Bears have been done too. This is the final scene of Grizzly, which is pretty awesome in its horribleness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgYIH715YeM
I think the grizzly is a symbol of the decline of the Canadian mineral extraction industry and the hardships that represented for many communities.
I think the grizzly is a symbol of the decline of the Canadian mineral extraction industry and the hardships that represented for many communities.
Must be time for a sequel - It Came From the Tar Sands!
That reads as a truism to me. Something in the work that isn't constructed deliberately is not symbolism; if it is interpreted as symbols, it's miscommunication with the author.
But assuming that you mean that "things we believe are symbolism" in an authors work are generally constructed deliberately, I would be very interested in seeing any kind of attempt to quantify how often literature critics gets it right, by e.g. having them analyse works where authors have confirmed their intent.
> When I write fiction it's almost impossible for me to start at the beginning and proceed to the end - I start out with fragmentary ideas of momentary images, snatches of conversation and so on, and traverse them in sort of random fashion until the outline of a sequence emerges which suggests a plot. Various symbols will suggest themselves along the way, and one or two may 'click' by encapsulating or paralleling the story structure particularly well. Once I've identified one of those then it acts like structural reinforcement, so I'll go back and add it or emphasize it in various parts of the story where it seemed to fit well.
And when I write, I don't think about symbols at all, generally. If I do see something that stands out as likely to be interpreted as symbolism, I'd generally remove it, as I find it trite and annoying. Your anecdote is interesting enough, but you can't extrapolate from that to tell us anything about how often people intentionally adds symbols vs. simply intend to e.g. convey images without thinking about how people might try to analyse it to death.
> But that she sells books rather than vegetables or equine accessories suggests she's primarily contemplative and maybe sensual, as opposed to nurturing or dynamic, that she's a collector/curator rather than a consumer or maker, and so on and so on.
Or it was what the author knew how to describe. Or the author likes book stores. Or the author wanted to add in a point about the death of small book stores (personally I'm far more partial to the idea that script writer was being literal and straight forward than what you suggest, but I have no specific basis for this interpretation either). Or (and I have no idea, so I'm just throwing out possibilities here) Meg Ryan was tied to the project from early on and the script writer just happened to think she'd fit well as a book store owner. The options were already limited if wanting to stay realistic once the premise of "owner of small local business falls for big chain guy" was set (e.g. equine accessories was never an option; produce could have been).
To me, absent additional knowledge of what the script writer intended, your suggestion is already well into over-interpretation.
But assuming that you mean that "things we believe are symbolism" in an authors work are generally constructed deliberately, I would be very interested in seeing any kind of attempt to quantify how often literature critics gets it right, by e.g. having them analyse works where authors have confirmed their intent.
I'm going to demur a little on 'things we believe...'. You are right of course about the aspect of deliberation, but there are two other possibilities besides critics simply being wrong: one, that symbols originate with the author but the author isn't conscious of them, and two that symbols don't originate with the author at all(perhaps because they appear to reference things that didn't exist at the time the story was written) but nevertheless offer an interesting new perspective on a work.
Modern critics are not much concerned with objective truths about 'what the author meant' so much as teasing apart the construction of meaning in readers' minds. MY understanding is that this approach became more prominent after the french critic Roland Barthes appeared on the scene and suggested that there might be no limit to the possibilities of interpretation, followed by Foucault suggesting there might not be such a thing as authorship (I'm oversimplifying to the point of absurdity here, mind). One the one hand I have a problem with this approach as a writer, because I do try to construct meaning and I am not enthused about some jumped-up critic who has never attempted any fiction coming along and expounding on 'what it really means' - I frequently find myself reading books of criticism and muttering 'so-and-so is still alive - why not just ask the author about intention?' Then again it's easy to find examples of cultural and symbolic material being assigned new meanings that came to overshadow the original intended ones. Famous examples would be Hitler's appropriation of the Swastika to represent the Nazi party, turning an Asian symbol of good luck and harmony into one of terror and oppression, or the ongoing game in American politics of claiming that 'the founders intended' this or that outcome of a Constitutional dispute. For politicians, what the author intended by something is of distinctly secondary importance compared to what the public can be made to believe was intended, and so (critics argue) we need to consider how works can be understood as well as how they were intended.
And when I write, I don't think about symbols at all, generally. If I do see something that stands out as likely to be interpreted as symbolism, I'd generally remove it, as I find it trite and annoying. Your anecdote is interesting enough, but you can't extrapolate from that to tell us anything about how often people intentionally adds symbols vs. simply intend to e.g. convey images without thinking about how people might try to analyse it to death.
For sure. I'm just trying to give one example of how symbols can be used. I used to be resistant to this approach to symbolization myself and wrote in pursuit of a more messy realism that rejected such abstractions, but eventually I noticed that the more abstract symbolic stuff was what I actually related to emotionally and accepted that I valued a lot of art more for its emotional and symbolic qualities than for its intellectual or mechanical ones.
Or it was what the author knew how to describe. Or the author likes book stores. Or the author wanted to add in a point about the death of small book stores (personally I'm far more partial to the idea that script writer was being literal and straight forward than what you suggest, but I have no specific basis for this interpretation either). Or (and I have no idea, so I'm just throwing out possibilities here) Meg Ryan was tied to the project from early on and the script writer just happened to think she'd fit well as a book store owner. The options were already limited if wanting to stay realistic once the premise of "owner of small local business falls for big chain guy" was set (e.g. equine accessories was never an option; produce could have been).
To me, absent additional knowledge of what the script writer intended, your suggestion is already well into over-interpretation.
