Category: Booking through Thursday

Question suggested by Barbara H:

My husband is not an avid reader, and he used to get very frustrated in college when teachers would insist discussing symbolism in a literary work when there didn’t seem to him to be any. He felt that writers often just wrote the story for the story’s sake and other people read symbolism into it.

It does seem like modern fiction just ‘tells the story’ without much symbolism. Is symbolism an older literary device, like excessive description, that is not used much any more? Do you think there was as much symbolism as English teachers seemed to think? What are some examples of symbolism from your reading?

I sympathise with Barbara’s husband and remember thinking at school that my teacher was trying to extract more from the text than was actually there, and getting really tired of analysing every sentence almost when I wanted to get on with reading. That I think was the problem -sometimes I just wanted to know what happened and was not very interested in going any further.

But later I took a course in “Literature” and was fascinated by how much more you can find in a text than on first reading. I read The Waste Land by T S Eliot which is crammed to the brim with symbolism. Without understanding the symbolism and literary allusions much of the poem is meaningless and baffling.

The dictionary definition of “symbol” is that it represents something else such as an idea or a quality by analogy or association for example a rose can represent or symbolise beauty and a serpent may stand for evil.  Using symbolism means that a variety of meanings and interpretations are possible and I think they enrich the text.  Any object or scene or episode can be symbolic giving depth of meaning and achieving a mysterious suggestiveness.

These days I like to vary my reading and sometimes I’m happy reading books that can be read quickly without thinking too deeply about what is happening, but at other times I want a more complex book, where there are themes working on several different levels that stimulate my imagination. I don’t think the use of symbolism is an older literary device, although my example of The Waste Land is not exactly “modern”.

Suggested by Janet:

The opposite of last week’s question: ‘What’s the best €˜worst’ book you’ve ever read €” the one you like despite some negative reviews or features?’

My mind went blank when I first read this question and then I remembered Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, which has had so any bad reviews. I read it before I read any of the reviews fortunately because I doubt I would have bothered reading it if I had. I’m glad I didn’t because I enjoyed it. It may not be the best book ever written but it kept me entertained throughout, so much so that I then read his Angels and Demons. I think both books have that page-turning fast action that keeps me wanting to read on to find out what happens and I also like the puzzle-solving aspects, although I think Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is far better.