, how about the two words ‘Big Society’? What on earth does that mean, Mr Cameron? And what does it mean when idiosyncratically interpreted by 60 million UK residents, all of whom have different biographical backgrounds and psychological traits which influence their interpretations of the world generally, let alone individual symbols?
A quotation often attributed to Voltaire is maybe relevant here: “If you wish to talk to me, first define your terms.” Which is fine and dandy but if we were to indulge in those pesky definitional polemics each and every time we uttered a word, life would prove intolerable and not much would get done. Which brings me neatly to lawyers and the law. Yes, they make life intolerable in many respects and not much gets done. And the reason why the law and lawyers drive us close to insanity is precisely because laws are constructed and promulgated by means of symbols (writing, in the main), the interpretation of which is outrageously idiosyncratic and which therefore provides lawyers with fine careers as sophists arguing for this interpretation or that interpretation of particular laws. Anybody who doubts this should consult English case law on the word ‘reasonable’. The definition of that single word has occupied much time and energy (and cost much money) over the years, being such an important concept in the English legal system. A semantic primitive, it is most certainly not. So, this is what lawyers do: they argue about the meaning of words. That’s it. That’s what they do. And they are able to do so because of the peculiar second function of symbols: that is, the confusing or obfuscation of reality.
Take any scenario you like: the domestic breakfast table where father and teenage son are going hammer and tongs at each other, any committee meeting anywhere, a university debating chamber, a party political meeting, business negotiations, and others – all of them will get bogged down with questions about the meaning of words. “No, that’s not what I meant,” would be one of the most commonly used phrases if you were to listen in.
And now there are emails and texting and Instant Messaging and Tweeting as added factors in the mess of confused meanings that so plague our lives.
Is this relevant to the creative writer? Of course it is. If the writer (the encoder) can’t successfully send a message to the reader (the decoder) such that the creative piece means what it’s intended to mean, it’s not a very good piece of writing. Choosing the wrong word – ‘imply’ instead of ‘infer’ (and vice versa), for example – is a regular means of adding confusion to a story, and to life. George Bush was a master at it and Sarah Palin seems to be following his lead. Punctuation marks (more symbols), which are every bit as important as the words in clarifying meaning, are the bête noir of any editor’s life. Lynne Truss’s book, Eats Shoots & Leaves, provides masterful comment on this.
3 They create a reality that doesn’t exist – a reality that is unequivocally untrue
And, yes, I do know that this sub-heading is nonsense. How can you have a reality that doesn’t exist because if it doesn’t exist, how can it be real? Well, that’s the point. It can’t. And, yes, it is complete nonsense. But we live in a nonsensical world, partly as a result of this particular function of symbols.
Consider this phrase: The purple mist rolled up the yellow hill and engulfed the green sheep.
I agree. What nonsense. And yet you, the reader, saw this scene with your well-used mind’s eye. You saw a purple mist rolling up a yellow hillside and engulfing some green sheep. I created a not-very-convincing reality for you. But you weren’t fooled for a moment, were you?
Let’s try some slightly more believable realities by less crass manipulation of symbols. How about these: Your cheque’s in the post; I promise to respect you in the morning; your bum doesn’t look big in that? Well, those were better attempts than the purple mist example, you’ll have to grant me that, but I reckon you saw through my lies again, for that’s what they were. On the evidence of those examples, as a creative writer, I suck. I need to write something that really, really convinces you about the truth of something… an idea, an historical event, an emotion, anything provided that, to you, it is ‘real’. How about this: the greatest tragedy in my life was to hold the hand of my father as he died at far too young an age in circumstances where I felt I should have saved him? I’ll leave you to decide whether that is really real, whether it actually happened or whether it’s all fanciful stuff and simply a (more) skilful manipulation of symbols than previously, but whatever you decide, you will never be sure.
Will you be sure about these, though: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal, Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic? I’ll stop there. I could have gone on. Are all or any of these nation-states real democracies? In truth, I don’t know, any more than I know whether the UK or the USA or France or Germany are. Just because people use the collective symbols that constitute the word ‘democratic’ or ‘democracy’ doesn’t mean that they are. And, to be exceptionally truthful, I’m not at all sure what the word ‘democracy’ means in the contemporary world… and I’m a political theorist! I do know, though, that thinking about symbols fairly makes my head spin.
The problem is that the Machiavellian-minded in this world (and I include smart creative writers in that category) fully understand the power of symbols. From politicians to confidence tricksters, from ad-men to paedophiles, the skilful manipulator of symbols creates the illusion of reality about any number of scenarios: whether they are bringing democracy to the Middle East, or promising a return of 100% on your investment, or trying to sell you a perfume that is a ‘timeless ribbon of light’, or pretending to be a friend of the family while secretly grooming a 13 year old, they all use symbols to weave an illusion of reality for their own purposes. For, and this is the crux of the matter, symbols, more often than not = illusion.
We all of us have inside of us a repository of socially-given symbols, mostly in the form of words. It’s like having a bucket of the things into which we plunge our hands, extracting individual letters and punctuation marks before arranging them in a given sequence on an intellectual whiteboard. The creative writer does this purposefully for, we hope, benign reasons: To be or not to be– that is the question… and so on. The knave does it for malign reasons. In ‘Solving the Jewish Question’, Dr. Achim Gercke wrote: Allowing free development and equality for the Jews has led to an “unfree” situation of exploited competition, and to a handing over of important positions within the German people to those of a foreign race.
But most people (I trust) don’t think about these things too much and simply use symbols in a sloppy way. They plunge their hands into the bucket, draw out a number of symbols and slap them onto their whiteboards. And, arbitrarily, while looking at the twinkling stars, and musing about life generally, they might order some of the symbols in the following order: w.h.a.t.’.s i.t a.l.l a.b.o.u.t and i.s t.h.e.r.e a. l.i.f.e a.f.t.e.r d.e.a.t.h… and then they tack onto the end of each one of these a ‘?’ to add to the illusion, the illusion being that the questions (for that is what they have become), make sense. Well, they don’t. They are illegitimate questions (in that form) and the answers they inspire (any number of answers if you think about it – I will leave you to supply your own, courtesy of your own repository of symbols and your idiosyncratic interpretation of them) are likely to be illusions just the same. Oh, but don’t we believe in them, both questions and answers? Powerful things, those symbols.
And so, where does this get us, we creative writers? Well, it pays, I think, to understand the nature of the raw material you are working with. Our experiences, and our imagination, are mediated by symbols. Our lives are presented to us in symbolic form, given to us by our culture. We think in symbols and interact with the world generally and our fellow man specifically through symbols. And our writing should not confuse. It should comprise only symbols configured in such a way as to re-present reality, which can sometimes be boring, or that create an illusion of reality and if the latter, that reality had better be believable and not just full of green sheep.
