The Anatomy of Story (38 page)

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Story World
A nineteenth-century London countinghouse and three different homes—rich, middle-class, and poor—glimpsed in the past, present, and future.

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Symbol Line
Ghosts from the past, present, and future result in a man's rebirth at Christmas.

It's a Wonderful Life

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Designing Principle
Express the power of the individual by showing what a town, and a nation, would be like if one man had never lived.

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Theme Line
A man's riches come not from the money he makes but from the friends and family he serves.

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Story World
Two different versions of the same small town in America.

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Symbol Line
Small-town America through history.
Citizen Kane

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Designing Principle
Use a number of storytellers to show that a

man's life can never be known.
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Theme Line
A man who tries to force everyone to love him ends up alone.

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Story World
The mansion and separate "kingdom" of a titan of America.

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Symbol Line
One man's life made physical—through such symbols as the paperweight, Xanadu, the news documentary, and the sled.

S
YMBOLIC CHARACTERS

After defining the symbol line, the next step to detailing the symbol web is to focus on character. Character and symbol are two subsystems in the story body. But they are not separate. Symbols are excellent tools for defining character and furthering your story's overall purpose.

When connecting a symbol to a character, choose a symbol that represents a defining principle of that character or its reverse (for example

Steerforth, in
David Cooperfield,
is anything but
a
straightforward, upstanding guy). By connecting a specific, discrete symbol with an essential quality of the character, the audience gets an immediate understanding of one aspect of the character in a single blow.

They also experience an emotion they associate from then on with that character. As this symbol is repeated with slight variations, the character is defined more subtly, but the fundamental aspect and emotion of the character becomes solidified in their minds. This technique is best used sparingly, since the more symbols you attach to a character, the less striking each symbol becomes.

You might ask, "How do I choose the right symbol to apply to a character?" Return to the character web. No character is an island. He is defined in relation to the other characters. In considering a symbol for one character, consider symbols for many, beginning with the hero and the main opponent. These symbols, like the characters they represent, stand in opposition to one another.

Also think about applying two symbols to the same character. To put it another way, create a symbol opposition
within
the character. This gives you a more complex character while still giving you the benefit of symbol. To sum up the process of applying symbol to character:

1. Look at the entire character web before creating a symbol for a single character.

2. Begin with the opposition between hero and main opponent.

3. Come up with a single aspect of the character or a single emotion you want the character to evoke in the audience.

4. Consider applying a symbol opposition within the character.

5. Repeat the symbol, in association with the character, many times over the course of the story.

6. Each time you repeat the symbol, vary the detail in some way.

A great shorthand technique for connecting symbol to character is to use certain
categories
of character, especially gods, animals, and machines. Each of these categories represents a fundamental
way of being
as well as a
level of being.
Thus when you connect your individual character to one of these types, you give that character a basic trait and level that the audi-ence immediately recognizes. You can use this technique at any time, but it is found most often in certain genres, or storytelling forms, that are highly metaphorical, such as myth, horror, fantasy, and science fiction.

Let's look at some stories that use the technique of symbolic characters.

God Symbolism

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

(by James Joyce; 1914)
Joyce connects his hero, Stephen Dedalus, to the inventor Daedalus, who built wings to escape slavery in the labyrinth. This gives Stephen an ethereal quality and suggests his essential nature as an artistic man trying to break free. But then Joyce adds texture to that primary quality by using the technique of symbolic opposition within the character: he attaches to Stephen the opposing symbols of Daedalus's son, Icarus, who flies too close to the sun (too ambitious) and dies, and the labyrinth, which Daedalus also made, in which Stephen finds himself lost.

The Godfather

(novel by Mario Puzo, screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola,

1972)

Mario Puzo also connects his character to a god but highlights a very different aspect of God than Joyce does. Puzo's is the God the Father who controls his world and metes out justice. But he is a vengeful God. This is a man-God with a dictatorial power no mortal should have. Puzo also adds symbolic opposition within the character when he connects this God to the devil. Equating the normal opposites of sacred and profane is fundamental to this character and the entire story.

The Philadelphia Story

(play by Philip Barry, screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart, 1940) Writer
Philip Barry connects the hero, Tracy Lord, not just to aristocracy but to the concept of the goddess. Besides the "lordly" quality of her last name, both her father and her ex-husband refer to her as a "bronze goddess." She is both reduced and elevated by this symbolic attachment. The story turns on whether she will succumb to the worst aspects of "goddessness"-her cold, haughty, inhuman, unforgiving side or the best—a greatness of soul that will allow her, ironically, to find and be her most human and forgiving self.

Other uses of the godlike hero include
The Matrix
(Neo = Jesus),
Cool Hand Luke
(Luke = Jesus), and
A Tale of Two Cities
(Sydney Carton = Jesus).

