A few years ago I wrote about the power of objects in both life and stories to carry the weight/convey the impact of abstract emotions. I referred to the company Apple in that post in the context of designing their products to look more “friendly,” but I’ve been thinking about that company’s logo lately, specifically its reference to the narrative in the first book of the Bible, the aptly titled “Genesis,” when Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden and everything is perfect except for that one darn tree they’re not allowed to eat the fruit from. Then yada yada yada, the serpent tempts Eve and she eats the fruit from it and gets Adam to too, and bam, they both gain *knowledge*—illustrating how the concrete object of the fruit shows the abstract concept of a transfer of knowledge. The first way this knowledge manifests is that they become aware of their nakedness, and connected to this awareness is an immediate need to cover that nakedness, which would seem to imply that knowledge is inherently connected to shame…and of course the general suffering known as the human condition.
Anyway, all that is to say, this narrative of the genesis of human suffering, whether you believe someone dictated it direct from God’s mouth or not, is also a narrative of the genesis of clothes, which happened because of an exchange of food. And while I always have my eye out for a good objective correlative when I’m reading books or watching movies and TV, lately these two particular kinds of objects present in that “original” narrative–food and clothes–have been jumping out at me.
The distinctive bite taken out of Apple’s apple pretty much explicitly links it to the Biblical apple:
In the biblical narrative, the apple is rendered an “epistemological” symbol, a fancy academic word that means “related to knowledge.” And the shame and suffering ultimately attendant with that knowledge in the biblical version would seem to render the bite taken from the apple–the knowledge taken–a negative entity. Apple has subverted this idea, sending the message that its products are conduits to knowledge, because in our secular culture, knowledge is a positive, desirable entity.
That’s just one example of how a symbol’s meaning can shift based on context—the same symbol that’s negative in the Bible becomes positive in the world of material consumption. In a similar way, objects can have a meaning or value that’s particular to an individual, and they can have a meaning or value collective to a group or culture. Taking advantage of both these individual and collective meanings can enrich a narrative. Food and clothes in particular can be good objects to use because they have potential individual and collective appeal. Everyone has to eat, and everyone has to wear clothes.
So let’s look at some examples of how food and clothes have carried meaning and emotion in fiction, and some creative nonfiction for good measure. There are a couple of different approaches we could take here—looking at the literary symbolism of the objects, or looking at how they figure in the narrative structure to compel a feeling of closure/emotional satisfaction in the reader. I’m going to primarily focus on the latter with some discussion of the former along the way.
The reason food jumps out at me when used as an objective correlative is probably because I was introduced to the general concept in an example that used food, the “bloody potato” from Chekhov’s “The Murder,” as my first post covered. Since then, I’ve written about another potato being used as an objective correlative, in Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See, in which a boiled potato contrasted with a piece of cake helped render it understandable why someone would choose to join the Nazi regime. In my ongoing project of reading Stephen King’s work, another use of potatoes jumped out at me in his novel The Shining (1977) that almost inverts Chekhov use of it in the blood—the bloodiness of a domestic beating is conveyed by a woman’s glasses lying in her mashed potatoes, not actually bloody but with gravy dripping down them in a way that evokes blood:
He and Becky crying, unbelieving, looking at their mother’s spectacles lying in her mashed potatoes, one cracked lens smeared with gravy.
And then, as I was writing this, the New Yorker reposted a nonfiction piece by King from 2000 describing his experience of being hit and nearly killed by a van when he was out walking in rural Maine:
[The driver] told friends later that he thought he’d hit “a small deer” until he noticed my bloody spectacles lying on the front seat of his van. They were knocked from my face when I tried to get out of [the driver’s] way. The frames were bent and twisted, but the lenses were unbroken. They are the lenses I’m wearing now, as I write.
In the interest of the angle of how critical an object food can be, I’ll also note that King notes that this driver later said he was out driving where he was that day…
…because he wanted “some of those Marzes bars they have up to the store.” When I hear this detail some weeks later, it occurs to me that I have nearly been killed by a character out of one of my own novels. It’s almost funny.
That’s because King knows how important food can be in a narrative. Also, the reason the driver wasn’t watching the road when he hit King is because his Rottweiler was trying to nose into a cooler of meat in the backseat. You can’t make this stuff up, I guess. But the point is, you should try. I’ll come back to King, who shows that taking advantage of food and clothes has both literary and commercial appeal.
