/lit/ - Literature

>>20965722
I'm with you on this, OP.

I don't know if many of the writers I've read recently are symbol crafters. The biggest problem I see is the symbol-hunting mania of people on /lit/.

I think that people feel uneasy fully immersing themselves in, or even becoming fully aware of, their aesthetic experience of a work if they're not able to provide some kind of explanation for why they find it valuable. One easy way to present your experience as valuable is, for some reason, to describe it as decoding symbols that represent some kind of Big Theme.

>If the reader, then, projects symbolism across the characters and the locations and the actions within the story then those things no longer exist as they are, rather they become propping posts 'for' the otherwise unrelated symbolism
This is true, although I think an important qualification is that in fiction nothing really is itself: I think the elements of the fictional world always hang in a weird space between concrete image and abstract concept. (Symbol-hunting obviously collapses that ambiguity.)

I think the solution is to come up with better ways to discuss what you call 'the material', and better ways to describe people's experience of it. My personal approach is to think of books as an answer to a 'What happens if ...?'-type question. Almost like a lab experiment. You have your symbols, and your themes, and your historical contexts, and your biography-drawn anecdotes, and you put them all in the vast literary Petri dish and see how they evolve and interact with each other and transform each other. As observer you should ask not 'What does it mean?' but 'What's going on here? How is it operating?'

(Your overwrought prose style is infectious, by the way.)