SYMBOL/SYMBOLISM
Source 1:
Murfin, Ross and Supryia M. Ray. The Bedford Glossary of Critical and
Literary Terms. 2nd ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 470-473. Print.
symbol: Something that, although it is of interest in its own right,
stands for or suggests something larger and more complex - often
an idea or a range of interrelated ideas, attitudes, and practices.
Within a given culture, some things are understood to be symbols:
the flag of the United States is an obvious example, as are the five
intertwined Olympic rings. More subtle cultural symbols might be
the river as a symbol of time and the journey as a symbol of life
and its manifold experiences. Instead of appropriating symbols
generally used and understood within their culture, writers often
create their own symbols by setting up a complex but identifiable
web of associations in their works. As a result, -one object, image,
person, place, or action suggests others, and may ultimately
suggest a range of ideas.
A symbol may thus be defined as a metaphor in which the vehicle the image, activity, or concept used to represent something else represents many related things (or tenors) or is broadly suggestive.
The urn in John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (1820) suggests
interrelated concepts, including art, truth, beauty, and
timelessness. Certain poets and groups of poets have especially
exploited the possibilities inherent in symbolism; these include the
French Symbolist poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, such as Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarrne, Arthur
Rimbaud, Paul Valery, and Paul Verlaine.
Symbols are distinguished from both allegories and signs. Like
symbols, allegories present an abstract idea through more
concrete means, but a symbol is an element of a work used to
suggest something else (often of a higher or more abstract order),
whereas an allegory is typically a narrative with two levels of
meaning that is used to make a general statement or point about
the real world. Symbols are typically distinguished from signs
insofar as the latter are arbitrary constructions that, by virtue of
cultural agreement, have one or more particular significations.
Symbols are much more broadly suggestive than signs. As a sign,
the word water has specific denotative meanings in the English
language, but as a symbol, it may suggest concepts as varied or
even divergent as peace or turmoil, the giver of life or the taker of
it. Some theorists (such as Charles Sanders Peirce), however, have
argued that symbols are in fact a type of sign, their meanings just
as arbitrary and culturally determined as those of signs.
Symbols have been of particular interest to formalists, who study
how meanings emerge from the complex, patterned relationships
among images in a work, and psychoanalytic critics, who are
interested in how individual authors and the larger culture both
disguise and reveal unconscious fears and desires through symbols.
Recently, French feminist critics have also focused on the symbolic.
They have suggested that, as wide-ranging as it seems, symbolic
language is ultimately rigid and restrictive. They favor semiotic
language and writing - writing that neither opposes nor
hierarchically ranks qualities or elements of reality nor symbolizes
one thing but not another in terms of a third - contending that
semiotic language is at once more fluid, rhythmic, unifying, and
feminine.
EXAMPLES: In the following passage from The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), Ernest Hemingway uses traditional literary and biblical
symbols to speak suggestively about human mortality, faith that
flies in the face of suffering and death, and the ultimate spiritual
triumph over limitation and loss. These symbols include the quiet
harbor, the sheltering rock, the struggle with a cross-like mast, and
the great, slippery, luminous fish:
When he sailed into the little harbour the lights of the
Terrace were out and he knew everyone was in bed. The
breeze had risen steadily and was blowing strongly now. It
was quiet in the harbour though and he sailed up onto the
little patch of shingle below the rocks. There was no one to
help him so he pulled the boat up as far as he could. Then he
stepped out and made her fast to a rock.
He unstepped the mast and furled the sail and tied it. Then he
'shouldered the mast and started to climb. It was then he
knew the depth of his tiredness. He stopped for a moment
and looked back and saw in the reflection from the street
light the great tail of the fish standing up well behind the
skiff's stern.
William Golding's Lord of the Flies (1954) also contains numerous
symbolic passages, such as the scene depicting Simon's death,
inflicted by a mob-like group of young boys. The young but wise
Simon is a Christ figure who dies unjustly; he is killed, in fact, by his
peers (reminiscent of the judgment of Christ's peers condemning
him to death) while trying desperately to help them by bringing
knowledge that will change their lives. Even nature protests
Simon's death with the opening of the clouds, torrential rain, and a
great wind, just as God opened the heavens, darkened the sky, and
let the rain pour down at the moment of Christ's death:
The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and
screamed. The beast was on its knees in the center, its arms
folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable
noise something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled
forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the
rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after
it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed,
struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements
but the tearing of teeth and claws.
