Literary Symbolism

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Literary Symbolism

• When is an egg not an egg?

2
Ralph Waldo Emerson

• nature is a symbol, in the whole, and in every
  part (7).
• The Universe is the externization of the soul
  (7)
• It is nature the symbol, nature certifying the
  supernatural, body overflowed by life which the
  poet worships with coarse but sincere rites
  (8).

3
Arthur Symons

• Symbols are essential
• Without symbolism there can be no literature
  indeed, not even language. What are words
  themselves but symbols (8).

4
Edmund Wilson

• Why we need symbols
• The assumptions which underlay Symbolism lead us
  to formulate some such doctrine as the following
  Every feeling or sensation we have, every moment
  of consciousness, is different from every other
  and it is, in consequence, impossible to render
  out sensations as we actually experience them
  through the conventional and universal language
  of ordinary literature (10).

5
M. H. Abrams

• A symbol, in the broadest use of the term, is
  anything which signifies something else in this
  sense, all words are symbols (18).
• As commonly used in criticism, however, symbol
  is applied only to a word or phrase signifying an
  object which itself has significance that is,
  the object referred to has a range of meaning
  beyond itself (18).

6
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• a symbol . . . Is characterized by a
  translucence of the special in the individual, or
  of the general in the special, or of the
  universal in the general above all by the
  translucence of the eternal through and in the
  temporal. It always partakes of the reality
  which it renders intelligible and while it
  enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living
  part in that unity of which it is the
  representative (19).

7
D. H. Lawrence

• You cant 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 senseconsciousness of the body
  and soul, and not simply mental (31).

8
D. H. Lawrence

• Allegory
• 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
  (31).

9
D. H. Lawrence

• Myth likewise is descriptive narrative using
  images. But myth is never an argument, it never
  has a didactic or 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 the mental explanation or
  description (31).

10
D. H. Lawrence

• the images of myth are symbols. They dont
  mean something. They stand for units of human
  feeling, human experience. A complex of
  emotional experience is a symbol. And the power
  of the symbol is to arouse the deep emotional
  self, the dynamic self, beyond comprehension
  (32).

11
D. H. Lawrence

• No man can invent the symbols. He can invent an
  emblem, made up of images or metaphors or
  images but not symbols. Some images, in the
  course of many generations of men, become
  symbols, embedded in the soul and ready to start
  alive when touched, carried on in the human
  consciousness for centuries (32).

12
D. H. Lawrence

• when men become unresponsive and half dead,
  symbols die (32).

13
Bernard M. Knieger

• Humpty Dumpty is a traditional figure in our
  culture, always identified as an egg. So Humpty
  Dumptys eggness cannot be disputed (58).

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Humpty Dumpty

• a symbol of fragility as an egg sitting on a
  wall, he is a symbol of aspiring pride. Pride,
  however, is a human trait so Humpty Dumpty
  emerges as a symbol of sinful man (58).

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Credits

• Material taken from Literary Symbolism An
  Introduction to the Interpretation of Literature.
  Edited by Maurice Beebe, Purdue University.
  Wadsworth Publishing Company, Inc., San Francisco.

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Understanding Symbols

• Identify
• Visualize
• Representation of ?
• Constant or shifts?