Symbolism and the Moral Hazard of Literary Studies

There is an old jibe that I have not been able to trace to its source that says that in literature, a phallic symbol is anything that is longer than it is wide. This came to mind when I read Lisa Libes’ recent note:

Yes, English class ruins everything, and my response to Libes’s note was:

This may count as an act of filial impiety on my part because my father was a professor of literature and wrote a book called John Keats and Symbolism. He wrote it when I was in high school, and I don’t think I have a copy of it anymore, so whether my complaint here would actually be filially impious, I can’t really tell. I’ll just have to risk it.

The moral hazard of literary studies is that there are far fewer great works of literature than there are tenure-seeking professors of literature, and so there is simply not enough subject matter for all of them to write sensible original theses and articles about. This tempts the upward-mobility-seeking scholar to do one of three things: go wide, go deep, or go political.

Going wide means teaching material that does not merit the attention given to it, like writing a thesis on Archie Comics or Star Wars.

Going political means reinterpreting everything through a Marxist or feminist lens, and overturning the canon to suppress the greats in favor of one’s fellow travellers.

But for those who cannot stomach either of these approaches (which I wholeheartedly applaud), going deep means feeding the texts of the greats through the finest of sieves to pan out every commentable literary particle. And the most easily discovered and readily commentable of these literary particles is the symbol. Which is why, indeed, anything that is longer than it is wide can be taken for a phallic symbol. It is also why students of literature, whose hordes darken the horizon with the dust of their coming, are taught that if they see a lamb kabob in a story, they must on no account fail to commend the author for their use of phallic symbolism.

But as the great Rudyard Kipling remarked,

And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke

This is a reference, by me, and probably not by Kipling, to Sigmund Freud’s supposed but unverifiable remark, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” But consider what literary-critical hay could be made of Kipling’s line suggesting that women are dispensable for pleasure. And once such an interpretation is asserted, with all the confidence that a PhD and an assistant professorship impart, who can gainsay it?

Lamb kabobs are longer than they are wide.

What is perfectly delicious about the symbol as a badge of literary sophistication is that symbol finding is almost entirely non-falsifiable. Whole careers can be built upon the detection and explication of symbolism without the slightest worry that some small boy may one day stand up in the back of the class and say that the emperor has no clothes. The other children would gasp at his impiety, and afterwards the bullies would steal his lunch money, and no one would pick him for their team in dodgeball.

Well, you can have my lunch money if you can catch me, and I didn’t want to play dodgeball with you anyway, so here goes: There is more rot talked about symbols than about any other subject in literature, perhaps than about all the other subjects in literature combined.

What is a symbol anyway? Literary scholars will give you all kinds of sophisticated explanations. I’m just a writer, and a former technical writer at that, so my explanation is pretty straightforward and functional: a symbol is an object that reminds you of a story.

If I start a story by saying,

Tom tied his horse to the rail, shook the dust from his Stetson, and stepped through the swinging doors.

Already, you know what Tom is, where he is, and what sort of story this is going to be. Those few details have brought a familiar story to mind, and you know at once that Tom is a cowboy, or possibly a gunfighter or a sheriff, and that he has arrived in town after a long ride and is entering a saloon in the Old West. This example works by mentioning three objects — horse, Stetson, swinging doors — that, taken together, remind you of a certain kind of story, and thus, by the strong alchemy of the brain, they pull all the other details of that kind of story into your head as surely as if they were on the page.

This effect is powerful and necessary to storytelling. Without this ability to pull things swiftly from the reader’s memory, the storyteller could not maintain any kind of pace, and the listener would grow tired at the recitation of the details. “A horse is an equine quadruped,” the novelist would have to write, and the reader would put the book aside and start checking their phone for the latest TikTok.

We should note that there are few if any universal symbols. That is, there are few if any objects that always suggest the same story whenever and wherever they are used. It is context and the juxtaposition of objects that work to bring a particular story to mind. Thus while the horse is a symbol of the Old West, it is also a symbol of a great many other things, and mentioning it alone does not bring any particular story to mind. It is by associating it with other symbols of the Old West, the Stetson and the swinging saloon doors, that we narrow the associations down to the Old West. Include instead a helmet and drawbridge, and the mention of a horse brings a different story to mind. Tom is now a medieval knight, soon, no doubt, to be courting a haughty baron’s daughter rather than the town’s pretty new schoolmarm.

The Wikipedia article on symbolism, by the way, defines a symbol as an object that suggests an idea. This seems to derive from the habit of scholars to “interpret” stories, which means reducing them to ideas. Thus to interpret a symbol means to associate it with an idea. But this isn’t how symbols operate in stories, in which they bring not ideas but stories to mind. This is how stories are built, stories recalling stories, stories all the way down.