Then the clouds opened and let down the rain like a waterfall.
The water bounded from the mountain-top, tore leaves and
branches from the trees, poured like a cold shower over the
struggling heap on the sand. Presently the heap broke up and
figures staggered away. Only the beast lay still, a few yards
from the sea. Even in the rain they could see how small a
beast it was; and already its blood was staining the sand.
Now a great wind blew the rain sideways, cascading the
water from the forest trees …
In the February 2001 episodes of the "reality-TV" series Survivor II:
The Australian Outback, the recurring image of a spider served not
only as a symbol of the predatory nature of certain characters but
also of the "game" of survival more generally.
symbolism: From the Greek symballein, meaning "to throw
together," the serious and relatively sustained use of symbols to
represent or suggest other things or ideas. In addition to referring
to an author's explicit use of a particular symbol in a literary work
("Joseph Conrad uses snake symbolism in Heart of Darkness"
[1899]), the term symbolism sometimes refers to the presence, in a
work or body of works, of suggestive associations giving rise to
incremental, implied meaning ("I enjoyed the symbolism in George
Lucas's Star Wars movies" [1977- ]).
When spelled with a capital S, Symbolism refers to a literary
movement that flourished in late-nineteenth-century France and
whose adherents rebelled against literary realism. Symbolists
(often referred to specifically by nationality as the French
Symbolists) held that writers create and use subjective, or private
(rather than conventional, or public), symbols in order to convey
very personal and intense emotional experiences and reactions.
They argued that networks of such symbols form the real essence
of a literary work. Because of the subjective and individual
character of their symbolic systems, the work of the French
Symbolists is more suggestive than explicit in meaning. Charles
Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarrne, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valery, and
Paul Verlaine are probably the best known of the French
Symbolists.
Many other writers could also be called symbolists because of the
sustained use in their works of "private" symbol systems - even
though they preceded, succeeded, or simply did not participate in
the better known (and more organized) French movement. Such
writers include William Blake, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, D.
H. Lawrence, and William Butler Yeats. Poe's poetic practice and
theory in particular had a considerable influence on the French
Symbolists. Thus, although literary historians tend to limit the use
of Symbolism to refer to a specific literary movement that
developed in France, the movement in fact had its roots - and
perhaps has had its greatest impact and influence - beyond French
borders. Twentieth-century European and American writing owes a
particular debt to Symbolism. Authors ranging from the German
Rainer Maria Rilke to the English Arthur Symons to the Irish Yeats
and James Joyce to Americans like Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot
have drawn on but also extended the work of the French
Symbolists.
Source 2:
Harmon, William and C. Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 7th ed.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 507-509. Print.
Symbol A symbol is something that is itself and also stands for
something else; as the letters a p p l e form a word that stands for
a particular objective reality; or as a flag is a piece of colored cloth
that stands for a country. All language is symbolic in this sense, and
many of the objects that we use in daily life are also.
In a literary sense a symbol combines a literal and sensuous quality
with an abstract or suggestive aspect. It is advisable to distinguish
symbol from IMAGE, ALLEGORY, and METAPHOR. If we consider an
image to have a concrete referent in the objective world and to
function as image when it powerfully evokes that referent, then a
symbol is like an image in doing the same thing but different from
it in going beyond the evoking of the objective referent by making
that referent suggest a meaning beyond itself; in other words, a
symbol is an image that evokes an objective, concrete reality and
prompts that reality to suggest another level of meaning. The
symbol evokes an object that suggests the meaning. As Coleridge
said, "It partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible." In
allegory the objective referent evoked is without value until it is
translated into the fixed meaning that it has in its own particular
structure of ideas, whereas a symbol includes permanent objective
value, independent of the meanings that it may suggest. In "The
Rhetoric of Temporality," Paul de Man argues that "Whereas the
symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification,
allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own
origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it
establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference." A
metaphor evokes an object in order to illustrate an idea or
demonstrate a quality, whereas a symbol embodies the idea or the
quality. As W. M. Urban said, "The metaphor becomes a symbol
when by means of it we embody an ideal content not otherwise
expressible."
