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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47875
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47875
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The short answer is that you can't. Symbolism is really a property of a culture, not an individual work. Symbols are a kind of second order language, and you can no more make up symbols out of whole cloth than you can make up language -- at least, not if you hope to be understood by a broad audience.

Secondly, the reason you hear so much about symbolism in literary studies is that works of art created any time before the modern age come from a civilization that was deeply symbolic in its way of thinking and expressing itself. To think, to write, to speak, and to paint symbolically was, therefore, no special trick, it was just the way you were used to communicating. The medieval world view held that God filled nature with symbols to communicate essential truths about Himself to man.

This is why, for instance, we had the theory of epicycles to try to explain anomalies in planetary motion. The heavens were held to be the realm of perfection (as opposed to the fallen realm or earth). The circle was a symbol of perfection because of its unity and simplicity. Thus in the heavens God proclaimed his perfection by inscribing circles in the sky. And when observation showed that the planets did not actually behave like they were prescribing circles, their motion was explained as circles orbiting circles, because circles are symbols of perfection and God fill nature with symbols of his glory. (I'm simplifying grotesquely here. Read C.S. Lewis's _The Discarded Image_ for all the wonderful details and a far more learned explanation than I can offer.)

And, of course, we don't think this way anymore. We now live in a painfully literalist civilization. This literalism had been good for science and technology but bad for the arts. It also causes us to grossly misinterpret the writing and beliefs of older and wiser civilizations, but that is a different topic.

Symbolism today, therefore, is a rather effete pursuit. All but the most obvious and heavy handed symbols will be lost on the general reading public. In fact, even the most obvious and heavy handed symbols will be lost on most of them because they have no experience of symbolic thinking or expression. It is not simply that they don't know the symbols, but that their linguistic centers are not attuned to interpreting symbolic communication.

Can you establish new symbols in a literary work? Maybe, sort of. You will have to do it by establishing an association between an object and a particular action or mood, through repetition, rather like training Pavlov's dog to salivate when you ring a bell. So every time our hero sees the woman he loves, he slips on a banana peel. Eventually, every time we see a banana peel, we think of the girlfriend. Except we probably don't, because our minds are not used to working that way.

Is it worth doing? For the average reader, probably not. But only you can decide who you are going to write for.

Original score: 8