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/ LITERARY SYMBOLISM
/ IIN An Introduction
f to the
/ Interpretation
of Literature
...
10 THE BOUNDARIES OF SYMBOLISM
EDMUND WILSON
'..
, THE NATURE OF SYMBOLISM 19
also something more; words like "bed," "joy," "love," indicate that
the described object has a further range of significance which makes
it a symbol. But Blake's rose is not, like the symbolic rose of Dante's
Pamdiso and other medieval poems, an element in a complex set of
traditional religious symbols which were widely known to contempo-
3. DEFINITIONS AND TOU~BSTONES
rary readers. Only from the clues in Blake's poem itself, supplemented
by a knowledge of parallel elements in his other poems, do we come to
see that Blake's worm-eaten rose symbolizes such matters as the de-
struction wrought by furtiveness, deceit, and hypocrisy in what should
be a frank and joyous relationship of physicallove.l96]
M. H. ABRAMS
D. H. LAWRENCE
You can't give a great symbol a "meaning," any more than you
can give a cat a "meaning." Symbols are organic units of consciousness
with a life of their own, and you can never explain them away, because
their value is dynamic, emotional, belonging to the sense-conscious-
ness of the body and soul, and not simply mental. An allegorical
image has a meaning. Mr. Facing-both-ways has a meaning. But I defy
you to lay your finger on the full meaning of Janus, who is a
sym bol. [157]
. It is necessaryfor us to realise very definitely the difference be-
tween allegory and symbol. Allegory is a narrative description using,
as a rule, images to express certain definite qualities. Each image means
something, and is a term in the argument and nearly always for a
moral or didactic purpose, for under the narrative of an allegory lies
a didactic argument, usually moral. Myth likewise is descriptive nar-
rative using images. But myth is never an argument, it never has a
didactic nor a moral purpose, you can draw no conclusion from it.
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which
the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for
mental explanation or description. We can expound the myth of
Chronos very easily. We can explain it, we c~n even draw the moral
conclusion. But we only look a little silly. The myth of Chronos lives
on beyond explanation, for it describes a profound experience of the
human body and soul, an experience which is never exhausted and
never will be exhausted, for it is being felt and suffered now, and it
will be felt and suffered while man remains man. You may explain the
myths away: but it only means you go on suffering blindly, stupidly,
"in the unconscious," instead of healthily and with the imaginative
comprehension playing upon the suffering. .
And the images of myth are symbols. They don't "mean some.
thing", They stand for units of human feeling, human experience. A
32 DEFINITIONS AND TOUCHSTONES I
THE NATURE OF SYMBOLISM 33
complex of emotional experience is a symbol. And the power of the
mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing,
symbol is to arouse the deep emotional self, and the dynamic self, be-
a definitely constituted entity. You see?
yond comprehension. Many ages of accumulated experience still throb [212J
within a symbol. And we throb in response. It takes centuries to create
a really significant symbol: even the symbol of the Cross, or of the -Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out
horseshoe, or the horns. No man can invent symbols. He can invent what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing
an emblem, made up of images: or metaphors: or images: but not for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis
symbols. Some images, in the course of many generations of men, be. which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically
come symbols, embedded in the soul and ready to start alive when possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. That is the moment
touched, carried on in the human consciousness for centuries. And which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral
again, when men become unresponsive and half dead, symbols die. [158J thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a
thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when
the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that
thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment
of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of
which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its
epiphany. [213J
JAMES JOYCE
-You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for
beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day
I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance
of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically
beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire uni-
verse into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object.
To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then
you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise
its integrity. Isn't that so?
-And .then?
-That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple
sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis
then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation
to itself and other objects, examines' the balance of its parts, contem-
plates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So
the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the structure. The
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I
I. HUMPTY DUMPTY
BERNARD M. KNIEGER