names indicate their qualities, and in the case of Despair, his size as well. Allegories have one mission to
accomplish—convey a certain message, in this case, the quest of the devout Christian to reach heaven. If
there is ambiguity or a lack of clarity regarding that one-to-one correspondence between the
emblem—the figurative construct—and the thing it represents, then the allegory fails because the message
is blurred. Such simplicity of purpose has its advantages. George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) is
popular among many readers precisely because it’s relatively easy to figure out what it all means. Orwell
is desperate for us to get the point, not a point. Revolutions inevitably fail, he tells us, because those who
come to power are corrupted by it and reject the values and principles they initially embraced.
Symbols, though, generally don’t work so neatly. The thing referred to is likely not reducible to a single
statement but will more probably involve a range of possible meanings and interpretations.
Consider the problem of the cave. In his masterful novel A p. 99 Passage to India (1924), E. M.
Forster has as his central incident a possible assault in a cave. All through the first half of the work the
Marabar Caves hover over the story; they keep being referred to, they’re out there, remarkable in some
ill-defined way, mysterious. Our independent and progressive heroine, Adela Quested (does that name
strike you as symbolic at all?), wishes to see them, so Dr. Aziz, an educated Indian physician, arranges
an outing. The caves turn out to be not quite as advertised: isolated in a barren wasteland, unadorned,
strange, uncanny. Mrs. Moore, Adela’s mother-in-law-to-be, has a very nasty experience in the first of
the caves, when she suddenly feels oppressively crowded and physically threatened by the others who
have joined her. Adela notices that all sound is reduced to a hollow booming noise, so that a voice or a
footfall or the striking of a match results in this booming negation. Mrs. Moore, understandably, has had
enough of caves, so Adela does a bit of poking around on her own. In one of the caves she suddenly
becomes alarmed, believing that, well, something is going on. When next we see her she has fled the
scene, running and falling down the hillside to collapse into the arms of the racist English community she
so vehemently criticized before. Badly bruised and scraped and poked by cactus spines, she is in shock
and utterly convinced that she was assaulted in the cave and that Aziz must have been her assailant.
Was that cave symbolic? You bet.
Of what?
That, I fear, is another matter. We want it to mean something, don’t we? More than that, we want it to
mean some thing, one thing for all of us and for all time. That would be easy, convenient, manageable for
us. But that handiness would result in a net loss: the novel would cease to be what it is, a network of
meanings and significations that permits a nearly limitless range of possible interpretations. The meaning of
the cave isn’t lying on the surface of the novel. Rather, it waitsp. 100somewhere deeper, and part of
what it requires of us is to bring something of ourselves to the encounter. If we want to figure out what a
symbol might mean, we have to use a variety of tools on it: questions, experience, preexisting knowledge.
What else is Forster doing with caves? What are other outcomes in the text, or uses of caves in general
that we can recall? What else can we bring to bear on this cave that might yield up meaning? So here we
go.
Caves in general. First, consider our past. Our earliest ancestors, or those who had weather issues, lived
in caves. Some of them left us some pretty nifty drawings, while others left behind piles of bones and
spots charred from that great discovery, fire. But the point here might be (no guarantees, of course) that
the cave, on some level, suggests a connection to the most basic and primitive elements in our natures. At
the far end of the spectrum, we might be reminded of Plato, who in the “Parable of the Cave” section of
The Republic (fifth centuryB.C. ) gives us an image of the cave as consciousness and perception. Each
of these predecessors might provide possible meanings for our situation. The security and shelter
suggested by some Neolithic memory of caves probably won’t work here, but something along the lines