translate this to persian:
More importantly, look what’s avoided. Dull exposition about character
traits. Heavy-handed reminders about what’s important. Overt message
statements from the author. None of which is dramatic in the least. Action is
dramatic. A triumphant ride in a landau, a spirited chukker on the maidan, even a
simple bicycle ride. They move. They show the character doing something. And
in doing, he reveals elements of himself. That’s what novels do: they reveal.
They’re not very good at explicating, at declaiming, or even at essaying. But
they’re excellent at revealing. It was a poet, William Carlos Williams, who said,
“No ideas but in things,” but he could just as well have been talking about
novels. Here then, is the Law of People and Things: Characters are revealed not
only by their actions and their words, but also by the items that surround them.
This last element is often overlooked in creative writing texts, which advise the
aspiring fictionist to eschew lengthy explanations of character in favor of
revelation through actions and words. Sage advice, as far as it goes, but it needs
to go a bit beyond. The things—the trinkets and baubles, the essentials and frills,
the tools and toys—associated with a character typically reveal aspects of his
personality as well as key ingredients of the story: plot, significance, idea, motif,
theme.
Okay, so how does that work?
It’s a mystery. Seriously. Lots of theories posited but nothing decisive. I put
it under the heading of deflection of meaning, by which I mean, broadly, the
alchemical process by which a literal thing comes to stand in figuratively for
some other thing. This bit of magic is the subject of my previous book, How to
Read Literature Like a Professor, but this is almost the only time I’ll employ it
here, and only because it is so critical to the business of creating character. T. S.
Eliot, in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems” (1922) and elsewhere, gives us a
more or less useful term, the “objective correlative,” by which he means the
external set of objects that stand in for some internal emotion or condition. The
objects provide the concrete, tangible images that allow readers or audiences to
grasp the necessarily abstract inner workings of a character. Where Eliot goes
wrong, to the extent that he does, is in insisting that the result of the objective
correlative is to convey one and only one emotion, so that confusion is
impossible. I believe that when very young, Eliot was badly frightened by a
double meaning, hence his determination to exert absolute authorial control.
Rather, the ambiguity is precisely what intrigues in the objective correlative or
character emblem. We can forgive his excess as a product of his age; like so
many of the so-called New Critics, he was also a writer, in his case a writer first
who was also a critic, and so he and they naturally want to cede power in the
writer-reader relationship to the writer, to put the author in authority. What
anyone who came of critical age after about 1965 or so will note, however, is
that the balance of power has shifted, that readers are the ultimate arbiters of
meaning in a work. Besides, the work becomes so much livelier as a space of
engagement when the possibilities are more open-ended, when ambiguity,
indeterminacy, and irony are all in play.
Consider Stephen’s “ashplant.” Joyce gives Stephen Dedalus a walking stick
made of ashwood, an object he acquires first in A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man and carries through to Ulysses. He employs it sometimes in its
designed role, as a cane carried by a young man, sometimes as a fashion
accessory, sometimes as a mock sword or a punctuator for his rapier wit,
sometimes as a weapon, as when he smashes the chandelier in Bella Cohen’s
brothel during the hallucinatory Circe episode of the later novel. When he is
beaten by the soldiers, Stephen has his ashplant, along with his hat, restored to
him by Leopold Bloom. So then, class, what does Stephen’s ashplant stand for?
Oh, it almost certainly has some Freudian possibilities as a phallic symbol, the
more so given the character’s doubts about his manhood. And it is without
question a crutch of sorts, at times. Is it a device for keeping the world at bay?
Probably. Will other readers find other possible explanations and interpretations?
Indubitably. Whatever Joyce may have intended, the matter, like the ashplant, is
out of his hands. The moment the book was published on February 2, 1922, it
ceased to be his and became ours. Thanks all the same, Jim, but further
assistance is no longer required of the author; we’ll make the decisions from
here on out. Writers can suggest meaning and significance, but ultimately,
readers make the final call.