It is this potentially enormous range of perspectives that has made the word ‘symbol’ one of the most overworked and incorrectly used in the critic’s vocabulary. In discussions of meaning, the symbol is like a universal adaptor. One size fits all. Anything with a decodable meaning is a symbol.
Well it is and it isn’t. At one end of the argument, a symbol is a metaphor with knobs on, so let’s deal with this uncomplicated idea first. I’m not a huge fan of critics who rush to the dictionary for assistance, but on this occasion, the result is quite interesting. According to the OED, which devotes a column and a half to the word and its various derivatives (and that’s the Shorter OED in microscopic print), at base, a symbol can be a metaphor in the way we’ve already explained it - as a token of something else, a transference of meaning. One root of the word is from the Greek ‘sum ballein’, literally, ‘to throw together’. So you might say that a symbol juxtaposes two related things, one of which sheds light on the meaning of the other, just like a metaphor does.
There’s also what the lit critters call ‘synecdoche’, another simple type of symbolism that substitutes a part of something for the whole of it. So if I’m a poet and I’m bored with using the word ‘ship’, I could refer to an oceangoing vessel as a ‘sail’ (as in ‘our fleet comprised fifty two sails’) or a keel (‘the keels cleft the waves as they passed through the storm’). Unless you’re a painful literalist (“do you mean there’s fifty-two ships, or that the number of ships [which you do not disclose] collectively has a total of fifty-two sails between them? Ha Ha! Got you.), this shoudn’t prove too difficult to accommodate.
But then another definition, which has direct religious overtones, states that, yes, a symbol stands for something else but “not by exact resemblance, but by vague suggestion, or by some accidental . . . relation,” which, is, to say the least, a rather Delphic explanation that opens up a large can of worms for the student of meaning.
One example we might mention is the great religious debate between the consubstantiationalists (who believe that in the Eucharist, bread and wine are symbolic substitutes for Christ’s body and blood) and the transubstantiationalists (who reckon that Christ’s body and blood are literally present during the ceremony) (1). It’s a controversy that’s been raging for 600 or so years, and still shows no sign of going away. But what it hinges on is the basic internal cohesion between form and meaning within the symbols of the bread and wine. The ‘cons’ sect is saying that bread and wine can, in part or in full, stand in for Christ’s body and blood; the ‘trans’ that the ceremony is robbed of its meaning if you adopt this heretical position. In their eyes, Christ’s body and blood have to be there for the Eucharist to be worth bothering with. So the bread and wine are literally what they symbolize.
So. If something ‘exactly resembles’ its meaning, it’s easier to interpret. Bread = the Body of Christ. Wine = Blood. It’s a direct correspondence. But if that meaning is only communicated through ‘vague suggestion’ or by some ‘accidental relation’ (bread is nothing like flesh, and I can’t say I find a glass of rhesus negative particularly attractive), we’re heading down the road to vagueness and even Mystery, which religions are all most adept at using when it suits them (as we’ll see when we deal with myth a bit later), but get rather cagey about if it leads to people questioning that religion’s exclusive franchise to interpret on everyone’s behalf).
As symbolism has developed in literature, that element of mystery has stayed with it. And it undoubtedly retains religious overtones in that it suggests a mystical relationship between the artist and his Muse, like the relationship that exists between God and his representatives on Earth. It stands in for all those aspects of the creative process we don’t understand 100 per cent (which is most of it). So there had to be a literary term which embodied this meeting point between the known and the unknown, and the symbol turned out to be the one that fitted the bill.
So the relationship between form and meaning within the symbol may be transparent - but it may also be so mysterious that even the writer doesn’t fully understand what’s going on. And, as the workings and influence of the subconscious became better understood in the late 19th century, this was an idea which could not simply be attributed to artists getting all precious on us and refusing to explain what they were on about in words of one syllable. Maybe the sources of creativity really were unknowable. In fact a whole literary movement based their philosophy around this idea.
The Symbolist artists (particularly in France and Belgium) sought to express the immediate sensations of human experience and the inner life, since their underlying philosophy was a conviction that the transient objective world is not the true reality, but a reflection of the invisible (usually secular) Absolute. The movement was a revolt against contemporary realistic and naturalistic poetic styles, which were merely designed to capture the transient - something which, in the Symbolist’s view, was of no value.
