Universal Symbolism: Illness

... And Rarely Just Illness
(from Chapter 24 of Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor)

At the beginning of James Joyce’s wonderful story “The Sisters” (1914), the unnamed young narrator mentions that his old friend and mentor, a priest, is dying. There is “no hope” for him this time, we’re told. Already your teacher’s radar should be on full alert. A priest with no hope? Not hard to recognize in such a statement a host of possibilities for interpretative play, and indeed those possibilities are realized throughout the story. What’s of immediate interest here, though, is how the priest got that way. He’s had a stroke, not his first, and it has left him paralyzed. “Paralysis” is a word that fascinates the young boy, quite apart from its meaning; he yokes it with “simony” and “gnomon” in a triad of words to obsess over. For us, however, it’s the notion of paralysis - and stroke - that intrigues.

Anyone who has ever had to watch a loved one deteriorate after a massive stroke will no doubt look askance at the very idea of such frustration and misery being in some way intriguing, fascinating, or picturesque, and quite rightly. But as we’ve seen time and again, what we feel in real life and what we feel in our reading lives can be quite different. In this instance, our interest is not in the deterioration of the old priest but in what his condition is telling us about him, about the boy, about the story at large, and about Joyce’s collection, Dubliners, in which it is the first piece. The boy has witnessed James, the priest, begin the slow decline after earlier strokes (his clothing covered with bits of tobacco and ash, his movement awkward, his speech affected). But it’s the paralysis after the recent, massive stroke that commands the boy’s attention. Within the story, the paralysis shows up in several ways, not least of them a sort of madness that set in at the time the priest was relieved of his parish over some incident involving an acolyte. All references to the event are sidelong and somewhat secretive, with shame a distinct component of James’s and his sisters’ responses. Whether the matter involve sexual impropriety or something to do with the litany we never learn, only that James was found in the confessional laughing softly and talking to himself. That he spent his last years a virtual recluse in a back room of his sisters’ house indicates the degree to which emotional or mental paralysis had already set in before his stroke.

From this little story the condition of paralysis grows into one of Joyce’s great themes: Dublin is a city in which the inhabitants are paralyzed by the strictures laid upon them by church, state, and convention. We see it throughout Dubliners - a girl who cannot let go of the railing to board a ship with her lover; men who know the right thing to do but fail because their bad habits limit their ability to act in their own best interest; a man confined to bed after a drunken fall in a public-house rest room; political activists who fail to act after the death of their great leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, some ten years earlier. It shows up again and again in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses and even in Finnegans Wake (1939). Of course, most maladies in most short stories, or even novels, are not quite so productive of meaning. For Joyce, however, paralysis - physical, moral, social, spiritual, intellectual, political - informs his whole career.

Until the 20th century, disease was mysterious. Folks began to comprehend the germ theory of disease in the 19th century, of course, after Louis Pasteur, but until they could do something about it, until the age of inoculation, illness remained frightening and mysterious. People sickened and died, often with no discernible preamble. You went out in the rain, three days later you had pneumonia; ergo, rain and chills cause pneumonia. That still occurs, of course. If you’re like me, you were told over and over again as a child to button your coat or put on a hat lest you catch your death of cold. We’ve never really accepted microbes into our lives. Even knowing how disease is transmitted, we remain largely superstitious. And since illness is so much a part of life, so too is it a part of literature.

There are certain principles governing the use of disease in works of literature:
1) NOT ALL DISEASES ARE CREATED EQUAL. Prior to modern sanitation and enclosed water systems in the 20th century, cholera was nearly as common as, much more aggressive than, and more devastating than tuberculosis (which was generally called consumption). Yet cholera doesn’t come close to TB in its frequency of literary occurrence. Why? Imagine mostly. Cholera has a bad reputation, and there’s almost nothing the best public relations in the world could do to improve it. It’s ugly, horrible. Death by cholera is unsightly, painful, smelly, and violent. In that same period of the late 19th century, syphilis and gonorrhea reached near-epidemic proportions, yet except for Henrik Ibsen and some of the later naturalists, venereal diseases were hardly on the literary map. Syphilis, of course, was prima facie evidence of sex beyond the bounds of marriage, or moral corruption (you could only get it, supposedly, by visiting prostitutes), and therefore taboo. In its tertiary stages, of course, it also produced unpleasant results, including loss of control of one’s limbs (the sudden, spastic motions Kurt Vonnegut writes of in his 1973 Breakfast of Champions) and madness. The only treatment known to the Victorians employed mercury, which turned the gums and saliva black and carried its own hazards. So these two, despite their widespread occurrence, were never A-list diseases.

