But back in the day it was far more than just a pose or an attitude: Symbolism also had a serious aesthetic purpose, and, inevitably, a manifesto, written in 1886 by Jean Moreas, in which he lists some of the stylistic devices typical of the genre: . . . d’impollues vocables . . . defaillances ondulees, les pleonasmes significatifs, les mysterieuses ellipses, l’anacoluthe en suspens, tout trop hardi et multiforme . . . (unpolluted words . . . undulant cadences, significant pleonasms, mysterious ellipses, suspended anacoluthon, an overwhelming sense of extreme audacity and multiformity . . . ) Well, Moreas obviously knew his aesthetic theory: ‘pleonasm’ is basically using ten words when one will do; ‘ellipsis’ is when you leave key words out of a line or sentence; and ‘anacoluthon’ is confused grammar. What this all adds up to is what a Symbolist poet might term ‘liberation’ and the rest of us a difficult, if not impossible, read: according to Moreas, poetic language should create enigmas rather than explain or resolve them. But this linguistically and grammatically anarchic declaration was considerably refined by Stephen Mallarme (1842 - 98), who’s now generally acknowledged as the most influential and representative Symbolist, so we’d do well to take a brief look at his views on poetry, since they actually seek to construct something of substance and value over and above the self-indulgence of some of his contemporaries. We mentioned Poe earlier, and Poe was one of Mallarme’s early heroes. In fact, Mallarme wrote a sonnet about him, in which he praised the older writer’s ambition “to give a purer sense” to language. And this is the general thrust of his meaning, one he would achieve by dreaming himself out of the real world. Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowledge that Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impression of that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and proclaiming, in the face of the Void, which is truth, these glorious lies. Mallarme was a chain smoker, who liked “to put some smoke between the world and myself” so he could play down its physicality and focus on what this imprecision evoked as its boundaries ‘dissolved’. So to get at the meaning of something, its visual impact has first to be played down and then discarded, leaving only words to fill the void of what was formerly there. We’re back to essences again. Take a flower, for example; I say: “a Flower!” and, out of the oblivion to which my voice consigns any outline, being something other than known petal-cups, musically rises, an actual and sweet idea, the one absent from all bouquets. Mallarme's flower doesn’t exist in the material world - it doesn’t have a physical outline because he’s only speaking the word “flower” (yet more emphasis on sound rather than sense). But the sound of the word, detached from its physical referent (the flower) leads to nothing that can be named positively: instead, it gives rise to "an actual and sweet idea", which can ultimately only be described in negative terms: "something other than," "absent from." It becomes a vacancy filled with the essence of a flower - a symbolic object. Sometimes, the transformation of an ordinary object into a symbolic object is indicated by capitalization: in Mallarme’s poem ‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’ (‘The virginal, living and beautiful day’) a swan become the Swan (“le Cygne”) as if it’s no longer a particular swan, but Every swan. Or, indeed, the poet’s own swan that he has transfigured out of the real world and into art. Mallarme’s second key principle involves the role of the poet himself: in his ‘Crise de Vers’ (‘Poetry Crisis’), Mallarme states that although the poet may be the vehicle for perceptions and thus responsible for the creation of art, he should nevertheless be left out of the equation when discussing meaning; ”L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition elocutoire du poete, qui cede l'initiative aux mots.... ("The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words....") So rather it’s the words, and not their writer, who should be allowed to do the talking, something he notes with approval in the work of contemporary poet Paul Verlaine: "Verlaine? Il est cache parmi l'herbe, Verlaine" (literally, "Verlaine? He is hiding in the grass, Verlaine"). And a good thing too, he’s implying. Unlike the less successful Symbolists, whose richness of language is showing you how clever they are, the true artist doesn’t indulge in this kind of showing off. So amid all the smoke and dissolution, what Mallarme’s actually creating is a strong sense of meaning that doesn’t arrive in the form of a statement, but, paradoxically, a suggestion. So something indistinct can also be something strong and affecting. And if you only remember one thing about Symbolism, this should be it. As his career progressed, Mallarme gradually refined his aesthetic, and an interview published in 1891, towards the end of his life, indicates how focused and consistent it had become: I believe . . . that there must only be allusion. The contemplation of objects, the images that soar from the reveries they have induced, constitute the song. The Parnassians, who take the object in its entirety and show it, lack mystery; they take away from readers the delicious joy that arises when they believe that their own minds are creating. To name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which derives from the pleasure of step-by-step discovery; to suggest, that is the dream. It is the perfect use of this mystery that constitutes the symbol: to evoke an object little by little, so as to bring to light a state of the soul or, inversely, to choose an object and bring out of it a state of the soul through a series of unravelings . . . One must set things straight. There must always be enigma in poetry, and the goal of literature - there is no other - is to evoke objects . . . The childishness of literature, up to now, has been to believe, for instance, that choosing a certain number of precious stones and writing down their names on a piece of paper, even very precisely, was to make precious stones. Well, no! Poetry being an act of creation, one must draw from the soul of man states, glowing lights, of such absolute purity that, well sung and well lighted, they become the jewels of man: that is what is meant by symbol; that is what is meant by creation, and the word poetry here finds its meaning: it is, in sum, the only possible human creation. And if, in truth, the precious stones with which one adorns oneself do not convey a state of the soul, one has no right to wear them . . . Very elegant, Steve: in Symbolism, to name is to destroy the resonance of something. So, if you’re a Symbolist, you don’t set out to label it or describe what an object looks like; you describe what it evokes in its perceiver. Trying to apprehend it in its totality