The Color of Emily's Bedroom

Recently on the discussion forum, William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose For Emily” became an item of interest. Some of you may have even discovered the Mr. Renaissance website while doing a search for information about that story, arriving upon the short literary analysis The Faded Rose of Emily. Interestingly, it has remained the single most requested page on the site since it was uploaded to the server, a debt owing in part, I suspect, to the fact Faulker’s story is assigned reading in many high school and college literature courses. In any case, Trish was asking about the symbolism of the rose in Faulkner’s story, wondering if it referred to the color of Emily’s bedroom. Answering such a question was thought-provoking, for I was again reminded of symbols of all sorts, whether literary or otherwise. So then, what exactly is a symbol?

The most basic forms of symbols are probably signs: things like stop lights or street signs, the former of which contain no words or images at all and the latter of which rely as much on shape and color to convey their intended meaning as the single word or picture they sport in bold relief. In fact, I smile to myself when I think of road signs with pictures;if you have ever seen the sign that cautions about slippery road conditions, you might notice that the drawing is very abstract and stylized, containing just a handful of crucial lines to convey the intended meaning. I smile because as a child I never could figure out what I was seeing: having no practical experience with driving a car, the tire ruts of the sliding vehicle appeared to me to be a car walking on bent stilts. The picture was a complete enigma to me: I knew what I thought it looked like, but that could not be it: “beware of cars crossing on bent stilts.” To make matters worse, the sign is very one-dimensional and my mind played tricks on me as I tried to envision the other two stilts at the rear of the car. I even pictured it walking on its two “front legs” dragging its rear wheels piteously behind it like some wounded creature.

Many of our road signs were designed so that anyone could read them no matter what language they spoke or even if they were largely illiterate. To my knowledge, most of the signs that dot the road side are multinational symbols that appear virtually everywhere there are roads to be found that comply with international regulations. Aside from my childish misunderstanding—the imagination of an artist already rearing its head—road signs have one or maybe two at the most possible meanings. They are symbols in the sense that they abstractly represent the concrete, but they fall far short of the sorts of symbols one finds in literature.

Symbols, then, must represent something beyond themselves: cars precariously walking on stilts symbolize the likeliness of slipping and falling when the road is wet, something I hear can be devastating to the paint to say nothing of the passengers. But what of more complex symbols? Carl Jung had much to do with taking the work of Freud in new directions and was deeply involved in the idea of dream symbolism, the implication being that within our own psyches we construct (or inherit) certain archetypes which play out in our dreams. These archetypes, not unlike Plato’s forms, are believed to exist on different levels ranging from the personal to the universal. The idea that there is such a thing as universal symbols has crossed disciplinary boundaries and Jungian and Freudian criticism of literature is not uncommon in certain circles. In fact, we can probably trace much of the literary interest in these symbols to the end of the previous century and the ideas of the Enlightenment that led up to it.

We shall not take long to explore dreams here, as we have already done so in other places. What we will say is that some dreams are pregnant with meaning and generally such dreams do not have a range of possible interpretations but are focused upon a single, often emotional issue or a small range of interrelated concerns. That being said, the concern in question is usually multifaceted to some degree and resistant to easy analysis.

For example, there are certain times in which the first girl I was ever deeply drawn to appears in my dreams; she was a very good friend of mine for many years. I can be almost certain that whenever my friend appears in my dreams, she signals my own sense of longing and lack of intimacy, particularly when I have not been consciously in touch with those feelings during my waking hours. Perhaps during such times, I am actually isolated from myself, a thought Hannah Arendt would likely sanction. My friend has long since become a symbol in my dreams for something very complex: she has become the incarnation of all my deepest feelings of, and desire for, intimacy. To make this an even more complex tapestry, my ex-wife often shows up in my dreams during these times as well, and she represents some of the same but there is always that sense of finality: that sense of something that once was deep and intimate but which will never, ever be again. The feeling she represents in my dreams corresponds very closely to the feelings I felt when she remarried, officially signing that part of my life away forever. In my dreams during these times we are intimate but we are not connected—or perhaps we are connected but have been severed; there is always a turning away and a sense of fatedness: to know someone so well, to have once been so close but now to forever be apart. I suspect (but do not know) that these two human symbols would still show up from time to time in my dreams even if I were happily remarried. These symbols do not appear on my whim and wish, but only when they accurately reflect some other circumstance in my life at present which is bringing to the surface many of the same feelings I experienced then. Jung would have a heyday looking inside my head, for my friend and my ex-wife are two very deeply embedded symbols that in many ways correspond only to what once was. That is, my friend and my ex-wife are undoubtedly different today than the way they manifest in my dreams: they are older now, they have moved on to other things and developed relationships with other people—they, like me, like us all, have changed. Yet their memory—a memory of what once was—can become as immediate and as real to me as if it were happening as we speak. By now, you are perhaps getting a strong sense that the symbolism of Freudian psychology is a bit more complex than the more basic forms involved in street signs.