The symbolists believed that the inner eternal reality could only be suggested: Mallarme, one of the movement’s leading lights (along with Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine), noted that "to name is to destroy, to suggest is to create", and the resulting poetry of this philosophy was intense and complex, full of condensed syntax and symbolic imagery. Their poetry also emphasized the importance of the sound of the verse, and was described by one fan as "an enigma for the vulgar, chamber-music for the initiated," (no guessing which camp he placed himself in). And, in many respects, it paved the way for the Modernists, who rendered meaning even more complicated by burrowing deeper into the unknown.
So the Symbolists tended to deal in essences rather than specifics. And those essences were not often fully coherent or realizable using standard literary techniques.
So the OED’s definition isn’t being deliberately vague (God forbid this wonderful institution ever would be) - it’s simply reflecting one facet of the way symbols have been made to deliver up their meaning. And so, to cut a long story short) a symbol is far busier part of speech than a metaphor. It genuinely multi-tasks (dread word).
Now let’s get back to our schoolboy’s address/ the essence of Bobby Moore/ the end of ‘Meninblack’, because this is where lit crit tends to lose the plot somewhat.
The farther an interpretation strays from the point of its perceived conception, the more abstract it will become. So at each stage of its outward trajectory (like the ripples in the pool), the symbol loses its particularity and inherits an ever wider application. Hence another OED definition of the symbol is something that ‘typifies’ a particular quality (a usage first noted in 1603, incidentally), and it’s how you define ‘typify’ that has led to some wonderful critical howlers over the years. When interpreting meaning of this sort, you have to continually have in your mind a) a sense of the symbol’s context and b) a sense of proportion. How much is something itself and how much is it a symbol? (Bear in mind it can be an infinitely variable combination of both).
As an example, let’s do the schoolboy letter thing with the character of Macbeth:
Macbeth is an evil man;
Macbeth is a typical evildoer
Macbeth is a stereotypical evildoer;
Macbeth is archetypally evil;
Macbeth is the embodiment of evil;
Macbeth is the apotheosis of evil
All the above are arbitrary descriptions, but they each represent one distinct step on Macbeth’s journey from being one evil man to being the Devil Incarnate, which is a rather long journey. Yet this is the ground the symbol has to cover in much critical thought. So to say ‘Macbeth is a symbol of evil’ is a tad vague and not saying much. How evil exactly?
But what we also need to notice is that at each step on this ladder of notoriety, Macbeth is less Macbeth and more of ‘Evil’, less of a human being and more Satan’s stand-in.
And this is where our sense of proportion needs to click in. How far is it appropriate to travel up this ladder? Macbeth is quite clearly a credible human character as well as being a symbol. He’s not any the less human for all the opprobrium heaped on him, and that is one of the many measures of Shakespeare’s genius, that he doesn’t let his meaning overwhelm the vehicle he’s created to transport it.
Would that certain critics could do the same.
If, for example, you say something is a symbol for something else when you actually mean it’s a metaphor, you’re placing too much weight on a load-bearing surface that isn’t designed to carry it. Not only are you turning suggestion into statement, you’re needlessly complicating the relationship between form and meaning. And it’ all arisen because either there’s a misunderstanding of what a symbol actually is; there’s been a sense of proportion failure; or there’s been a sense of context failure.
Let’s get out our Meaning Line again, and examine four well-known literary symbols to see how they work, ranging from the inscrutable to the downright comprehensible.
One of the most successfully realized literary symbols that conforms with many of the qualities we noted above is the Caves of Marabar in EM Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’.
Within these echoey portals Miss Adela Quested, an English tourist, is allegedly assaulted by local physician Dr Aziz, who is giving her a tour of this famous attraction. In his lengthy description of the caves and their significance, Forster is at pains to point out that they don’t necessarily represent anything tangible, but they do carry enormous, almost palpable portent. They pre-date every other physical feature of the landscape, and are renowned for their ability to scramble the human senses. Add to that Forster’s favourite theme of the sensually illiterate English middle classes and their baseless prejudices, and you’re almost begging Aziz to forego the tour. Adela’s an accident waiting to happen.
Forster’s work is often unjustly maligned for being ‘quaint’, but here is a brilliant symbolic coup de grace whose ambition quietly outstrips many of his high Modernist contemporaries (‘A Passage to India’ was published in 1924, two years after ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Waste Land’). Many critics have seized on the fact that the caves don’t seem to mean anything to state precisely that - that they are a symbol of nothingness, of the nihilism that was so fashionable in intellectual circles throughout the 1920’s, and that Forster was swept up in this tide of modish ennui.
But the caves are a far cleverer symbol than that; they are actually spiritually neutral.
