Literary Gems
By Brian Crawford
Whenever I ask students what literary devices are for, I usually get one of the following answers:
They add (hidden) meaning (or depth) to the story.
They help us understand a character (or theme) better.
I’ve never been satisfied with these answers.
On the one hand, they don’t address the real issue in writing; on the other, they don’t answer the question.
Why not?
The first case is an issue of a metaphor I’d like to challenge--that of “layers” to describe meaning. English teachers and students often speak of stories having a “deeper” meaning--a “subtext” that is “hidden” from view and must be “uncovered” when we peel back the “layers.” But it seems to me a more accurate metaphor for story would be that of a multifaceted gem.
If I hold up, say, a cut emerald and look at it, I’ll see some facets but not others. If I hold it up to a fluorescent light, I will see certain rays and spectra of light; if I hold it up to the sun, I will see others. Just as a lapidary thinks while cutting a stone of how the finished gem will look--with all its facets--so do authors think while writing about multiple facets of a story at once. As far as I can tell, writers only deliberately hide things in their texts when they want to ensconce controversial topics in allegory, symbol, or satire; or perhaps when they are dropping subtle clues about character or problem that will become evident later in the story. Or maybe they are building suspense or mystery. And sometimes, maybe authors are just having fun playing with their readers.
Related to this idea of literature-as-a-gem is a term that I coined about 15 years ago: multireferentiality. Derived from semiotics (the study of signs and symbols), multireferentiality is the idea that a word or story element simultaneously refers to many different things (referents)--some literal, some symbolic, some figurative. An apple might just be an apple. But it can also be sin, temptation, wisdom, science, or an evocation of war--all at once. (I later learned that someone had already coined a term for this phenomenon, but it was “polysemy,” “multiple meanings.” So much for coining words.).
Think about how music works, and this might make sense. Imagine the plot or character arc as the melody; the literary devices--symbol, allusion, metaphor, allegory, imagery, and so on--as the harmony. The through line of a story forms the melodic line; the literary devices form the chord progressions. In music, chords can emphasize a note, draw attention to the melody, or create tension that the listener wants resolved. Same goes with literary devices. In Lord of the Flies, for example, we see the Lord of the Flies--a translation of the Hebrew בַּעַל זְבוּב Baʿal Zəvûv, a devil--speak to a character in the middle a paradisiacal jungle, before the jungle becomes an inferno (remind you of any medieval Italian literature featuring Virgil as the protagonist?) and the characters begin fighting each other. The choice of the term “Lord of the Flies” specifically refers to a demon’s name; when we see this, we are looking at our gem through a different light, and we see that the island in the novel takes on Biblical proportions. It is no longer about a group of kids going berserk; it is about the Fall of humankind from (divine) grace. Or is it?
How did this allegorical facet become visible? We caught the reference to Be’elzebub. And now we see multiple facets of the gem at once.
We hear the melody and the harmony.
As to the second, oft-proposed answer for why literary devices exist (“They help us understand a character”): saying this is like saying, “I know the answer but am not telling you.” What about the character does the device help us understand? What do we know--differently--about the character now that we’ve spotted, say, a scar on the character’s heel? If the scar made you think of Achilles, and that made you think of anger (because Achilles’s fatal flaw is his hot-headedness), and you see that the character tends to get angry, then maybe now you can predict that the character’s anger will get them into trouble. This is what the literary device does: It helps us see that the character is a tragic hero with a fatal flaw--what that will cost them big-time.
At their core, stories are about meaning. Meaning is created through words and narrative. And to understand how literary devices work is to understand how words can make you think of a whole bunch of different ideas--simultaneously. Literary devices don’t add “depth.” They don’t add “hidden meaning.” They don’t add “subtext.” What they do is make the polished gems of stories sparkle in ways you can’t imagine…until you learn how to look. And when a student learns to create meaning multireferentially, the student is the one who adds new gems to the world.