One of those rare clarifying moments in my life came when I was told that the whale in Moby Dick didn’t symbolise anything. Or rather, it didn’t symbolise any one single thing in a fixed and coherent way. The whale might symbolise a handful of things, and those things might contradict one another and you’d just have to live with it. Also the whale was simultaneously a whale – no or a whale, because there is never anything “mere” to be had when a whale is involved.
This was a brilliant thing to learn, and I still think about it often. Symbolism and things like that were very exciting when I was first learning about art and literature, but the danger, I guess, is that they become binary, a kind of substitution cypher. If the whale is a single thing, then Moby Dick is a puzzle that can be solved and we can all move on to other things. But it’s not a single thing. It contains multitudes, to borrow a handy phrase from a contemporary of Melville. This frees it and sets it loose in the wild oceans of the mind. It is forever a thing of inference and speculation, of contradiction and dark wonder.
I may have written about this before. No bother. At the moment, anyway, these thoughts very much remind me of Elden Ring, which is getting a DLC this week in the shape of Shadow of the Erdtree. Inference and speculation, contradiction and dark wonder. I have my own relationship with Elden Ring, as I do with almost all FromSoftware games. I have played them a bit, some of them really quite a bit, and always enthusiastically. And then I have inevitably stalled on a skill issue or a simple matter of cognitive overload: too many threads to keep track of, so when I step away for a week or two, further progress becomes unthinkable. But this is only part of my relationship with these games, and it may actually be the weaker part. I love FromSoftware stuff and I think I love it passionately. I just love to talk about it, think about it, and most of all hear about it.
7 Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree Beginners Tips – A REFRESHER COURSE FOR FORGETFUL TARNISHED Watch on YouTube
And so more Elden Ring means more of that. More watching videos on the minutiae of lore and more listening to friends who are playing the game and experiencing it in their own ways. It’s always been like this with FromSoftware games, back from the first moment that I had a coffee in Brighton with Simon Parkin and he told me about this wild and confusing game he was trying to play: Demon’s Souls. (I’ve definitely written about before.) I think there’s a reason why FromSoftware’s games make for such excellent spectator sports, why simply learning about them feels so active. And it all comes down to the way they’re designed to tell their stories.