Footnotes:
1. Of course, as with all religious controversies, it’s not as simple as that, but this’ll do for our purposes.
Well it is and it isn’t. At one end of the argument, a symbol is a metaphor with knobs on, so let’s deal with this uncomplicated idea first. I’m not a huge fan of critics who rush to the dictionary for assistance, but on this occasion, the result is quite interesting. According to the OED, which devotes a column and a half to the word and its various derivatives (and that’s the Shorter OED in microscopic print), at base, a symbol can be a metaphor in the way we’ve already explained it - as a token of something else, a transference of meaning. One root of the word is from the Greek ‘sum ballein’, literally, ‘to throw together’. So you might say that a symbol juxtaposes two related things, one of which sheds light on the meaning of the other, just like a metaphor does.
There’s also what the lit critters call ‘synecdoche’, another simple type of symbolism that substitutes a part of something for the whole of it. So if I’m a poet and I’m bored with using the word ‘ship’, I could refer to an oceangoing vessel as a ‘sail’ (as in ‘our fleet comprised fifty two sails’) or a keel (‘the keels cleft the waves as they passed through the storm’). Unless you’re a painful literalist (“do you mean there’s fifty-two ships, or that the number of ships [which you do not disclose] collectively has a total of fifty-two sails between them? Ha Ha! Got you.), this shoudn’t prove too difficult to accommodate.
But then another definition, which has direct religious overtones, states that, yes, a symbol stands for something else but “not by exact resemblance, but by vague suggestion, or by some accidental . . . relation,” which, is, to say the least, a rather Delphic explanation that opens up a large can of worms for the student of meaning.
One example we might mention is the great religious debate between the consubstantiationalists (who believe that in the Eucharist, bread and wine are symbolic substitutes for Christ’s body and blood) and the transubstantiationalists (who reckon that Christ’s body and blood are literally present during the ceremony) (1). It’s a controversy that’s been raging for 600 or so years, and still shows no sign of going away. But what it hinges on is the basic internal cohesion between form and meaning within the symbols of the bread and wine. The ‘cons’ sect is saying that bread and wine can, in part or in full, stand in for Christ’s body and blood; the ‘trans’ that the ceremony is robbed of its meaning if you adopt this heretical position. In their eyes, Christ’s body and blood have to be there for the Eucharist to be worth bothering with. So the bread and wine are literally what they symbolize.
So. If something ‘exactly resembles’ its meaning, it’s easier to interpret. Bread = the Body of Christ. Wine = Blood. It’s a direct correspondence. But if that meaning is only communicated through ‘vague suggestion’ or by some ‘accidental relation’ (bread is nothing like flesh, and I can’t say I find a glass of rhesus negative particularly attractive), we’re heading down the road to vagueness and even Mystery, which religions are all most adept at using when it suits them (as we’ll see when we deal with myth a bit later), but get rather cagey about if it leads to people questioning that religion’s exclusive franchise to interpret on everyone’s behalf).
As symbolism has developed in literature, that element of mystery has stayed with it. And it undoubtedly retains religious overtones in that it suggests a mystical relationship between the artist and his Muse, like the relationship that exists between God and his representatives on Earth. It stands in for all those aspects of the creative process we don’t understand 100 per cent (which is most of it). So there had to be a literary term which embodied this meeting point between the known and the unknown, and the symbol turned out to be the one that fitted the bill.
So the relationship between form and meaning within the symbol may be transparent - but it may also be so mysterious that even the writer doesn’t fully understand what’s going on. And, as the workings and influence of the subconscious became better understood in the late 19th century, this was an idea which could not simply be attributed to artists getting all precious on us and refusing to explain what they were on about in words of one syllable. Maybe the sources of creativity really were unknowable. In fact a whole literary movement based their philosophy around this idea.
The Symbolist artists (particularly in France and Belgium) sought to express the immediate sensations of human experience and the inner life, since their underlying philosophy was a conviction that the transient objective world is not the true reality, but a reflection of the invisible (usually secular) Absolute. The movement was a revolt against contemporary realistic and naturalistic poetic styles, which were merely designed to capture the transient - something which, in the Symbolist’s view, was of no value.
The symbolists believed that the inner eternal reality could only be suggested: Mallarme, one of the movement’s leading lights (along with Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Verlaine), noted that "to name is to destroy, to suggest is to create", and the resulting poetry of this philosophy was intense and complex, full of condensed syntax and symbolic imagery. Their poetry also emphasized the importance of the sound of the verse, and was described by one fan as "an enigma for the vulgar, chamber-music for the initiated," (no guessing which camp he placed himself in). And, in many respects, it paved the way for the Modernists, who rendered meaning even more complicated by burrowing deeper into the unknown.