Well, then, what makes a prime literary disease?
2) IT SHOULD BE PICTURESQUE. What, you don’t think illness is picturesque? Consider consumption. Of course it’s awful when a person has a coughing fit that sounds like he’s trying to bring up a whole lung, but the sufferer of tuberculosis often acquires a sort of bizarre beauty. The skin becomes almost translucent, the eye sockets dark, so that the sufferer takes on the appearance of a martyr in medieval paintings.

3) IT SHOULD BE MYSTERIOUS IN ORIGIN. Again, consumption was a clear winner, at least with the Victorians. The awful disease sometimes swept through whole families, as it would when one member nursed a dying parent or sibling or child, coming into daily contact with contaminated droplets, phlegm, blood for an extended period. The mode of transmission, however, remained murky for most people in that century. Certainly John Keats had no idea that caring for his brother Tom was sealing his own doom, any more than the Brontes knew what hit them. That love and tenderness should be rewarded with a lengthy, fatal illness was beyond ironic. By the middle of the 19th century, science discovered that cholera and bad water went together, so it had no mystery points. As for syphilis, well, its origins were entirely too clear.

4) IT SHOULD HAVE STRONG SYMBOLIC OR METAPHORICAL POSSIBILITIES. If there’s a metaphor connected with smallpox, I don’t want to know about it. Smallpox was hideous in both the way it presented and the disfigurement it left without really offering any constructive symbolic possibilities. Tuberculosis, on the other hand, was a wasting disease, both in terms of the individual wasting away, growing thinner and thinner, and in terms of the waste of lives that were often barely under way.

Often, though, the most effective illness is the one the writer makes up. Fever - the non-Roman sort - worked like a charm in times past. The character merely contracted fever, took to her bed, and died in short or long order as the plot demanded, and there you were. The fever could represent the randomness of fate, the harshness of life, the unknowability of the mind of God, the playwright’s lack of imagination, any of a wide array of possibilities. Dickens kills off all sorts of characters with fevers that don’t get identified; of course, he had so many characters that he needed to dispatch some of them periodically just for housekeeping purposes. Poor little Paul Dombey succumbs with the sole purpose of breaking his father’s heart. Little Nell hovers between life and death for an unbearable real-time month as readers of the original serialized version waited for the next installment to be issued and reveal her fate. Edgar Allan Poe, who in real life saw plenty of tuberculosis, gives us a mystery disease in “The Masque of the Red Death.” It may be an encoding of TB or of some other malady, but chiefly it is what no real disease can ever be: exactly what the author wants it to be. Real illnesses come with baggage, which can be useful or at least overcome in a novel. A made-up illness, though, can say whatever its maker wants it to say.

It’s too bad modern writers lost the generic “fever” and the mystery malady when modern medicine got so it could identify virtually any microbe and thereby diagnose virtually any disease. This strikes me as a case where the cure is definitely worse than the disease, at least for literature.

Universal Symbolism: Weather

It’s More Than Just Rain or Snow
Chapter 10 of Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor

It was a dark and stormy night. What, you’ve heard that one? Right, Snoopy. And Charles Schulz had Snoopy write it because it was a cliche, and had been one for a very long time, way back when your favourite beagle decided to become a writer. This one we know: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, celebrated Victorian popular novelist, actually did write, “It was a dark and stormy night.” In fact, he began a novel with it, and not a very good novel, either. And now you know everything you need to know about dark and stormy nights. Except for one thing.

Why?

You wondered that too, didn’t you? Why would a writer want the wind howling and the rain bucketing down, want the manor house or the cottage or the weary traveler lashed and battered?