For an example of commercial appeal, sitcoms use this trope frequently where characters talk about one thing and mean another. In a Friends episode in which Chandler’s gotten a new roommate and, being men in the 90s, neither he nor his former roommate Joey can express their feelings about this loss, their emotions explode over breakfast:
Joey: And now there’s no juice. There’s no juice for the people who need the juice and want the juice. I need the juice.
Chandler: There’s another carton right over there.
Joey: Hey, this isn’t about juice anymore, all right man.
Chandler: All right, so what’s it about?
Joey: Eggs. Who’s eggs do you like better, his or mine, huh?
Chandler: Well I like both eggs equally.
Joey: Oh come on. Nobody likes two different kinds of eggs equally. You like one better than the other and I wanna know which.
Chandler: Well what’s the difference? Your eggs aren’t here anymore, are they? You took your eggs and you left! Did you really expect me to never find new eggs?
In one of the readings I give my intro fiction class from Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, she uses a passage from Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man to illustrate the concept of “significant detail”:
It was a narrow room, with a rather high ceiling, and crowded from floor to ceiling with goodies. There were rows and rows of hams and sausages of all shapes and colors—white, yellow, red and black; fat and lean and round and long—rows of canned preserves, cocoa and tea, bright translucent glass bottles of honey, marmalade and jam. . . .I stood enchanted, straining my ears and breathing in the delightful atmosphere and the mixed fragrance of chocolate and smoked fish and earthy truffles. . . . I spoke into the silence, saying: “Good day” in quite a loud voice; I can still remember how my strained, unnatural tones died away in the stillness. No one answered. And my mouth literally began to water like a spring. One quick, noiseless step and I was beside one of the laden tables. I made one rapturous grab into the nearest glass urn, filled as it chanced with chocolate creams, slipped a fistful into my coat pocket, then reached the door, and in the next second was safely round the corner.
Burroway points out the passage’s appeals to the senses, articulating what this food-focused passage is showing the reader without coming right out and saying it:
“I was quite poor, and I was not used to seeing such a profusion of food, so that although I was very afraid there might be someone in the room and that I might be caught stealing, I couldn’t resist taking the risk.”
Someone used to seeing “such a profusion of food” would not observe it in such detail. The objects of the food here are being used to reveal the character’s state and state of mind.
The titular metaphor of J.D. Salinger’s classic The Catcher in the Rye (1951) uses food in an even larger-scale way for narrative structure by helping provide what Janet Burroway calls a “reversal”—a concrete manifestation of change, which is what compels narrative closure (we feel like the story is complete if a change has taken place–something has “happened” that has rendered relevant the events described up to that point). But the most significant change–an emotional one–is abstract, so has to be shown in a more concrete way, using objects. Even something as small as having a character walk through a puddle at the beginning of a story and around a puddle at the end helps drive home or make felt the larger change the events of the story have caused the character to undergo.
The first time its title comes up in Salinger’s novel explicitly is when Holden overhears a kid he’s walking behind:
He was singing that song, “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” He had a pretty little voice, too. He was just singing for the hell of it, you could tell. … He kept on walking next to the curb and singing “If a body catch a body coming through the rye.” It made me feel better. It made me feel not so depressed any more.
That this child makes Holden feel less depressed reflects his larger conflict with the corruption/phoniness of the adult world. The reference comes up once more, later, when Holden visits his younger sister Phoebe and she asks him what he wants to be:
“You know that song ‘If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye’? I’d like–“
“It’s ‘If a body meet a body coming through the rye’!” old Phoebe said. “It’s a poem. By Robert Burns.”
“I know it’s a poem by Robert Burns.”
She was right, though. It is “If a body meet a body coming through the rye.” I didn’t know it then, though.
“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,'” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around–nobody big, I mean–except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff–I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
It’s significant that both the kid and Holden have the words wrong—it indicates that this fantasy of his, that what he wants to be, is “wrong.” Which he himself seems to know here, since he calls himself “crazy” for it. Of course, you can know it’s crazy to want or feel something and that knowledge will affect how much you want and feel those things not one iota. The rye that the children play in–the food object, which never appears literally but only in Holden’s mind and the line of a poem–symbolizes sustenance and wholesomeness, a sort of purity associated with childhood—or rather, with Holden’s conception of it.
