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文學的 象徵主義
Symbolism in Literature
董崇選
中山醫大應用外語系教授
「懂更懂學習英文網站」負責人
網址：dgdel.nchu.edu.tw
I.
何謂 Symbol?
An object, animate or inanimate, that
represents something else.
代表他物者
Scales (天秤) symbolizes justice (公正).
A dove (鴿子) stands for peace (和平).
The clenched fist (握拳): aggression (侵略)
Words, spoken or written, are all symbols.
A symbol can be public or private, universal
or local.
A rose (玫瑰) as a beauty (美人) is public and
universal.
Stars (星星) as reason is private and local.
(Blake)
I.
何謂 Symbol?
A symbol involves comparison like simile or
metaphor.
The lily (百合花) vs. purity (清純): white & clean
A symbol is not so definite in meaning as an
allegory.
Christian (基督徒) passes through the Slough
of Despond (沮喪之沼澤) and Vanity Fair (虛榮
市集) and arrives at the Celestial City (天國之
城).
­­Allegory in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress.
Gregor finds himself turned into a big
cockroach (蟑螂).
­­Symbol in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
II. Symbolism as a Movement:
Primarily in literature (esp., poetry), also in
other arts. (見畫)
Beginning in France in the latter part of the
19th C.
A movement against Realism and
Naturalism. 反寫實
Moréas’s manifesto: “le Symbolisme”
To clothe the idea in perceptible form.
以 可覺知的形式 衣著觀念。
“The Death of the Gravedigger” by Schwabe
Khnopff’s “The Caress”
II. Symbolism as a Movement:
Influenced by Swedenborg’s theory of
correspondences (對應論) and
Schopenhauer’s pessimistic aesthetics (悲觀
美學).
There are correspondences between the
natural ( physical), the spiritual, and the divine
worlds.
We are ever living with sufferings under the
Will­to­life, and Art serves as a contemplative
refuge (思想的庇護) from the world of Will.
III. Key Ideas of Symbolism:
Using concrete images (具象) as symbols
(象徵) to express an emotion or an abstract
idea, to represent an ideal world, or to
suggest another plane of reality (實体面).
The poet is a kind of seer (先知) or voyant
(先覺) who could see through and beyond
the real world to the world of ideal forms and
essences.
Using the method of suggestion (提示) to
evoke (喚起) hidden meanings.
III. Key Ideas of Symbolism:
The world of essences is a world of
synesthesia (fusion of sensations, 共感).
To achieve pure poetry (純粹詩) through
word relationships: musical quality (言樂性),
image clusters (意象群), logical and
psychological associations (聯想).
The best form is free verse (vers libres 自由
詩), or “prose poem” (散文詩).
IV.
一些名言:
“The sun itself is the dark
simulacrum (影像), and light is
the shadow of God.”
­­Sir Thomas
Brown
“Symbolism is the art of
evoking an object little by little
so as to reveal a mood (心境)”
or, conversely, “the art of
choosing an object and
extracting from it an état d’âme.
(心境).”
­­Mallarmé
IV.
一些名言:
“The only way of expressing emotion in the
form of art is by finding an ‘objective
correlative’ (相關客体); in other words, a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emotion;
such that when the external facts, which must
terminate in sensory experience, are given, the
emotion is immediately evoked.”
­­
T. S. Eliot
「門前遲行跡，一一生綠苔；苔深不能
掃，
落葉秋風早。八月蝴蝶黃，雙飛西園
草。」
李白〈長干
行〉
V.
重要作家作品：
Baudelaire: The Flowers of
Evil
波德萊 (《惡之華》)
〈對應〉
“Correspondences”
〈鬱卒 78〉 “Spleen LXXVIII”
“Windows” (prose poem)
Mallarmé:
Rimbaud:
Verlaine:
Correspondences
Nature is a temple whose living colonnades
Breathe forth a mystic speech in fitful sighs;
Man wanders among symbols in those glades
Where all things watch him with familiar eyes.
Like dwindling echoes gathered far away
Into a deep and thronging unison
Huge as the night or as the light of day,
All scents and sounds and colors meet as one.
Perfumes there are as sweet as the oboe’s sound,
Green as the prairies, fresh as a child’s caress,
­­And there are others, rich, corrupt, profound
And of an infinite pervasiveness,
Like myrrh, or musk, or amber, that excite
The ecstasies of sense, the soul’s delight.
Spleen LXXVIII
鬱卒
Old Pluvius, month of rains, in peevish mood
冬雨倒冷甕
Pours from his urn chill winter’s sodden gloom
墳屍消退中
On corpses fading in the near graveyard,
乖戾陰霾下
On foggy suburbs pours life’s tedium.
郊霧生長冗
My cat seeks out a litter on the stones,
孤貓露疥癬
Her mangy body turning without rest.
覓窩青瓦片
An ancient poet’s soul in monotones
詩人長凍瘡
Whines in the rain­spouts like a chilblained ghost. 獨吟雨管間
A great bell mourns, a wet log wrapped in smoke 樓鐘悲嗚燃溼
木
Sings in falsetto to the wheezing clock,
咕
壁鐘感冒猛嘀
While from a rankly perfumed deck of cards
裡
發臭香牌煙幕
(A dropsical old crone’s fatal bequest)
物
水腫老嫗遺留
The Queen of Spades, the dapper Jack of Hearts
與魔
黑桃紅心后
Speak darkly of dead loves, how they were lost.
傾訴
死情暗處猶
Windows
Looking from outside into an open window one never sees
as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is
nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more
insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle.
What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting
than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or
luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
Across the ocean of roofs I can see a middle­aged woman, her
face already lined, who is forever bending over something and
who never goes out. Out of her face, her dress, and her gestures,
out of practically nothing at all, I have made up this woman’s
story, or rather legend, and sometimes I tell it to myself and weep.
If it had been an old man I could have made up his just as well.
And I go to bed proud to have lived and to have suffered in
some one besides myself.
Perhaps you will say “Are you sure that your story is the real
one?” But what does it matter what reality is outside myself,
so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I
am?
VI. Influences of Symbolism:
Maeterlinck: plays
Proust: novel (Remembrance of Things Past)
Yeats: poems
T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
O’Neill: The Hairy Ape
Melville: Moby Dick
Pound: poems
其他國家許多人包括 painting, music, cinema,
etc.
VII. Conclusions about
Symbolism:
It is a revival of the Romantic emphasis on
the visionary (靈視的).
It is a re­assertion of Platonic or
Neoplatonic (新柏拉的) ideas.
It is originally a French movement in poetry,
but it becomes a universal (普遍的)
movement in all kinds of art.
It is linkable to many previous writers and
later movements or techniques of art such
as Imagism (意象派), Expressionism (表現主
義), surrealism (超寫實主義), and
Impressionism (印象派).