This past Sunday I was guest to Christ Episcopal, a church just a block or two down the street from my apartment. There are, of course, churches that incorporate much more iconography than the Episcopal Church and there are others that pride themselves in incorporating none. In fact, this particular Episcopal church was more austere than many of its fellows in spite of its beautiful architecture and its claim of being the oldest continually meeting place of worship in the city. During the Recessional Hymn in particular as the processional was filing down and out the center aisle holding the large staffs affixed with crosses and other icons, I was struck by how much symbolism is wrapped up in these icons. I was not raised Episcopal and thus did not recognize them all, but there is probably not a professing Christian alive for whom the symbol of the cross does not carry a great degree of significance. A child could easily construct the shape of the horizontal beam with its vertical crosspiece, and yet there are so many different elements all wed together in that one simple shape. Some perhaps scorn it to some degree, not because they scorn Christ but because they associate the symbol with negative feelings they harbor toward institutional Christianity. Others may recall the exact time and place they were at when its meaning first gripped their lives in a very personal and profound way. Some may instantly recall the Passion account or the Resurrection of Easter and be moved to tears. The symbol of the cross may for some be associated more with the crucifix as a testament to their Lord and Savior’s suffering and sacrifice; to others, a naked cross may be more poignant in symbolizing the Ascension and the empty tomb. The symbol of the cross is a particularly appropriate one in our discussion, for while it conveys a range of possible meanings, those meanings are not arbitrary but rather all center in one way or another on Jesus Christ or His Bride on earth. As we said, for some, this may leave a bitter taste, but for many it becomes the ultimate symbol of hope and meaning in an often uncertain and lonely world.

Symbols in a literary sense are equally complex and often deeply subconscious as well. For this reason, when asked whether or not the rose signified the color of Emily’s bedroom in Faulkner’s tale, I turned it back into a question: assuming that is true, what is the significance of the color of her bedroom? Having a rose-colored bedroom is an interesting bit of information perhaps, but if it is going to carry some depth of significance, it must play on the range of meanings we associate with the color of roses: that is, with the color red. In fact, I daresay when I mention the meanings associated with the color red, a list has jumped into your mind even if you don’t put much stock in the symbolism of colors. Most of us have heard the color red associated with any number of things from murder to passion and love to the beating of the human heart both alone and in union with another; what makes a symbol so powerful is that it can simultaneously mean all of those things at once.

Think again about the symbol of the cross. In fact, let us take the symbol of the cross with our Lord still upon it: the crucifix. As we look at Him, we see a very human side as He hangs there in agony. A mortal man, nails driven through hands and feet, an object of derision and scorn, far beyond the help of mortal or beast. We also see with mystical eyes the union this seeming frail human has with the Father and how the weak and lowly state of man is transformed on this cross of changes, death swallowed up in victory. The Son of Man and Son of God, the human and the Divine, the tragic and the victorious are all paradoxically there. The very ambivalence of the crucifix is part of what gives it the power it holds over us, for it is resistant to analysis and black-and-white finality. The emotions that correspond to our contemplation of the symbol may also be an ambivalent mixture of sober and joyous, grievèd and at peace.

