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SYMBOLISM

Of all components of fiction, the one that often seems to produce the greatest interpretive problems is symbolism.

What is a symbol?

The word symbol derives from the Greek verb symballein ‘to throw together’, and its noun symbolon ‘mark’, ‘emblem’, ‘token’ or ‘sign’. It is an object, animate or inanimate, which represents or ‘stands for’ something else.

Scales, for example, symbolize justice; the orb and scepter, monarchy and rule; the dove, peace; the goat, lust; the lion, strength and courage; the bulldog, tenacity; the rose, beauty; the lily, purity; the Stars and Stripes, America and its States; the Cross, Christianity. Actions and gestures are also symbolic. The clenched fist symbolizes aggression. Beating of the breast signifies remorse. Arms raised denote surrender. Hands clasped and raised suggest supplication.

What is a literary symbol?

A literary s y m b o l combines an image with a concept, a literal, concrete quality with a suggestive, abstract dimension. It may be universalorindividual.

In literature an example of a universal symbol is a journey into the underworld (as in the work of Virgil, Dante and James Joyce) and a return from it. Such a journey may be an interpretation of a spiritual experience, a dark night of the soul and a kind of redemptive odyssey. Examples of individual symbols are those that recur in the works of W.B. Yeats: the sun and the moon, a tower, a mask, a tree, a winding stair, and a hawk.

Dante’s Divina Commedia is structurally symbolic. In Macbeth there is a recurrence of the blood image symbolizing guilt and violence. In Hamlet weeds and disease symbolize corruption and decay. In King Lear clothes symbolize appearances and authority; and the storm scene in this play may be taken as symbolic of cosmic and domestic chaos to which ‘unaccommodated man’ is exposed. The poetry of Blake and Shelley is heavily marked with symbols.

In prose works the great white whale of Melville’s Moby Dick (the ‘grand god’) is a kind of symbolic creature — a carcass which symbol-hunters have been disseting for years. Much of the fiction of William Golding (especially Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin and The Spire) depends upon powerful symbolism capable of more interpretations than one. To these examples should be added the novels and short stories of Kafka, and the plays of Maeterlinck, Andreyev, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Synge and O’Neill.

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