closes the door on curiosity and therefore a potential source of intellectual movement and energy. And finally, there has to be empathy and communication between the perceiver and thing perceived, or you’re simply borrowing reality and not dignifying it with any passionate involvement. So at the heart of Symbolist poetry lies the “enigma”, the “dream”, the “mystery” that is meaning. It’s what gives the world its specialness - because it can never be fully embodied or explained. And whether this implies a sort of hyper-reality or the impractical other-worldliness of the OED definition of ‘visionary’ is entirely down to the reader’s taste in poetry. So how far Mallarme succeeds in translating this theory into practice is outside the scope of this section: but there can be no doubt that the Symbolist movement left the world a more intensely beautiful , if sometimes insubstantial place using this model for meaning. And it’s not surprising, given that Symbolism placed such overwhelming emphasis on the cultivation of the poetic sensibilty. Poetry wasn’t a bolt-on extra that could be picked up and put down at will. As a Symbolist, you had to live your art, open your mind and senses to every aspect of lived experience, and not be afraid of the irrational and subjective, even if it meant the poem was impenetrable. It would at least be troubling. But that’s not the whole story. I noted a few pages ago that the Symbol could possess a compelling strength despite its enigma and evanescence; and so it’s perhaps not surprising that, as we saw in Part 1, Symbolism was essentially a base camp for those who chose to use Myth as the carrier for their meaning, a process which involved promoting Symbolist essences, which can be delicate and even febrile, to the rank of timeless, ELEMENTAL qualities. Mallarme’s swan we looked at earlier was an aspect of that process in action, transforming a single common or garden bird into an iconic bird. It’s a move from the particular to the general, the essence to the archetype. All the Symbolist attributes are present and correct in the myth, including; Þ the self-effacement of the writer; Þ the fact you can’t quite put your finger on a myth, particularly the elusive quality that makes it eternal; Þ its resonant qualities - the tendency of its meaning to travel outwards from its point of origin. But whereas, in Mallarme’s model, language and image are the products of contemplation, in mythical writing, it’s an idea or even an entire story that tends to emerge from the writer’s observation of reality. Symbolism, in short, doesn’t necessarily have the power to reverberate as widely, or at a level as close to the surface of reality as myth; yet it can travel on part of that journey towards more general meaning. For instance, it can work beautifully as a single image or motif that resonates throughout a poem or novel on an aesthetic rather than a formal level, creating substructures based on less tangible, sensual elements rather than the surface constituents of plot, character and event. Not an easy idea to grasp, but let’s try. I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the sensation of smelling something (usually pleasurable) you haven’t smelt for years; in certain cases, it can transport me back over decades. And it’s not just the smell that’s replicated, it’s the whole sense of place - its attendant sights and sounds and textures for which the smell is the trigger. It’s as if the years in between simply evaporate. Yet these recollections are far from vivid; they merge into a single composite image which can’t quite be verified without a visit to the local historical society. For example: the aroma of coffee from my student haunt at the Queen’s Lane Coffee House in Oxford was absolutely identical to that in Sainsbury’s in Crouch End Broadway in London N8 in about 1964, 15-odd years previously. The moment I smelled it, I was instantaneously carried back to early childhood, and a medium-sized bustling store with its large red bacon slicer and giant urn-shaped coffee grinder, as well as butter being sold loose at a white marble-topped counter. And that’s all I remember. But when that memory hit me, I wondered why on earth my subconscious had bothered to register it. Why coffee? Why that coffee? Then? This isn’t about dates, people and places, but the way the senses conspire with the imagination to create an alternative, parallel history of your life. I find it also happens a lot with particular ieces of music, and the reminiscences they bring. I suppose it’s a sort of epiphany of the kind we looked at in Part 1. And it’s not just me, apparently. There’s a great example of this in William Faulkner’s novella, ‘Knight’s Gambit’; when the lawyer Gavin Stevens bumps into an old flame he hasn’t seen for many years, Faulkner compares her to the fragrance of a lavender sachet that’s been left in a bureau drawer and forgotten. Suddenly, years later, the drawer is by chance jarred open. The fragrance escapes and is smelled; the two events are immediately linked in the perceiver’s imagination, and it appears as if the intervening years have never happened. During this period the old flame, one Melisandre Backus, has married into the parvenu Harriss family, been widowed, and subsequently pursued by a number of suitors. She lives with her son and daughter in the ostentatious mansion her husband had built for them to live in as newlyweds: Gavin suddenly and without warning knew the true juxtaposition, the true perspective; it was not she that was the ghost; the wraith was Harriss’s monstrous house: one breath, one faint waft of sachet from that disturbed drawer, and all the vast soar of walls, the loom and sweep of porticoes, became at once transparent and substanceless: the scent of old sachet, lavender and thyme and such, which, you would have thought, the first touch of the world’s glitter would have evaporated, until in the next second you realized that it - the scent, the odour, the breath, the whisper - was the strong and enduring, and it was the inconstant, changing glitter which flashed and passed. I think this is the closest analogy I’ve come across in literature to how a Symbolist perspective can work for the non-artist. A symbol can be, as here, an intensely personal experience, gathering (in this example) under the collective heading of ‘love’, all kinds of different threads and strands of Gavin’s life and past experiences that centre on Melisandre. Not in any systematic way, but instantaneously and powerfully. The symbol can be the prompt, the mnemonic, the touchstone for an entire ragbag of thoughts, perceptions and impressions that have subconsciously accumulated around their subject and have faded or attenuated until being instantaneously energised, returning as powerfully as if they’d never been away. So the symbol draws meaning into it and can fire it outwards again, given a sympathetic set of circumstances.