Now that we have said a bit about symbols, what should we say about truth and reality, those two areas of inquiry purported to be the subject matter of epistemology and metaphysics? This semester has brought a sense of clarity to me on the matter that I did not possess before. Specifically, for my “Knowledge and Reality” class, we read J.T. Fraser’s Time, Conflict, and Human Values (the “reality/metaphysics” part of the course) and Stephen C. Pepper’s 1942 classic World Hypotheses (the “truth/epistemology” part of the course which incidentally can be read in its entirety online). These were the very books I referenced to write my recent graduate portfolio piece that still needs to be polished a bit before being shipped off to prospective Ph.D. programs. As soon as finals are over this week, I will have to get back to the submission process, which involves putting the final touches in place and writing my statements of purpose. But I digress. Ahem!

In particular, Pepper’s book stakes out a series of world hypotheses in popular currency that attempt to “get at” reality. The concept is not difficult to understand: the fact that these words are black symbols upon a white page, that you are seated on the sofa, that in a few hours you will be leaving to go to the store: none of these details or facts about your world say much outside of being just what they are: facts. We all, however, interpret the details or facts of our world in ways that the facts themselves don’t explicitly spell out. You read the black words on the white page not only because black shows up well on white but because these ideas might help you join together your world or otherwise interest or inspire you. But the other facts of your day—the sittings-on of sofas and the goings-out to stores—aren’t quite so clearly spelled out. In fact, the only reason why the black words are spelled out so clearly is precisely because they have undergone—or are undergoing—just this kind of a facts-binding-themselves-to-other-facts kind of process. There is no sense in taking it to the degree of technical language Pepper does in his book so long as we understand the basic concept: there are facts and then there are the indispensable theories we consciously and unconsciously use to stitch them together into more-or-less coherent wholes.

Pepper believes that there are many of these theories we use to explain our world, some of which are more adequate than others. By adequate, he means a theory that has sufficient scope (it is able to meaningfully explain nearly everything with which it comes in contact) and plenty of precision (it can drill down to the details of any given thing in a way that offers us greater insight). Of all the theories in the world, Pepper believes that there are only four in popular currency that are relatively adequate and these include formism (we would normally say realism), mechanism (we might say naturalism or materialism), contextualism (we would probably call it pragmatism), and organicism (also called idealism). Of these four, I chose contextualism (also known as pragmatism) as my paper topic, using that as a lens through which to peer at Fraser’s theory of time. Not surprisingly, I also had some in-depth conversations with the guys on Wednesday nights who were curious to learn more about these world hypotheses and how they spoke to life, particularly to the life of the believer.

Most of us in the group had been around the type of reasoning in Christian circles that treats any kind of relativistic thinking with suspicion and even contempt. I cannot say how others construed the particulars, but for me, I think much of my confusion in agreeing with this distrust was in a conflation or confusion of reality on the one hand and truth on the other. I have long associated one with the other and the other with the one to a degree that there was really no distinction between the two and truth and reality became two synonyms for the same essence. That is not to say, of course, that truth and reality do not share a very tight connection that is at times entirely fused together, but it does suggest that as an aid to understanding, if we first take them apart, when we put them back together again, we will have a better understanding of the whole.

We mentioned the guys on Wednesday nights: in Circles in a World of Squares last week, we talked a bit about Ray but spent more time talking about Greg. However, in this issue, it will be Ray who plays the prominent role. Let us put a frame around what for the moment is only a name to many of us and we shall see if something of the man emerges beneath.

As long as I have known Ray, he has always been cautious in his calculations and in general conservative in his approach to life in nearly every sense of the word. He runs little risk of being carted away by the latest trend or suddenly shipwrecking on some new idea gone south. However, when it comes to philosophy and most especially math and physics, he is always ready to give a new idea a hearing even though the chances of him embracing it in its entirety depend to some degree on how long it has been in currency. He warms up to new ideas slowly (unless he can see a huge amount of an old idea tucked away inside the new), turning them over and around in his mind, and then, when we, his friends, least expect it, confounds us by the depth of his deliberation from all this slow analysis that has been percolating unseen in the bowels of his mind. Slower to embrace novel ideas than some, he certainly displays no lack of curiosity in exploring new ones. Not surprisingly then, he was eager to learn more about contextualism and my new-claimed insight into the separation of truth and reality.

