Eliot's objective correllative - and the Semplica Girls

George Saunders's story Al Roosten in Tenth of December is a bit of a throwback to his earlier work, which focused more directly on losers and outsider, those well-known habitues of American short fiction; in this story the eponymous Roosten is the owner of a small and unsuccessful (antique?) shop and a guy with very weak self-image. Story entails his taking an impulsive act of vengeance - essentially, hiding keys and wallet - against a town leader, family man, image of success - and then Roosten frets about what he's done - had it ruined the guy's life? made it impossible for his daughter to make a doctor's appointment? - and thinks about returning to the scene, "finding" the keys, becoming the guy's good friend, becoming a success, running for mayor, what should his slogan be?, and so on - very typical Saunders wild interior monologue, but funny and disturbing, as he conveys the almost obsessive surges of emotion, the oscillation of feeling from self-abnegation to grandiosity. Story ends on a quiet note as Roosten nods to a homeless man - they seem to recognize something in each other, that's his real "counterlife" perhaps. The most important story in the collection, however, is The Semplica Girls Diary - in which the narrator (story in the form of his diary, which he hopes will provide future generations with info about how life was led today!) is a character much like Roosten, leading a pathetic life of quiet desperation and deeply envious of those who have it better - he would like to be a social climber but doesn't have even the skills for that. I'd read the story in magazine appearance and had forgotten the long set-up - it takes quite a few pages before we have any idea who or what the Semplica Girls are; we just get these strange references to the SGs that his wealthy neighbors have in their yards - and his kids are curious about these. At one point, he wins a small lottery payout and, rather than do anything wise with the $ such as pay off maxed out credit cards, he and wife decide to have their yard landscaped - and as part of that the "install" some SGs. This occurs about 20 pp into the story - and we still have no sense of what they are. In fact, they are a lawn display of enslaved women from 3rd-world countries, earning their way out of poverty, sending $ back home - a horrible thought of course, but in some ways how different from the maids, the landscapers, the migrants on whom so many Americans, all Americans in some way (e.g., the produce we purchase, the trash that miraculously disappears once a week) depend? The SGs are in some way what Eliot called an Objective Correlative - not a symbol, which is one thing representing another, but a concept that stands in for a constellation of feelings and ideas. Will post more on Semplica tomorrow.