Literary symbols are of two broad types: One includes those
embodying universal suggestions of meaning, as flowing water
suggests time and eternity, a voyage suggests life. Such symbols
are used widely (and sometimes unconsciously) in literature. The
other type of symbol acquires its suggestiveness not from qualities
inherent in itself but from the way in which it is used in a given
work. Thus, in Moby-Dick the voyage, the land, the ocean are
objects pregnant with meanings that seem almost independent of
Melville's use of them in his story; on the other hand, the white
whale is invested with meaning-and differing meanings for
different crew members-through the handling of materials in the
novel. The very title of The Scarlet Letter points to a double
symbol: a color-coded letter of the alphabet; the work eventually
develops into a testing and critique of symbols, and the meanings
of "A" multiply. Thomas Pynchon's V. continues much the same line
of testing an alphabetical symbol. Similarly, in Hemingway's A
Farewell to Arms, rain, which is a mildly annoying meteorological
phenomenon in the opening chapter, is converted into a symbol of
death through the uses to which it is put in the book. The meaning
of practically any general symbol is thus partly a function of its
environment.
Symbolism In its broad sense symbolism is the use of one object to
represent or suggest another; or, in literature, the serious and
extensive use of SYMBOLS. Recently the word has taken on a
pejorative connotation of mere rhetoric without reality, surface
without substance, speciousness and tokenism, all smoke and no
fire, all hat and no cattle.
In America in the middle of the nineteenth century, symbolism of
the sort typical of romanticism was the dominant literary mode. In
this movement the details of the natural world and the actions of
people were used to suggest ideas. Romantic symbolism was the
fundamental practice of the transcendentalists. Emerson, the chief
exponent of the movement, declared that "Particular natural facts
are symbols of particular spiritual facts" and that "Nature is the
symbol of spirit," and Henry David Thoreau made life itself a
symbolic action in Walden. The symbolic method was present in
the POETRY of these two and also in that of Walt Whitman.
Symbolism was a distinctive feature of the novels of Hawthorne-notably The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun--and of Melville,
whose Moby-Dick is probably the most original work of symbolic
art in American literature.
Symbolism is also the name of a movement that originated in
France in the last half of the nineteenth century, strongly
influenced British writing around the turn of the century, and has
been a dominant force in much British and American literature in
the twentieth century. This symbolism sees the immediate, unique,
and personal emotional response as the proper subject of art, and
its full expression as the ultimate aim of art. Because the emotions
experienced by a poet in a given moment are unique to that
person and that moment and are finally both fleeting and
incommunicable, the poet is reduced to the use of a complex and
highly private kind of symbolization in an effort to give expression
to an evanescent and ineffable feeling. The result is a kind of
writing consisting of what Edmund Wilson has called "a medley of
metaphor" in which symbols lacking apparent logical relation are
put together in a pattern, one of whose characteristics is an
indefiniteness as great as the indefiniteness of experience itself
and another of whose characteristics is the conscious effort to use
words for their evocative musical effect, without much attention to
precise meaning. As Baudelaire, one of the principal forerunners of
the movement, said, human beings live in a "forest of symbols,"
which results from the fact that the materiality and individuality of
the physical world dissolve into the "dark and confused unity" of
the unseen world. In this process SYNAESTHESIA takes place.
Baudelaire and the later symbolists, particularly Mallarme and
Valery, were deeply influenced by Poe's theory and poetic practice.
Other important French writers in the movement were Rimbaud,
Verlaine, Laforgue, Gourmont, and Claudel, as well as Maeterlinck
in the drama and Huysmans in the novel. The Irish writers of this
century, particularly Yeats in poetry, Synge in the drama, and Joyce
in the novel, have been notably responsive to the movement. In
Germany, Rilke and Stefan George were great symbolist poets. In
America, the imagist poets reflected the movement, as did Eugene
O'Neill in the drama. Through its pervasive influence on T. S. Eliot,
symbolism has affected much of the best British and American
poetry in our time. One of the most evocative passages of
symbolist poetry is that beginning "Garlic and sapphires in the
mud" in Eliot's "Burnt Norton."