You may say that every story needs a setting and that weather is part of the setting. That is true, by the way, but it isn’t the whole deal. There’s much more to it. Here’s what I think: weather is never just weather. It’s never just rain. And that goes for snow, sun, warmth, cold, and probably sleet, although the incidence of sleet in my reading is too rare to generalize.

So what’s special about rain? Ever since we crawled up on the land, the water, it seems to us, has been trying to reclaim us. Periodically floods come and try to drag us back into the water, pulling down our improvements while they’re at it. You know the story of Noah: lots of rain, major flood, ark, cubits, dove, olive branch, rainbow. I think that biblical tale must have been the most comforting of all to ancient humans. The rainbow, by which God told Noah that no matter how angry he got, he would never try to wipe us out completely, must have come as a great relief.

We in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world have a fair chunk of mythology invested in rain and its most major by-product. Clearly rain features in other mythologies as well, but for now let this be our cornerstone. Drowning is one of our deepest fears (being land creatures, after all), and the drowning of everything and everybody just magnifies that fear. Rain prompts ancestral memories of the most profound sort. So water in great volume speaks to us at a very basic level of our being. And at times Noah is what it signifies. Certainly when D.H. Lawrence has the flood go crashing through the family homestead in The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930), he’s thinking of Noah’s flood, the big eraser that destroys but also allows a brand-new start.

Rain, though, can do a lot more... First of all, as a plot device. (here Foster explains how rain is used as a plot device, to force certain things to happen, in a book by Thomas Hardy). Second, atmospherics. Rain can be more mysterious, murkier, more isolating than most other weather conditions. Fog is good, too, of course. Then there is the misery factor. Given the choice between alternatives, Hardy will always go for making his characters more miserable, and rain has a higher wretchedness quotient than almost any other element of our environment. With a little rain and a bit of wind, you can die of hypothermia on the Fourth of July. And finally there is the democratic element. Rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. Condemned man and hangman are thrown into a bond of sorts because rain has forced each of them to seek shelter.
What other things? For one, it’s clean. One of the paradoxes of rain is how clean it is coming down and how much mud it can make when it lands. So if you want a character to be cleansed, symbolically, let him walk through the rain to get somewhere. He can be quite transformed when he gets there. He may also have a cold, but that’s another matter. He can be less angry, less confused, more repentant, whatever you want. The stain that was upon him - figuratively - can be removed. On the other hand, if he falls down, he’ll be covered in mud and therefore more stained than before. You can have it either way, or both ways if you’re really good.

On the other hand, rain is also restorative. This is chiefly because of its association with spring, but Noah once again comes into play here. Rain can bring the world back to life, to new growth, to the return of the green world. Of course, novelists being what they are, they generally use this function ironically. In the ending of A Farewell to Arms (1929), Hemingway, having killed off Frederic Henry’s lover during childbirth, sends the grieving protagonist out of the hospital into, you guessed it, rain. It might be ironic enough to die during childbirth, which is also associated with spring, but the rain, which we might properly expect to be life-giving, further heightens the irony.

Rain mixes with sun to create rainbows. We mentioned this one before, but it merits our consideration. While we may have minor associations with pots of gold and leprechauns, the main function of the image of the rainbow is to symbolize divine promise, peace between heaven and earth. God promised Noah with the rainbow never again to flood the whole earth. No writer in the West can employ a rainbow without being aware of its signifying aspect, its biblical function. When you read about a rainbow, as in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish” (1947), where she closes with the sudden vision that “everything/was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow,” you just know there’s some element of this divine pact between human, nature and God. Of course, she lets the fish go. In fact, of any interpretation a reader will ever come up with, the rainbow probably forms the most obvious set of connections. Rainbows are sufficiently uncommon and gaudy that they’re pretty hard to miss, and their meaning runs as deep in our culture as anything you care to name. Once you can figure out rainbows, you can do rain and all the rest.

Fog, for instance. It almost always signals some sort of confusion. Dickens uses a miasma, a literal and figurative fog, for the Court of Chancery, the English version of American probate court where estates are sorted out and wills contested, in Bleak House (1853). Henry Green uses a heavy fog to gridlock London and strand his wealthy young travelers in a hotel in Party Going (1939). In each case, the fog is mental and ethical as well as physical. In almost any case I can think of, authors use fog to suggest that people can’t see clearly, that matters under consideration are murky.