Animal Symbolism

A Streetcar Named Desire

(by Tennessee Williams, 1947)
In
A Streetcar Named Desire,
Tennessee Williams equates his characters to animals in a way that diminishes them but also grounds them in biologically driven behavior. Stanley is referred to as a pig, a bull, an ape, a hound, and a wolf to underscore his essentially greedy, brutal, and masculine nature. Blanche is connected to a moth and a bird, fragile and frightened. Williams repeats these symbols in various forms as the story plays out. Eventually, the wolf eats the bird.

Batman, Spider-Man, Tarzan, Crocodile Dundee

Comic book stories are modern myth forms. So not surprisingly, they literally equate their characters with animals from the very start. This is the most metaphorical, over-the-top symbol making you can do. Batman, Spider-Man, even Tarzan the Ape Man all call attention to their characters' connection to animals by their names, their physiques, and their dress. These characters don't just have certain animal-like traits, like Stanley Kowalski, that affect them in subtle but powerful ways. They are animal men. They are fundamentally divided characters, half man and half beast. The nasty state of nature of human life forces them to turn to some animal to benefit from its unique powers and to fight for justice. But the cost is that they must suffer from an uncontrollable division within and an insurmountable alienation from without.

Equating a character with an animal can be very popular with an audience because it is a form of getting big (but not so big as to make the story dull). To be able to swing through the trees
(Tarzan)
or swing through the city
(Spider-Man)
or to have power over the animal kingdom
(Crocodile Dundee)
are dreams that lie deep in the human mind.

Other stories that use animal symbols lor characters are
Dances with Wolves, Dracula, The Wolf Man, and The Silence of the Lambs.

Machine Symbolism

Connecting a character to a machine is another broad way of creating a symbolic character. A machine character, or robot man, is usually someone with mechanical and thus superhuman strength, but it is also a human being without feeling or compassion. This technique is used most often in horror and science fiction stories where over-the-top symbols are part of the form and thus accepted. When good writers repeat this symbol over the course of the story, they do not add detail to it, as with most symbolic characters. They
reverse
it. By the end of the story, the machine man has proved himself the most human of all the characters, while the human character has acted like an animal or a machine.

Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

(novel by Mary Shelley, 1818; play by Peggy Webling, screenplay by

John L. Balderston and Francis Edward Faragoh & Garrett Fort, 1931)
Connecting character to machine was an approach first developed by Mary Shelley in
Frankenstein.
Her human character at the beginning of the story is Dr. Frankenstein. But he is soon elevated to god status as a man who can create life. He creates the machine man, the monster who, because he is manufactured from parts, lacks the fluid motion of a human being. A third character, the hunchback, is the in-between symbolic character, the subhuman man who is shunned as a freak by the human community but works for Dr. Frankenstein. Notice how these symbolic characters are defined and contrasted by simple but clear types. Over the course of the story, it is precisely because he is treated as a lower type, a machine to be chained, burned, and then discarded, that the monster rebels and seeks revenge against his cold, inhuman, godlike father.

Other stories that use the character-as-machine technique are
Blade Runner
(the replicants),
The Terminator
(Terminator),
2001: A Space Odyssey
(HAL), and
The Wizard of Oz
(the Tin Woodman).

Other Symbolism

The Sun Also Rises

(by Ernest Hemingway, 1926) The Sun Also Rises
is a textbook example of creating a symbolic character without using metaphorical character types like god, animal, or machine. Hemingway sets up a symbolic opposition within hero Jake Barnes by showing a strong, confident man of integrity who is also impotent from a war wound. The combination of strength and impotence creates a character whose essential quality is that of being lost. As a result, he is a deeply ironic man, going from one sensuous moment to the next but unable to function on that basic level. As a man who is not a man, he is a totally realistic character who also comes to stand for a whole generation of men who are simply drifting.

SYMBOL TECHNIQUE: THE SYMBOLIC NAME

A
nother technique you can use to connect symbol to character is to translate the character's essential principle into a name. A genius at this technique, Charles Dickens created names whose images and sounds immediately identify his characters' fundamental natures. For example, Ebenezer Scrooge is clearly a man who loves money and will do anything to anyone to get it. Uriah Heep may try to hide behind the formal facade of "Uriah," but his essential slimy nature seeps out in "Heep." We know Tiny Tim is the ultimate good boy long before he utters the phrase "God bless us, every one."

Vladimir Nabokov has pointed out that this technique is much less common in post-nineteenth-century fiction. That's probably because the technique can call attention to itself and be too obviously thematic.

Done properly, however, the symbolic name can be a marvelous tool. But it's a tool that usually works best when you are writing a comedy, since comedy tends toward character type.

For example, here are some of the guests at one of Gatsby's parties in
The Great Gatsby.
Notice how Fitzgerald often lists names that suggest a failed attempt to appear as American aristocracy: the O.R.P Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia; Mrs. Ulysses Swett. He