What Salinger does next is clever, because in reaching for a reversal through a concrete object (even if that concrete object is not literally concrete because it only exists in a fantasy/metaphor) a lesser writer probably would have gone back to the rye. But Salinger leaves the food behind, because the reader’s gotten what they need from it: the idea that Holden feels the need to protect children from going over the cliff into adulthood—that Holden sees adulthood as a corrupting influence, as death. In the novel’s final scene, Holden takes Phoebe to the zoo and she rides on a carousel:
All the kids kept trying to grab for the gold ring, and so was old Phoebe, and I was sort of afraid she’d fall off the goddam horse, but I didn’t say anything or do anything. The thing with kids is, if they want to grab the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them.
Now the “gold ring” on the carousel ride is the object communicating Holden’s feelings about children growing up and his own relation to that inevitability, and the feelings it communicates show they’ve reversed from when he was talking about the catcher poem with her earlier. Letting her reach for the gold ring is the equivalent of letting her go over the cliff in the rye field and not “catching” her. To let her do this is to come closer with being okay with doing that himself. That he’s no longer figuring adulthood as going over a cliff but instead reaching for a gold ring also shows a change in attitude toward the concept toward more positive in general. And the drenching rain that falls on him after he lets her reach for the gold ring is cleansing. The ring isn’t food or clothes, but it works with them.
Because there’s also Holden’s red hunting hat, his marker of uniqueness/difference that he acquires on the morning of the day the novel begins, which near the end he symbolically gives to Phoebe and she symbolically gives back to him, reinforcing these changes, or rather, reinforcing the intensity with which this change is felt in the reader. Clothes are actually all over this book, taking advantage of one of their categories of meaning—denoting class—as well as pulling an interesting trick when two different characters borrow Holden’s clothes: first his prep-school roommate Stradlater borrows Holden’s houndstooth jacket to go out on a date with a girl Holden himself seems interested in, and Holden describes how James Castle, a boy at one of his former prep schools whom he let borrow his turtleneck sweater, killed himself while wearing it. By wearing Holden’s clothes, Stradlater and James Castle represent different possible versions of Holden himself, but at the same time, on a more literal level, the fact that they borrowed clothes from him indicates that he has nicer things than they do, that he comes from a wealthier background. Which affects the rest of the novel in ways that escape the scope of this particular post…and the use of suitcases as an object also ties into this in ways I won’t go into now.
The use of clothes as an objective correlative related to class was also all over another book I recently read, Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life (1989). Wolff more or less describes leading a sort of double life of split identity between delinquent and literal and figurative Boy Scout; its narrative arc’s climax is constituted almost exclusively through clothes in a chapter in which a wealthy benefactor buys him clothes for the prep school he’s gotten into by forging his recommendation letters and transcripts. The climactic chapter’s climactic passage emphasizes the power of clothes in general:
She glanced at me again and then stepped back so that I was alone before the mirror. The elegant stranger in the glass regarded me with a doubtful, almost haunted expression. Now that he had been called into existence, he seemed to be looking for some sign of what lay in store for him.
He studied me as if I held the answer.
The “stranger in the glass” is rendered thus by the expensive clothes he’s wearing that he’s obviously far from familiar with. The movie adaptation left this and a lot of other stuff out, but it did make use of the Boy Scout uniform as concrete metaphor for the good-boy identity not figuratively fitting the adolescent Wolff’s character:
I’ll talk more about this book in another post, but the last thing I wanted to note was a chapter that makes use of food. Wolff is a renowned short-story writer, and the chapters that serve the longer arc of the memoir also frequently function like contained stories. Again part of what helps give them that feeling is the use of objects. In this particular chapter, Wolff is maybe ten or so, and is at a gathering at a park one day when a man starts hitting on his mother. The man lures Wolff and his mother to his nearby house with a promise:
“Lunch,” the man said. “That’s no problem. What do you like?” he asked me. “What’s your absolute favorite thing to have for lunch?”
I looked at my mother. She was in high spirits and that made me even grimmer, because I knew they were not due to my influence. “He likes hamburgers,” she told him.
“You got it,” he said. He took my mother’s elbow and led her across the park toward the house.
But once there, the promised lunch is downgraded:
I followed him to the kitchen and sat at a counter while Judd pulled things out of the refrigerator. He slapped together a baloney sandwich and set it in front of me. He seemed to have forgotten about the hamburger. I would have said something, but I had a pretty good idea that even if I did there still wasn’t going to be any hamburger.
Of course, a “baloney” sandwich becomes symbolic here of the lie that was told. This lie might initially seem harmless or unintentional, but becomes much less so in light of what happens later, for which the baloney exchange was clearly a setup: when it comes up in conversation that Wolff’s mother can’t afford a bike for him, the man promises him a bike:
“What kind of bicycle would you like to have, Jack?”
