Symbo-dumps and Spatial Form

First some definitions -

• Spatial Form -
  • "Spatial Form (modernist poetics) gives unity to a literary work by a pattern of interconnected motifs that can only be perceived by 'reading over'" ("The Art of Fiction", David Lodge)
  • "The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time ... modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity" ("Spatial Form in Modern Literature", J. Frank, Sewanee Review, 1945)
• Symbo-dump (my term) - like an info-dump except that it sets up the symbolism of the piece. Like info-dumps, they can be blatant, often appearing after an initial in media res paragraph or two. Alternatively the author can spread the material through the work, or reveal the key symbolism as a punch-line.

These are concepts I sometimes use when I put together stories. I hope that readers will read the story linearly, then roam over the story (rather like their eyes would flick over a painting) to track the instances of (for example) "paper", "bird", "love" etc. The symbols (a limited set of repeated ones) tell a story that might undercut (rather than support) the narrative. Clues about the meaning of the symbols might be revealed in a single scene - for example, an origami bird is left on a schoolgirl's desk. Previous usages of "paper" (perhaps a boy had written a letter) and "bird" (maybe hungry birds had been pecking in the snow) consequently need to be re-assessed. Perhaps earlier the boy scrunched up the letter and threw it at the birds.

Symbolism

In Reality and Symbols I pointed out that "Readers are more likely to read symbolically if Realism cues are reduced. A Forest is a place of testing, of challenge, but if the forest is named and described, the urge to symbolise is attenuated. A poem that's bland or obscure or that repeats a word may tempt readers to look beyond literal meanings".

Fairy Tales provide a fertile setting for symbols - if a man gives a woman an object (it needn't even be a rose) then that object will represent love. If at the end it's lost down a well or stolen by another man, so is love.

Prose writers need be aware of the balance between realism and symbolism. Good stories can be written using various proportions of them. It's even possible for one character in a piece to have a symbolic PoV while another is brutally realistic.

Examples

Here are some story collections that use symbolism extensively (in order of how explicit the symbolism is) -

"Animals at night" (Naomi Booth)

There's often a key theme in these stories with a related symbol that returns at the end. In "The chrysalides" the narrator (her third-person PoV) and Sam are with their little daughter Nia during Covid. Nia asked "why are we alone?" During the day they sometimes walk by the river. In the evening the mother looks through windows at other lives. The mother watches an old, bedridden man opposite. Nia stops wanting to go outside. They get a butterfly farm package in the post. In sync,

• They care for the 5 caterpillars which grow, then produce gold-specked chrysalises. When they hatch inside netting, the gold has gone. Nia hits the netting - "I just wanted to feel them flying" she says - and is upset for an hour.
• The adults try to keep in touch with the world, do Zoom yoga classes, read about police and Blacks. She claims that things can change, that change is inevitable. Sam disagrees - if it happens at all, it has to be worked for. For the first time in months, they meet the mother's mother - by the river
• The man's health worsens. He disappears overnight.

Sam had said they'd release the butterflies out of the window or by the river. In the end, the family go to the river. Before the released butterflies fly away they briefly alight on the family. That night Nia asks her mother what's going to happen to the butterflies. The mother talks to her about life and death - "do people die? Or is it only butterflies?" Nia asks, and "Do people go back into the earth when they die? ... So I was in the ground before I was a baby?" The mother replies "it's more like you become something different". She feels guilty lying about death.

In this piece the life-cycle of butterflies, the river and the netting all have conventional symbolic usages. There's no need to provide a symbol dictionary - a symbo-dump. The language is that of realism. The themes are "inside vs outside" and "change vs escape". Why does Nia hit the netting (she was happy to stroke it before)? Sam barely appears in the story - his main role is to say that change doesn't just happen.

"Subjunctive moods" (CG Menon)

In these stories there's often a symbolic sub-plot that a lyrical ending returns to.

In "Rock Pools" the objects used symbolically don't have conventional meanings - the author has to concoct them. Lisa (her first-person PoV) lives in a "city of widows" where seagulls circle overhead, "keeping the sea's bridal foam from our dreams". They stitch the bright crack of the dawn sky with powerful wingbeats (she later says that "I'm no seagull, when I stitch up wounds it always leaves a mark"). There's a legend that St Cuthbert conjured them out of sea foam.

Jon (her husband who returned to London because he thought she didn't love him) returns each spring to continue a bird project - "tagging them, assigning a meaning to each flight". He has a "beak-sharp mind". She no longer wears a ring. She "used to wear it like a little collar of gold until [she] first stepped out of the house in the clear bright morning to see the gulls". This year he stays with her. When they see each other for the first time in a year she thinks "I feel the tide starting to turn, the current urgently between my legs ... but when I look around, the gulls are already gone." "His eyes move like wings above a beach, snatching my secrets away". He's "like a guardian with pinion feathers of sea foam." She wears her ring again, "like a band round a cormorant's neck". He says "what we're observing is a new pattern ... They've become dependent on people to feed them." He says he's going to leave soon, this time forever - the project's over.

"There are fish that live in rock pools," she thinks, "They live and breed and die without ever seeing the ocean". "Jon observes my migration patterns from the living room to the kitchen. I'm being driven by hunger and silence." That night in bed "I move against him, slippery as a beached fish while he plunges and pecks at my body". At the end she goes "leaping over the rock pools where fish live on land. ... The seagulls ... are leaving this city ... to our sea foam, and our throbbing darkness and our gleeful knowledge of what we lack" (earlier she thinks "I've seen these seagulls every morning, could tell him all that he wants to know")

In this story there's a narrative but symbolism spreads beyond the two main characters, suffusing the lyrical language. Her friend Annie "beats the disapproving wings of her shawl ... there's a glint in her magpie eyes"

For a change, the sea isn't symbolic but several other terms are. To understand their meanings, readers need to keep the whole story in mind, or read it twice. Her ring and the birds' rings are matched up. What does migration mean - just regular movement towards and away? What do the fish and the gulls represent - people (women?) who stay and people (men?) who go (who die)? Why does she "leap over" rock pools? And what about the sea foam? It's to do with gulls, with males, but in what way? Hoped-for males?

Why is "Rock Pools" chosen as the title? I suppose the point is that the narrator (like the fish in the rock pools) stayed, but she in future will avoid that trap? He (a seagull) studies migration - he watches her around the house and decides to leave.

"Seeds of Stars" (Richard Stimac)

Flash can afford to be less realistic, and has less time to drip-feed the symbolism. In this collection the key to the symbols is sometimes provided when an adult explains something to a child in a consciously poetic way by symbo-dumping. In the title story a brother about to leave for the army says to a younger sister
"The dew is the tears from someone missing someone they love. And in each tear is a seed of a star. ... After some time, the seeds of the stars sprout and then grow into the sky. That’s where stars come from"
Later,
Just then, a small cloud, just one, covered so many of the stars, not all, but enough to bring a deeper darkness to the night, like forgetting does loss, not gone, simply unremembered for a time. ... their tears, one by one, fell onto the grass.