Again I would have been firmly in your camp a few years back. Indeed, having worked for a decade in film, I've seen a lot of projects where the semantic content was subordinated to logistics, eg a story being set in a prison rather than a military base because we couldn't afford to rent a location and proprs for a convincing military base, but there was a disused jail going cheap and we made some last minute story adjustments. That's not such an issue for a big budget film but for small budget films of the sort I work on it happens all the time.
However! I also believe in a phenomenological approach to art, ie that when you encounter a piece of art the impression that it makes on you is the most important thing, unmediated by any critic's interpretation, artist's statement, or even knowledge of the artist's identity. To me the essence of good art is that it compels engagement somehow. So for example, I intensely dislike the paintings of Francis Bacon but I think he's a great artist because I feel compelled to engage with them; somehow he's managed to bypass my preferential filters in order to communicate something I find unpleasant but truthful. I certainly don't want to have a discussion with an art critic about his work because while I find it distressing to look at, that experience of distress is something I wish to explore and understand within myself rather than domesticate by locating it within a critical framework - I'm not so interested in understanding Francis Bacon as I am my reaction to his work. Of course over time I have become a bit interested in Bacon himself, but I think it's important not to lose sight of that first impression, when you see, hear, or read something the first time without any clear cultural context.
So for me the value of criticism is (increasingly) not about answering the question of 'what is this art about' or 'what does this artist mean' but rather 'how do people engage with art' or 'how do we construct meaning', which I suppose reflects a personal slide from Platonism to existentialism.
That said, symbolism generally is constructed deliberately. When I write fiction it's almost impossible for me to start at the beginning and proceed to the end - I start out with fragmentary ideas of momentary images, snatches of conversation and so on, and traverse them in sort of random fashion until the outline of a sequence emerges which suggests a plot. Various symbols will suggest themselves along the way, and one or two may 'click' by encapsulating or paralleling the story structure particularly well. Once I've identified one of those then it acts like structural reinforcement, so I'll go back and add it or emphasize it in various parts of the story where it seemed to fit well.
The symbol(s) you pick in turn become a source of new ideas for solving other plot/structure problems. So suppose I have a story about some lonely woman and I realize this person likes flowers (I didn't decide this, I just kept picturing her eating dinner alone but always with a vase of flowers on the table so I'll roll with it), and then it hits me that flowers have a short life and wilt and die so that's a good metaphor for my character's situation if she doesn't find love. This isn't a full story yet, though - why is this person lonely? Dunno, don't have any ideas...well I'll think about flowers a bit....vases...you need to water the...do you pick them or buy them...will they attract insects....oh wait, flowers use insects to pollinate, what if my character was stung by a bee and unconsciously displaced a fear of sex onto the incident? Now I have a story because I have a person in conflict with herself, impelled to seek love by the fact of time's passage but afraid of the emotional or physical risks that entails. Hmm, not only does my lead like flowers, but has become obsessed with them - she owns a chain of florists or she's a master flower arranger that supplies flowers for all the best weddings, and has put all the energy that normally goes into a romantic relationship into floral activities instead. Then she meets someone who's perfect, but maybe hates cut flowers, which is a problem because my florist is obsessed with having everything just so and needs to learn to accept other people as they are naturally...well now I have a whole little world here with numerous interconnected symbols and some obvious characters and situations that I can develop, and the name of the flower store and the story is 'Perfect Bouquet,' and it seems like it's going to be a romantic comedy.
Exploring and exaggerating the semantic associations of the initial floral symbol has provided me with a basic plot and a handful of obvious scenes that I can begin writing immediately. Most books on writing say things like imagine your characters, find out everything about them and flesh them out in detail, then put them together and see what they do...' I guess that works for some people but I think it's total crap. I don't know any florists or much about flowers, apart from a summer working for a commercial flower supplier when I was young (which was basically a warehouse job). But taking a generic person, an emotion, and finding some symbol that can embody that were enough to get the ball rolling.
You can do this in reverse too. Sticking with the romantic comedy genre, take You've Got Mail. Meg Ryan is a proto-hipster who owns a tiny local bookstore, Tom Hanks is the ruthless CEO of a bookstore chain that wants to put her out of business, and of course they have to fall in love (via the internet, which ironically has since put a large bookstore chain out of business - see my point above about revisionist readings, because it's interesting to ask whether Nora Ephron even contemplated that possibility when she wrote the film). Now the story structure is pretty generic - it's sort of Beauty and the Beast set in a bookstore, and BatB is in turn a metaphor for mating strategies. But why bookstores? Couldn't Meg Ryan have been a plucky neighborhood grocer being squeezed by the opening of a new Walmart store, or a feisty buggy whip maker fending off an encroaching automobile salesman. But that she sells books rather than vegetables or equine accessories suggests she's primarily contemplative and maybe sensual, as opposed to nurturing or dynamic, that she's a collector/curator rather than a consumer or maker, and so on and so on.
The process of exploring these semantic associations isn't a scientific one, and you're absolutely right that it can degenerate into horse shit that ends up telling us more about the critic's inner life than the work that is supposedly under scrutiny, but the inquiry is itself informative. Why is Jaws about a giant shark rather than a giant alligator or bear? It wouldn't be hard to imagine a story about a village near a swamp or a forest that was menaced by the appropriate animal and have the plot unfold quite similarly - creature features are among the oldest kinds of stories and thus among the most formulaic, but we don't mind because they're so relatable, as long as the personality of the Creature is developed sufficiently well. Symbols work like icebergs; the large part that is submerged (below the level of consciousness)serves as a foundation for the relatively small visible part: the authorial design is to present the reader with something whose significance is easy to underestimate but which will become clear during the development of the story.