“A Schwinn, I guess.”
“Really? You’d rather have a Schwinn than an English racer?” He saw me hesitate. “Or would you rather have an English racer?”
I nodded.
“Well then, say so! I can’t read your mind.”
“I’d rather have an English racer.”
“That’s the way. Now what kind of English racer are we talking about?”
Judd brought the drinks. Mine was bitter. I recognized it as Collins mix.
That last exchange with the drinks seems like it’s a possible objective correlative for the narrator’s feelings here: his side of this exchange tastes bitter, because he recognizes it as false, probably due to the baloney exchange. But any recognition here is really retrospective and/or subconscious it would seem, because Jack does seem convinced of the truth of the bike, thinking that his mother’s going on a date with this man later that night will “firm things up.” But his mother returns home crying, and the next day when he asks about the bike, she doesn’t answer. At that point he does know for sure that’s the end of it. And this knowledge, bitter as it is, feels like an ending.
Wolff’s book shows, among other things, how clothes project a facade, a relevant theme to both fashion and public relations, as the opening of Jennifer Egan’s short story/chapter “Selling the General” demonstrates:
Dolly’s first big idea was the hat. She picked teal blue, fuzzy, with flaps that came down over the general’s large dried-apricot ears. The ears were unsightly, Dolly thought, and best covered up.
When she saw the general’s picture in the Times a few days later, she almost choked on her poached egg: he looked like a baby, a big sick baby with a giant mustache and a double chin. The headline couldn’t have been worse:
GENERAL B.’s ODD HEADGEAR SPURS CANCER RUMORS
LOCAL UNREST GROWSDolly bolted to her feet in her dingy kitchen and turned in a frantic circle, spilling tea on her bathrobe. She looked wildly at the general’s picture. And then she realized: the ties. They hadn’t cut off the ties under the hat as she’d instructed, and a big fuzzy bow under the general’s double chin was disastrous.
Not only does this passage show how clothes project an image for this general (a genocidal dictator), but Dolly’s own anxiety over this headline is reflected using both food and clothes when she spills the tea on her robe.
One of the TV shows most relevant to clothes in the past two decades, Project Runway, understands clothes’ emotional power. Serving as a guest judge on season 9 back in 2011 when she was editor-in-chief of Marie Claire magazine, Joanna Coles said something in episode 9.4, “All About Nina,” that’s stuck with me:
Clothes are emotional. When you put them on, they make you feel something, and they make other people feel something when they see you in them.
Of course, a show like Project Runway and most clothing lines are exploiting these emotions for profit, and emotions become tied to branding. I’m going to tie that back to food with some passages from Stephen King’s The Stand. A lot of King’s horror derives from a juxtaposition of the horrific with the mundane (kind of like how in a scientific experiment you need a control among the variables). And food is a good way to constitute the mundane/domestic/routine. The horror of death is heightened by this contrast in a passage when an army officer looks at men dead from the superflu in the cafeteria through camera monitors:
A man and a woman in blue coveralls were crumpled at the foot of the candy machine. A man in a white coverall lay beside the Seeburg jukebox. At the tables themselves were nine men and fourteen women, some of them slumped beside Hostess Twinkies, some with spilled cups of Coke and Sprite still clutched in their stiff hands. And at the second table, near the end, there was a man who had been identified as Frank D. Bruce. His face was in a bowl of what appeared to be Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin Soup.
What struck me was the use of the brand names. These days it’s a fine line between verisimilitude and advertising…it’s a use of specificity that contributes a feeling of authenticity, and does reflect our real world that’s populated by such brands. King uses branded food again in a passage that shows how it stands in for his favorite emotion, not fear, but love:
Just thinking of that note was enough to make him wince. No “Dear” before his name. No “Love” before her signature. She didn’t believe in phony stuff. The real stuff was in the refrigerator. Sometime while he had been sleeping off his drive across America, she had gone out and stocked up on every goddam thing in the world that he liked. Her memory was so perfect it was frightening. A Daisy canned ham. Two pounds of real butter—how the hell could she afford that on her salary? Two six-packs of Coke. Deli sausages. A roast of beef already marinating in Alice’s secret sauce, the contents of which she refused to divulge even to her son, and a gallon of Baskin-Robbins Peach Delight ice cream in the freezer. Along with a Sara Lee cheesecake. The kind with strawberries on top.
Bottom line: food and clothes can say a lot….
-SCR
the pva creative writing review 