Stories are experiences, and one may certainly have ideas about stories just as one may have ideas about any experience. Some stories may suggest particular ideas to those who seek to interpret rather than simply enjoy them. Thus, Wikipedia notes that the lion may be a symbol of strength, and that is fair enough as a matter of interpretation. But as a matter of operation, a lion brings to mind stories of lions, which are, of course, strong, though in different contexts, the reference may call other aspects of them to mind.

The problem with symbols is not that they are rare, but that they are so abundant as to be in some sense unremarkable. They are how language works. Any object in a story can bring another story to mind for a particular reader, whether the writer intended it to do so or not. Thus, Liza Libes’ beta-reader might indeed have read the words “lamb kabobs” and immediately been reminded of a phallus.

But while this can happen accidentally with almost any object in a story, authors do often use symbols deliberately to bring specific stories into the reader’s mind. When they do this, it is incumbent on them to carefully triangulate their symbols, as in the cowboy example, so that they could only reasonably point to one particular story. But there is nothing that the author can do to prevent random readers from seeing phallic symbols in lamb kabobs if that is the way the reader’s mind works.

Now, I suspect, as Liza Libes clearly suspects, that this reader would only have had that image spring into their head because they had been trained in symbol hunting by the shaman of their literary tribe. But who is to say? Indeed, who is to say that Libes did not unconsciously have that image in her mind when she wrote the words “lamb kabobs?” After all, the literary scholar knows far more about what was going on in the unconscious mind of the writer than does the poor benighted scribe herself. Well, no, they don’t. That claim is nonsense. But such is the moral hazard of literary criticism that you will find many literary scholars willing to affirm it.¹ Without it, a legion of thesis topics bite the dust.

But this isn’t the whole story of symbols and symbol hunting. Symbolism was, for a very long time, part of the formal literary and religious culture of the West. In part this is a matter of certain stories being common across the whole of Western Civilization, until quite recent times, and therefore the mention of objects from those stories, in the right context, could bring those stories to mind reliably and universally, at least within the scope of the West. Thus words like apple, ark, flood, and whale all have, or had, more or less fixed symbolic uses and meanings.

Thus it is possible, within the context of the Western canon, to see these symbols as fixed things. I have a great deal of sympathy with this view. A wide, deep, fixed, reliable symbol system is a huge boon to an author, providing them essentially with a language rich in allusions which they can use to write stories that seem fuller and rounder and deeper simply because they evoke so much that is already in the reader’s brain.

The problem, of course, is that the symbol system of the Western canon is disappearing from the minds of most readers, and some elements of it, like the rainbow, have been repurposed to point to different stories. In this sense, the scholar who points out and explicates the symbols referenced in older works is doing a yeoman service for their students. But they are being useful to them only when they are guiding them over familiar and well-trodden ground. There is little scope for scholarly career advancement in this form of study.

But it is not just familiarity with the old stories that created a stable symbol system for the West. Far from being the literalists that some moderns take them for, scholars of the Medieval Period tended to see things not in literal but in analogical terms. The physical universe itself had been populated with symbols by the hand of the creator. Thus, for instance, the thorns of the rose are a symbol of the crown of thorns, and the red petals are a symbol of the blood of Christ and thus, the rose is a symbol of Christ. This was a symbol written by the finger of God.

I’m oversimplifying grossly, but the point is that for many people, symbols are not accidental things in which certain objects, in the right context, remind us of common stories, but rather they are part of the fabric of the universe itself, ordained, as it were by God, and therefore a subject to be studied and learned by both writers and readers alike. There are branches of psychology that see the operation of the mind in symbolic terms, teaching, in effect, that a whole system of symbols is somehow built into the psyche. And it is by arguments such as this that scholars get away with arguing that were an author wrote “lamb kabobs,” what she was really thinking was “phallus.”

These ideas are perhaps not entirely fanciful. There are certain stories that occur in everyone’s life, and thus it is not unreasonable to think of them as universal. When Shakespeare says of Cleopatra,

She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed;
He ploughed her, and she cropped.

Even people not particularly well informed about swords and agricultural implements are unlikely to miss his meaning. And yes, it is abundantly clear that in this case, where Shakespeare said “sword,” he meant “phallus.” Nor is it in the least unclear what he meant by “ploughed” and “cropped.” And the reason it is clear is that he wove these symbols together to tell a story. That is how you can tell that the author is doing it on purpose: they are using the symbols to tell a story. This is what we do as writers. It is stories all the way down.