And snow? It can mean as much as rain. Different things, though. Snow is clean, stark, severe, warm (as an insulating blanket, paradoxically), inhospitable, inviting, playful, suffocating, filthy (after enough time has elapsed). You can do just about anything you want with snow.

For now... one does well to remember, as one starts reading a poem or story, to check the weather.

Universal Symbolism: Journeys & Quests

Every trip is a quest (except when it’s not)
Chapter 1 of Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor

Okay, so here’s the deal: let’s say, purely hypothetically, you’re reading a book about an average 16-year-old kid in the summer of 1968. The kid - let’s call him Kip - who hopes his acne clears up before he gets drafted, is on his way to the A&P. His bike is a one-speed with a coaster brake and therefore deeply humiliating, and riding it to run an errand for his mother makes it even worse. Along the way he has a couple of disturbing experiences, including a minorly unpleasant encounter with a German shepherd, topped of in the supermarket parking lot where he sees the girl of his dreams, Karen, laughing and horsing around in Tony Vauxhall’s brand-new Barracuda. Now Kip hates Tony already because he has a name like Vauxhall and not like Smith, which Kip thinks is pretty lame as a name to follow Kip, and because the ‘Cuda is bright green and goes approximately the speed of light, and also because Tony has never had to work a day in his life. So Karen, who is laughing and having a great time, turns and sees Kip, who has recently asked her out, and she keeps laughing. (She could stop laughing and it wouldn’t matter to us, since we’re considering this structurally. In the story we’re inventing here, though, she keeps laughing.) Kip goes into the store to buy the loaf of Wonder Bread that his mother told him to pick up, and as he reaches for the bread, he decides right then and there to lie about his age to the Marine recruiter even though it means going to Vietnam, because nothing will ever happen for him in this one-horse burg where the only thing that matters is how much money your old man has. Either that or Kip has a vision of St. Abillard (any saint will do, but our imaginary author picked a comparatively obscure one), whose face appears on one of the red, yellow, or blue balloons. For our purposes, the nature of the decision doesn’t matter any more than whether Karen keeps laughing or which colour balloon manifests the saint.

What just happened here?

If you were an English professor, and not even a particularly weird English professor, you’d know that you’d just watched a knight have a not very suitable encounter with his nemesis.

In other words, a quest just happened.

But is just looked like a trip to the store for some white bread.

True. But consider the quest. Of what does it consist? A knight, a dangerous road, a Holy Grail (whatever one of those may be), at least one dragon, one evil knight, one princess. Sound about right? That’s a list I can live with: a knight (named Kip), a dangerous road (nasty German shepherds), a Holy Grail (one form of which is a loaf of Wonder Bread), at least one dragon (trust me, a ’68 ‘Cuda could definitely breathe fire), one evil knight (Tony), one princess (who can either keep laughing or stop).

Seems like a bit of a stretch.

On the surface, sure. But let’s think structurally. The quest consists of five things: (a) a quester, (b) a place to go, (c) a stated reason to go there, (d) challenges and trials en route, and (e) a real reason to go there. Item (a) is easy; a quester is just a person who goes on a quest, whether or not he knows it’s a quest. In fact, usually he doesn’t know. Items (b) and (c) should be considered together: someone tells our protagonist, our hero, who need not look very heroic, to go somewhere and do something. Go in search of the Holy Grail. Go to the store for bread. Go to Vegas and whack a guy. Tasks of varying nobility, but structurally all the same. Go there, do that. Note that I said the stated reason for the quest. That’s because of item (e).

The real reason for a quest never involves the stated reason. In fact, more often than not, the quester fails at the stated task. So why do they go and why do we care? They go because of the stated task, mistakenly believing that it is their real mission. We know, however, that their quest is educational. They don’t know enough about the only subject that really matters: themselves. The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge. That’s why questers are so often young, inexperienced, immature, sheltered. Forty-five-year-old men either have self-knowledge or they’re never going to get it, while your average 16-to-17-year-old kid is likely to have a long way to go in the self-knowledge department.