Last Wednesday, toward the end of the evening (whenever “the end” exactly is for us), he rose from his chair and claimed he needed to “be going,” but, as fate would have it, that did not happen for at least another good forty-five minutes. His hand on the knob, he made the fatal mistake of mentioning he would like to hear more about contextualism and the separation of truth and reality. It just so happens I have a globe sitting in a waist-high wooden base next to the front entrance given me as a gift from my parents to display in my office when I officially become a college professor. Pointing to it, I began by saying something like: “This is not the earth.” My thoughts had begun and Ray was not going to get away so easily this time. “This is not the earth, but a representation of the earth. It is a reasonably accurate representation as representations go, particularly considering it is at most several feet in diameter and even with our current technology it takes us how many days at what rate of speed to traverse the globe?” So far so good. The globe is not the earth, but a small-scaled replica of the earth.

I told Ray that the earth was something that he and I could not “get at.” It was too big and besides we are stuck in our own heads all our life. In other words, we have to get what is “out there” into “in here.” What is “out there,” is, quite simply, out there existing as stuff does out there apart from ourselves. It continues to exist whether there are minds to perceive it or not.

In fact, in some preliminary discussions with Ray and another friend, it was suggested that our new definition of truth was similar to the question: “If a tree falls in the forest with no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?” The key, our friend said, was in how we defined the concept of “sound.” We “solved” this question in the same way we did once before. Basically, our new question becomes: “In a universe without sentient life—without beings who could apprehend things about their world—does sound still exist?” The question of truth, like the question of sound, depends on whether we define it from the perspective of the perceiver or from the standpoint of some kind of independent existence. If it is something that exists as a discrete entity, truth (like sound) would exist whether anyone was around to apprehend it or not, but if truth (like sound) is in some way a perception of something, then truth (like sound) as such could only be said to exist within the mind of the perceiver and nowhere else.

Returning to our question of the sound of falling timber, vibrations would still be sent through the air when a tree fell and the tree would keep on being a tree, but no sound would exist because, in this second way of defining our terms, sound does not exist outside of minds. Vibrations are not sound until heard; truth does not exist outside of a mind that is capable of perceiving: neither sound nor truth is reality in any external, “out there” sense (and it only begs the question to speak of God as being the eternal perceiver: we are speaking, in that case, of a Mind). We will circle back to this idea in a moment.

You may be very pretty. I may also think that you are very pretty: my thought, though true, is not the same thing as your prettiness. It corresponds to your prettiness—it may even be so much as some kind of reflection of your prettiness—but my thought lacks the fine and delicate curvature of your face. Your face is pretty; my thought is not. Your face is pretty, my thought simply agrees with that fact.

So then, the earth is too big for Ray and me to “get at” all at once, so a much smaller-scaled version helps us considerably in “getting at” its essence. And “getting at” its essence means forming some kind of accurate knowledge about the reality of the earth. The knowledge corresponds or in some way represents the reality, but it is not the reality itself.

Now then, Ray may very well be walking around with a globe in his head—that is, he may well have a global representation that helps him “get at” the reality of the earth. By contrast, I may have a sixty-four page atlas in my own head that helps me “get at” the earth. My atlas is no more the same thing as the earth than Ray’s globe; my atlas is no more the same thing as the earth than my thought is the same thing as your face. Ray may go on to point out the reasons why his globe is superior to my atlas. For one thing, it is round and thus is not subject to the same distortions that creep in when one tries to represent round objects on flat surfaces. “Ah,” I may chime in, “but your map only shows the most cursory of topical details where in my full sixty-four pages I have so much more information about the specifics than you ever could on that small surface of yours.” He may then remind me that he has raised mountain ranges you can feel with your fingers and I may tell him that I have visual blow-ups and expansions of these same mountain ranges that provide even more accurate and refined data about the actual height, say, of Mt. Everest at any geographic coordinate along its extremity.