The moral hazard of literary criticism is to not be content with pointing out places where the author was doing it on purpose, but to claim to find places where the use of a supposed symbol was an operation of their subconscious and that a lamb kabob is actually a phallus regardless of the author’s conscious intent.

And this surely should be the point. Anything can remind someone of something else. What good authors do is manage the way they put symbols together in the context of a story as a means to tell the story. Such uses may sometimes require explication, because the modern reader may no longer associate a particular object with a particular story in the way the readers of the author’s time would have done. But the study of this should be confined to the explication of the clearly deliberate use of symbols that has been rendered obscure only by a difference of culture or the passage of time.

This is not to suggest that the critic cannot discover and point out aspects of the story that the writer did not have consciously in mind. A finished story is an object and an experience, and in some sense it does not matter what the author who created it had consciously in mind. As an experience, it can strike different readers in different ways and bring different things to mind for them. It is perfectly legitimate for a critic to have and to express such responses, just as it is for any other reader. But that does not mean that the critic is never wrong to call a lamb kabob a phallic symbol. Where the critic goes wrong is not in having an original reaction to the experience of the story, but in tearing apart the structure of the story to find spurious symbols and meanings in its individual words, sentences, or beats.

This is not to suggest that writers don’t sometimes use obscure symbols in obscure ways. Trained in the habits of literary criticism, some no doubt think that it is part of their craft to do so, and some do it for the sheer delight of erudition. Some, I suppose, do it as a kind of literary Where’s Waldo exercise to see if the critics can find the hidden gems in their deliberately obscure work.

And if that is what lights your fire, by all means, go for it. Just as worldbuilding for worldbuilding’s sake is a legitimate form of art, so erudition for the sake of erudition is a legitimate form of art. My complaint is that we should not confuse these pursuits with the high and ancient art of storytelling. Symbolism and worldbuilding both have something to contribute to storytelling. The use of symbols — objects that recall stories — is an essential storytelling tool, just as worldbuilding sufficient to set the scene is an essential storytelling tool. But when the hunting of symbols for the sake of erudition alone is applied to works that were not written to be read this way, when it is applied to works that were written to be stories, then I do have a problem with it, because it ruins stories for students who are subjected to it. Either they begin to read them incorrectly, or they give up and don’t read them at all.

There may be exceptions, but the MFA system today seems designed to operate in a closed loop with the critical side of the English department, training writers to write with the kind of deliberate erudition that the critical side of the program is set up to feed upon, thus setting up something of a conveyor belt of thesisable works. And more power to them if that keeps them occupied (though I’m not particularly keen on my tax dollars paying for it). But again, don’t treat good, honest stories, either classical or modern, as if they were works of this kind. And don’t teach people to read either kind of story this way either. That will only put them off reading altogether.

And because there is indeed important work to be done in teaching people to read old stories whose symbols may have become obscure with time, by all means, teach these stories and their symbols. This is good and necessary work, even if it does not produce a lot of wholly original thesis topics from what is by now very well ploughed ground.

There is a little ditty my father used to sing about T.S. Eliot. Google seemingly knows it not, so my father may have made it up himself. (Yes, that’s the kind of household I grew up in.) As I remember, it went like this:

My poems have erudite flavour
My prose is as sharp as a pin
I'm fixed up at Faber and Faber
My God how the money rolls in.

I think there may have been other verses about other poets, but this is all I remember. The point is simply this: there is in the literary world a community of readers and writers who traffic in symbols for symbols’ sake. We should leave them to their amusement, and beg them not to spoil ours. Because this peculiar habit, whatever else it may be, is not an indicator of either seriousness or quality in literature. It is a literary parlor game, a kind of sleight of hand, which is, in most respects, antithetical to seriousness and quality. If they had anything of importance to say, they would strive to say it plainly.² Deliberate erudition, by contrast, says, “I have nothing urgent or important to say, but look how cleverly I contrived to say it!” ³

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Speaking of finding things in the experience of the story that were not part of the intent of the author, I was fascinated by the things Courtney Kim found in her reading of Lady Isabel and the Elf Knight. If you have read the book, or if you would care to, I would be fascinated to know if you found these things, or something else, in the experience.

1. You can claim, if you like, that authors sometimes do things unconsciously in their works. What is absurd is the claim that literary scholars can reliably catch them doing it and tell us what they were really thinking. If you doubt this, read Fernseed and Elephants.

2. If you want to claim that it is not a parlor game but a serious philosophical exercise, my only question would be, could the philosophical point not be made more directly? And perhaps you can argue successfully that it could not. That’s fine with me. Just don’t spoil stories for me and for others.

3. Said with a specific exemption for Mr. Eliot, who, though he may have been a progenitor of this style of writing, did have something important to say with his cleverness.