So the Symbolists tended to deal in essences rather than specifics. And those essences were not often fully coherent or realizable using standard literary techniques.
So the OED’s definition isn’t being deliberately vague (God forbid this wonderful institution ever would be) - it’s simply reflecting one facet of the way symbols have been made to deliver up their meaning. And so, to cut a long story short) a symbol is far busier part of speech than a metaphor. It genuinely multi-tasks (dread word).
Now let’s get back to our schoolboy’s address/ the essence of Bobby Moore/ the end of ‘Meninblack’, because this is where lit crit tends to lose the plot somewhat.
The farther an interpretation strays from the point of its perceived conception, the more abstract it will become. So at each stage of its outward trajectory (like the ripples in the pool), the symbol loses its particularity and inherits an ever wider application. Hence another OED definition of the symbol is something that ‘typifies’ a particular quality (a usage first noted in 1603, incidentally), and it’s how you define ‘typify’ that has led to some wonderful critical howlers over the years. When interpreting meaning of this sort, you have to continually have in your mind a) a sense of the symbol’s context and b) a sense of proportion. How much is something itself and how much is it a symbol? (Bear in mind it can be an infinitely variable combination of both).
As an example, let’s do the schoolboy letter thing with the character of Macbeth:
Macbeth is an evil man;
Macbeth is a typical evildoer
Macbeth is a stereotypical evildoer;
Macbeth is archetypally evil;
Macbeth is the embodiment of evil;
Macbeth is the apotheosis of evil
All the above are arbitrary descriptions, but they each represent one distinct step on Macbeth’s journey from being one evil man to being the Devil Incarnate, which is a rather long journey. Yet this is the ground the symbol has to cover in much critical thought. So to say ‘Macbeth is a symbol of evil’ is a tad vague and not saying much. How evil exactly?
But what we also need to notice is that at each step on this ladder of notoriety, Macbeth is less Macbeth and more of ‘Evil’, less of a human being and more Satan’s stand-in.
And this is where our sense of proportion needs to click in. How far is it appropriate to travel up this ladder? Macbeth is quite clearly a credible human character as well as being a symbol. He’s not any the less human for all the opprobrium heaped on him, and that is one of the many measures of Shakespeare’s genius, that he doesn’t let his meaning overwhelm the vehicle he’s created to transport it.
Would that certain critics could do the same.
If, for example, you say something is a symbol for something else when you actually mean it’s a metaphor, you’re placing too much weight on a load-bearing surface that isn’t designed to carry it. Not only are you turning suggestion into statement, you’re needlessly complicating the relationship between form and meaning. And it’ all arisen because either there’s a misunderstanding of what a symbol actually is; there’s been a sense of proportion failure; or there’s been a sense of context failure.
Let’s get out our Meaning Line again, and examine four well-known literary symbols to see how they work, ranging from the inscrutable to the downright comprehensible.
One of the most successfully realized literary symbols that conforms with many of the qualities we noted above is the Caves of Marabar in EM Forster’s ‘A Passage to India’.
Within these echoey portals Miss Adela Quested, an English tourist, is allegedly assaulted by local physician Dr Aziz, who is giving her a tour of this famous attraction. In his lengthy description of the caves and their significance, Forster is at pains to point out that they don’t necessarily represent anything tangible, but they do carry enormous, almost palpable portent. They pre-date every other physical feature of the landscape, and are renowned for their ability to scramble the human senses. Add to that Forster’s favourite theme of the sensually illiterate English middle classes and their baseless prejudices, and you’re almost begging Aziz to forego the tour. Adela’s an accident waiting to happen.
Forster’s work is often unjustly maligned for being ‘quaint’, but here is a brilliant symbolic coup de grace whose ambition quietly outstrips many of his high Modernist contemporaries (‘A Passage to India’ was published in 1924, two years after ‘Ulysses’ and ‘The Waste Land’). Many critics have seized on the fact that the caves don’t seem to mean anything to state precisely that - that they are a symbol of nothingness, of the nihilism that was so fashionable in intellectual circles throughout the 1920’s, and that Forster was swept up in this tide of modish ennui.
But the caves are a far cleverer symbol than that; they are actually spiritually neutral.
Footnotes:
1. Of course, as with all religious controversies, it’s not as simple as that, but this’ll do for our purposes.