Now then, for those of us on the outside looking in on Eric and Ray, we might think to ourselves: well, Ray has some good points and Eric has some good points and if we combine their thoughts then we may come closer to having gotten the entire earth inside our own heads. And indeed, that is precisely what Pepper suggests about these four world hypotheses. There are many ways of looking at the world, some of them adequate like globes and atlases and some of them very inadequate like talking about a big, flat disc held up by turtles stacked on top of turtles all the way down to nowhere and nothingness. Or maybe there are other ways of looking at the world that are amazing in their precision but lack the scope to be called a true world theory: if I can tell you all the properties of titanium and calcium cyanamide, that is helpful, but it does little in explaining how earthquakes happen or why the force of gravity behaves as it does. But globes and atlases, at least, are adequate to explain the world as a whole and can tell us quite a bit about its surface features as well. There are strengths to globes and there are strengths to atlases and the better we understand each one for what it is, the better we can add and combine the two together.

So of all the hypotheses of the world currently in existence, Pepper feels that only four are relatively adequate, one of which is contextualism or pragmatism. Greg, Ray, and I have all heard a lot of Christians who talk about how bad or evil this theory is because in its simplest, most caricatured sense it says, “A thing is true if it works” or “the end justifies the means.” We have read Christian authors who point to the atrocities of Auschwitz and other events in recent history as indicators of the logical end conclusion of all hypotheses that have nothing to say about some absolute truth: namely, of course, the absolute truth of God. After reading Pepper’s account of world hypotheses, however, I realize that there is a problem with this kind of thinking: “absolute truth” is being conflated with “reality.” Reality is what it is, but a thing is true to the degree that it meaningfully and accurately reflects that reality in some way. Therefore, absolute truth is an ideal that probably does not exist except in the mind of God who alone knows all things. We are finite and therefore our ways of getting the world “out there” to be adequately represented “in here” are necessarily limited. But let us back up a moment.

Pragmatism—we will just call it by its more familiar name—is one way of representing the outside world “in here.” All things being equal, it is neither the best way nor the worst way, but is completely neutral. It is just a tool and the mechanic learned long ago that the best way to accomplish his task is to have as many tools as he can, at least provided that he can find the right ones when he needs them. Pepper does not advocate that we rely on pragmatism alone, but rather see its strengths and its weaknesses clearly, like Ray’s globe and my atlas. The facts of the universe do not explain themselves, so these various hypotheses are the tools we have to make what we learn fit into a coherent whole. To admit that we are limited in our knowledge of the truth in no way implies that reality itself is merely relative such that if I think a given thought the world morphs itself accordingly until you come along and unthink it back again. Those are ridiculous oversimplifications of reality. It suggests rather that we believe that there is a reality that does exist no matter what we happen to think about it, but that the degree to which we efficiently and accurately “re-present” it in our minds, to that degree we can be said to have truth. If reality falls in the forest and there is no mind to apprehend it, no truth (according to this definition) can be said to exist. The fact of the toppling reality has in nowise changed; it has simply not been “re-presented” in the minds of any creatures. Truth, then, is what exists “in here” that helps us “get at” the reality that exists “out there.” To speak of “absolute truth,” according to this definition, is just a little silly. We would do better to speak of “absolute reality,” but if we did that, we could just drop the “absolute” and be done with it, for a thing is simply what it is no matter what any of us may think about it.

All of these thoughts bring us back around to symbolism. It is entirely possible for a symbol to mean different things to different people and still accurately correspond to or “re-present” reality. In fact, part of the richness of symbols is found in the fact that built within them is room for different but adequate (and less adequate) ways of “re-presenting” the world. The cars that walk across the roadside with wobbly legs are pretty straight-forward because they don’t have much scope. They convey the sense of “slippery roads” and even more to the point, that this particular road might be wet or icy and we do well to beware lest we are involved in an accident. Symbols in dreams like my friend and my ex-wife are more complex “re-presentations” of current reality, often expressions of emotional reality as well as all other forms. Symbols like the cross and the crucifix are bursting with meaning, some of it perhaps mistaken or misguided, but much of it highly relevant and rich, capable of taking on many perspectives that are all true attributes of a single whole just as “green,” “fibrous,” and “pointed” are all properties of a single blade of grass. Now then, what do you suppose would have happened if I would have “re-presented” all of the ideas inside this old head of mine to the unsuspecting visitor who asked me whether or not I thought William Faulkner’s rose symbolized the color of Emily’s bedroom? (Wink.)

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The Color of Emily’s Bedroom