11/26 2025
I recently started a challenge of only reading new books, 2024 or newer. Maybe to get with the times, I don't know, or perhaps there is some truth to the idea that ideas in literature trickle down in time --- modern literature being a distillation of that which came before. Never know if you don't try.
Now, Dream State by Eric Puchner (2025) is not a necessarily bad book. But there are very few images in it. Most I see are symbols. It's an effort in trying to connect to the reader not through images first, but images through symbols. If pragmatics underly human communication, then the vastly complex social meanings a metaphor or reference contains provide an efficient shortcut in one's writing. Why write many word when few do trick? What is a symbol and image here? Simple definition: a symbol is something that has very little meaning by itself, it gains its meaning through the connotations it holds. Maybe it's the words close connection to real life phenomena or social groups or whatever you want, really. An image can contain symbols, but it is simply a shortcut (or symbol if you will) used here to convey the general sense of portraying something in fiction. An image here might be the way a character is portrayed1, the way a scene is shown, the whole picture if you will. Let's give an example from Dream State, which I think is ripe for symbols, but low in actual images:
She loved the store, even though it was surrounded by cheesy souvenir shops, situated on a pedestrian pier that jutted into the lake. She'd converted it from a gallery selling "Western art," which seemed to mean a lot of bronze sculptures of Native Americans sternly evoking noble virtues. Cece was happy to see the gallery fail and even happier to convert it into a bookstore with books about urban life, life in LA and New York and Paris, Delhi and Istanbul and Tokyo, bringing the big bad world of "cultural elites" to Salish, Montana. It had not been easy to string together the capital: sucking up to her dad, getting him to cosign the loan, then convincing the SBA office to insure the debt and hand her a 504 on top of it.
It becomes a matter of throwing everything you got at the image, hoping some of it sticks. The question is whether that makes for a better story. I'd argue it does the opposite, it makes the characters muddled, stuck in an ocean of colors.
If we dissect the passage, what is really being told here except connecting the character to the symbols we have as cultural/pragmatic beings? It's similar to the challenge in introductory drawing classes: describe somebody you know, but you're not allowed to use things like "middle aged lawyer", "penchant for wine", or "like those blokes you see down at the pub". You're only allowed to describe what you actually see; the way the shadow falls over his eye at the end of the night, and the way he looks up, leaning slightly to the left, with the slightest grin. Symbols are shortcuts because they work, and we use them constantly. It is the artists job, however, to dare to look beyond them. To see what's possible, to be grateful for what we have, for what we've had and lost. To free ourselves --- even if only momentarily --- from the shackles of everyday perception. I think a description like the one above is an everyday perception, not an artistic one.
Let's go one step further. What does fiction do better compared to any other type of medium? What is it that is possible in fiction not possible anywhere else? I'd argue the thing fiction does best is expressing focused images, often psychological in nature, to the reader. If we build on top of the lesson from the drawing classes, what if we assume the same lens on our psychological state? We then end up somewhere in the realm of Virginia Woolf, the master. Which is where fiction, I think, really shines. Another great example of this is the passage from Hemingway's "For Whom The Bell Tolls":
Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, land for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.
Is it unfair to use Hemingway as comparison? Of course. That's the point. I'm trying to convince you of something. In debate we are dirty. We like to win, or should I say, we don't like to lose. But what I find interesting here is that this type of description would not fit itself paraphrase into symbols. We wouldn't be able to fit these two characters into neat little boxes. There isn't a character sheet we can really draw up here that would justify these observations. Yes, I hear you say that that's the job of a good writer, but I'm not sure that's the order in which it works. You don't go from character sheet to good writing. Observations about the world and the people in it come first. What's left is bleeding that into the page. There is no way to reduce the dimensionality of impression to a bullet point list. It comes out jumbled, full of colors, but just enough, not too much. It's neither minimalism or maximalism, it's an image, nothing more.
This Goldilocks theory of color extends to memory as well. Now, I only have myself to go off, so the sample size is rather small, but if you think back to a memory the symbols aren't what stand out. You might fill those in when you tell the story to make it make sense to others. It's small things. Things that stood out to you in the moment. I remember when my grandpa died I sat by his dining table as my mom sat by him in the bedroom with her brother, stroking his still warm head, and it was night, but it had been a sunny day and I'm sure that the light from the window when the sun set must have been beautiful when he fell to the ground right there beside the dining table, a crushed red light in the darkest of seasons. There was a particular smell of dried, moldy jam from paper plates in the sink. I went out to the balcony and his half smoked cigarette was still there by the ashtray.
Is this prescriptive thinking? Maybe, depending on how you look at it. Though I think it's more aptly categorized as one of those things to keep in mind. Symbols work for a reason, but fiction excels for other reasons. But all fiction must not excel, of course. There are multiple reasons why media exists (including one I've written about before), and it would be unfair to say that the only fiction that ought to exist is that which reaches beyond, that tries to expand, that tries to teach, and tries to awe. Reasons are never exhaustive. But having both symbolics and images in mind, and knowing the delicate balance, now that is the work of a truly good writer. Of course, no one manages this more beautifully than the master herself, Virginia Woolf, though. From "The Lighthouse":
Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron. It was to be a thing you could ruffle with your breath; and a thing you could not dislodge with a team of horses. And she began to lay on a red, a grey, and she began to model her way into the hollow there.
Also, curiously, how can you tell a book is from 2025? Look at the names of the characters. Where's John, Paul and Mary? Replaced by Pavani, Tea, Tarrare, Cece, Fifi, Misi, and Bruno2. Maybe because I'm not a native English speaker living in Montana, or LA, but I can't help but feel that those names aren't that common for white people living in Montana. I can't help but feel that you as a writer is so uncertain about the characters that you use the name as a personality trait. It's not, of course, it's what the characters do that defines them.