Let’s look at a real example. When I teach the late-20th-century novel, I always begin with the greatest quest novel of the last century: Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 (1965). Beginning readers can find the novel mystifying, irritating, and highly peculiar. True enough, there is a good bit of cartoonish strangeness in the novel, which can mask the basic quest structure. On the other hand, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 14th century) and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen (1596), two of the great quest narratives from early English literature, also have what modern readers must consider cartoonish elements. It’s really only a matter of whether we’re talking Classics Illustrated or Zap Camics. So here’s the setup in The Crying of Lot 49:

1) Our quester: a young woman, not very happy in her marriage or her life, not too old to learn, not too assertive where men are concerned.
2) A place to go: in order to carry out her duties, she must drive to Southern California from her home near San Francisco. Eventually she will travel back and forth between the two, and between her past (a husband with a disintegrating personality and a fondness for LSD, an insane ex-Nazi psychotherapist) and her future (highly unclear).
3) A stated reason to go there: she has been made executor of the will of her former lover, a fabulously wealthy and eccentric businessman and stamp collector.
4) Challenges and trials: our heroine meets lots of really strange, scary, and occasionally truly dangerous people. She goes on a nightlong excursion through the world of the outcasts and the dispossessed of San Francisco; enters her therapist’s office to talk him out of his psychotic shooting rampage (the dangerous enclosure known in the study of traditional quest romances as “Chapel Perilous”); involves herself in what may be a centuries-old postal conspiracy.
5) The real reason to go: did I mention that her name is Oedipa? Oedipa Maas, actually. She’s named for the great tragic character from Sophocles’ drama Oedipus the King (ca.425BC), whose real calamity is that he doesn’t know himself. In Pynchon’s novel the heroine’s resources, really her crutches - and they all happen to be male - are stripped away one by one, shown to be false and unreliable, until she reaches the point where she either must break down, reduced to a little fetal ball, or stand straight and rely on herself. And to do that, she first must find the self on whom she can rely. Which she does, after considerable struggle. Gives up on men, Tupperware parties, easy answers. Plunges ahead into the great mystery of the ending. Acquires, dare we say, self-knowledge? Of course we dare.

Still...

You don’t believe me. Then why does the stated goal fade away? We hear less and less about the will and the estate as the story goes on, and even the surrogate goal, the mystery of the postal conspiracy, remains unresolved. At the end of the novel, she’s about to witness an auction of some rare forged stamps, and the answer to the mystery may appear during the auction. We doubt it, though, given what’s gone before. Mostly, we don’t even care. Now we know, as she does, that she can carry on, that discovering that men can’t be counted on doesn’t mean the world ends, that she’s a whole person.

So there, in fifty words or more, is why professors of literature typically think The Crying of Lot 49 is a terrific little book. It does look a bit weird at first, experimental and super-hip, but once you get the hang of it, you see that it follows the conventions of a quest tale. So does Huck Finn. The Lord of the Rings. North by Northwest. Star Wars. And most other stories of someone going somewhere and doing something, especially if the going and doing wasn’t his idea in the first place.

A word of warning: if I sometimes speak here and in the chapters to come as if a certain statement is always true, a certain condition always obtains, I apologize. “Always” and “never” are not words that have much meaning in literary study. For one thing, as soon as something seems to always be true, some wise guy will come along and write something to prove it’s not. If literature seems to be too comfortably patriarchal, a novelist like the late Angela Carter or a poet like the contemporary Eavan Boland will come along and upend things just to remind readers and writers of the falseness of our established assumptions. If readers start to pigeonhole African-American writing, as was beginning to happen in the 1960s and 1970s, a trickster like Ishmael Reed will come along who refuses to fit in any pigeonhole we could create. Let’s consider journeys. Sometimes the quest fails or is not taken up by the protagonist. Moreover, is every trip really a quest? It depends. Some days I just drive to work - no adventures, no growth. I’m sure that the same is true in writing. Sometimes plot requires that a writer get a character from home to work and back again. That said, when a character hits the road, we should start to pay attention, just to see if, you know, something’s going on there.

Once you figure out quests, the rest is easy.