HOW THE FANTASTIC FOUR WILL SAVE YOUR NOVEL

On Symbolic Systems

Behold… Galactus! by Jack Kirby

Where I answer an Office Hours question from Joshua Davis.

Dear Professor Diaz,

I wanted to ask about symbol, image systems, and metaphorical meaning. I can think of only two places where I’ve encountered this question from my teachers directly:

- Shirley Jackson writes in the New Yorker (“Garlic in Fiction”) about The Haunting of Hill House, how she used symbols to carry the meaning--and therefore the story;

- John Gardner describes an image patterning system where each image repetition evokes an ever widening set of associations. Like throwing pebbles in a pond to watch the ripples combine and recombine.

I imagine if I studied poetry, which I am only beginning to do, I might find more explicit discussion of image and symbol. (I believe Ocean Vuong has written well on metaphor).

But I’m wondering: is this fundamental to storytelling, or is it a mode certain writers work in? Do you consciously pay attention to symbols in your work? Is it better left to the unconscious?

Thank you for your time!

Thank you for your excellent question, Joshua.  Forgive me if I answer this half-assed or misunderstand what you’re looking for. 

From my limited unauthoritative perspective – and as someone who also never studied poetry – the uses and powers of symbolistic / imagistic / metaphoric systems do not appear to be widely taught in fiction workshops.  Perhaps there’s an assumption that folks ain’t interested – which is curious considering how many of our best writers – Morrison and Silko and Moore and Atwood and Oyeyemi come immediately to mind – are wonderful practitioners.  In any event most of the folks I came up with who wanted to explore this magic had to home-brew our approaches, find mentors in the books we loved and only rarely, if we were truly lucky, in other writers. 

(My own education on this front was mad haphazard.  Everything that Toni Morrison, Borges, Cortázar, Ellison, Tolkien and García Márquez wrote; Robert Grave, The White Goddess, which along with Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World, gave me two very powerful archetypes to reflect on; Alan Moore’s incredible mythopoesis across his career; C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books and his Space Trilogy; the aforementioned Toni Morrison and her deep-wake remixes of the Bible and African-American folk-tales and superstitions; the dreams and myths and spirals that structures Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead and so forth).    

Now, there’s no question that a writer can leave the whole matter of symbols / image / metaphor patterns to the unconscious.  Many writers, in fact, do.  We live in such a symbol-rich, myth-dense universe that most of us will draw upon what Tolkien called the Cauldron of Stories and fluently replicate established symbolic systems and mythic infrastructures without effort or awareness.  Critics are always finding symbolic metaphoric systems in literature for good reasons.  Myths, symbols, and folktales form a sort of common language (fractured by language, by community, by time-space, naturally).  We don’t always know the grammar of this common language or even that there is a grammar, and yet we writers often conjugate the myth/symbol sentences perfectly and reliably.      

Are symbolic / metaphoric / allusory systems fundamental to good fiction writing?  Perhaps not.  A plurality of writers seem to write endlessly without ever glancing in that direction.  Yet in my book there are good reasons to avail yourself of these systems if you can:

— because they fucking work and, in many cases, have worked for millennia

— because these systems shape and structure stories in ways that are already familiar to readers

— and because the very presence of these systems lends the work the gravitas of ethos, scents the work with the oils of ancient grandeur.     

And yes: I definitely deployed one myth system to shape and “thicken” my novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.  (Symbolic system spoilers ahead.)  I know I say this endlessly, but novels are damn hard work and if you’re writing one across years (mine took eleven) it’s easy to lose yourself in their labyrinthine coils.  A hidden symbolic system can become like an Ariadne thread, a guiding force of sorts.

As my novel was about a virginal Dominican supernerd I went straight for the comics that I grew up with.  You don’t have to be Richard Reynolds or own Marvel stock to understand that in our fallen world comic books function as contemporary myths.  One of my favorite comics of all time is the Fantastic Four, and I loved what Rick Moody did with the Fantastic Four in his extraordinary novel The Ice Storm (if you haven’t read it, you should).  Rick uses the Fantastic Four to shape his narrative, has his young protagonist Paul Hood obsess over the FF in the diegesis, and imagine his own family as a version of the First Family of comics:   

When (Paul) was younger, he actually thought of his father as the Thing: chunky, homely, self-pitying…He was like the Thing. He hated the world, hated mankind, hated his family, but loved people, loved kids and dogs.

And his mother was the Invisible Girl. Although, on the other hand, sometimes she was like Crystal, the Elemental, a prophetess, a seer.

And sometimes his dad was Reed Richards, the elastic scientist. And sometimes Paul himself was Ben Grimm, and sometimes he was Peter Parker, a.k.a. the Spider-Man. These models never worked exactly. Still, the F.F., with all their mistakes and allegiances, their infighting and dependability, told some true tale about family. When Paul started reading these books, the corny melodrama of New Canaan lost some of its sting.

I the writer did what Paul the character did: I mapped the Fantastic Four over my wild-ass Dominican family: Belicia and her daughter Lola are the Invisible Girl / Woman and the Human Torch.  Oscar, naturally, is The Thing.  Abelard is Mister Fantastic.  Trujillo was Doctor Doom or Galactus or Darkseid (to mix up series and publishers).

And then there was Yunior, our narrator, who is also an unidentified Fantastic Four character.¹ 

Unlike Rick in The Ice Storm I did this mapping so glancingly, it was nigh invisible to readers.  Wasn’t nowhere near as obvious as say The Incredibles (which cribbed from the Fantastic Four hard)². In my case no one ever noticed or much cared, which was fine by me.  What mattered was how the Fantastic Four helped me and helped the novel.  

At a metaphoric level, the Fantastic Four, with their fractious imperfect solidarity, were the perfect avatars for my fractured haunted Dominican family dispersed across generations, lost in the Negative Zone of postcolonial history.  I don’t share Mark Singer’s view that “the FF are a family, the foremost one in comics, but rarely have they ever meant anything about family.”  I wonder if Singer only wrote that because at the time he didn’t know Dominican families like mine in which the discontinuities and traumas of the African diaspora have done Gamma Ray things to all our bonds and all our bodies.  Their struggle to stay human in spite of the ravages of the Gamma Rays (aka history) helped inform my approach to the equally warped family in my novel.

These models never worked exactly but they worked enough and held my fictional family together over the eleven long years it took to write the book.  Without the Fantastic Four I’m sure I would have lost track of my characters across all those different time periods and I would have never finished the novel.

But the Fantastic Four were not only an invaluable guide, the Ariadne thread through the labyrinth, they were also an important hermeneutics, a way of understanding the novel.  The rare reader nerdy and interested enough to unravel, for example, which FF character Yunior actually was would (in my hopes) have a very different book in their hands than one who didn’t. 

But it doesn’t have to be something as obvious and graspable as the Fantastic Four. You could use Lynchean dream-logic or Jungian archetypes or copy actual histories like George R.R. Martin copied the histories of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, or you could go deep into the Catholic weeds like Gene Wolfe did in The Book of the New Sun. 

As Tolkien knew, the Cauldron of Stories, of Myth, of Symbols, has no bottom and if used well can serve any story — and save them as well.   

Point is, all the above are models to be borrowed from; they are the teachers and syllabi we don’t always get and they are the only methodology I have for doing this type of work.

Sorry to go on; I do hope this helps, Joshua.  Thank you and good luck!

1. From jump Yunior claims he’s the Watcher but I would suggest the novel points in another direction entirely.

2. The Incredibles is still the best Fantastic Four movie ever.