02/08/2011
Nicholas Halmi on the Romantic symbol
Nicholas Halmi is University Lecturer in Romantic Literature at Oxford University and a Fellow of University College, Oxford. He is a Visiting Professor in English at Stanford during Winter quarter 2011. His research interests include the Enlightenment and Romantic literature, philosophy, and visual culture; the reception of classical antiquity; the history of literary theory and […]
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This is KZSU Stanford.
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Welcome to entitled opinions.
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My name is Robert Harrison
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and we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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You're going to bother Christopher and Shawn and Michael Mamba
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got your left for some of my flower beds, my poison, but I'm firing.
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I don't know what a symbol is or even whether such a thing exists,
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but I confess that I am taken by the charisma of the word,
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which I associate with the redemption of the phenomenon.
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When I hear the word symbol, things take on a subtle glow
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as if a mystical light deep inside of them had been turned on.
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I am definitely one of those who Paul Vallehi had in mind
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when he declared, I quote, "I've known many people who have meditated endlessly
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on this little word symbol to which they attributed an altogether imaginary profundity
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and whose mysterious resonance they have tried to clarify."
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And what I ask is wrong with an imaginary profundity.
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And if a resonance is not mysterious,
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what matters, what resounds in it.
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I'll take a forest of symbols any day over the vegetable law,
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and I would rather exchange gazes with a tree than stare at the gorgon's head.
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This other kingdom seems by far the best.
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I mean, the one but there leads us into in his poem,
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"Cuddhist-Pondance," or "correspondences."
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Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes emit confused words.
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Man passes by through forests of symbols,
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which observe him with a familiar gaze, like long echoes
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confounded from a distance in an obscure and deep unity,
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vast as the night or as clarity itself,
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sense, colors, and sounds respond to one another.
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Is nature like a temple?
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No.
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It is a temple.
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Is a temple nature by analogy?
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No.
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Nature is a temple because it's trees or it's columns
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preserve the aboriginal familiarity between things
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that makes analogies possible.
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When things correspond, when sense, colors, and sounds
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respond to one another, they are already
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bound or prebound by kinship.
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In the forest of symbols, living pillars
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observe the observer with a familiar gaze across a distance
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that confounds echoes in an obscure and deep unity,
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as Bodle Goh's on to say in his sonnet,
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when perception undergoes a metamorphosis
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in this transport of the mind and senses,
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things all of a sudden look back at you
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as if in recognition.
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In Robert Muziel's novel, "Young Tourless,"
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the adolescent protagonist tells a friend of his about something
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that happened to him when he was a child.
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I quote, "Once, when I was quite small,
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I was playing in the woods at this time of evening dusk.
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My nurse mate had wandered off somewhere.
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Suddenly, something made me look up.
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I could feel I was alone.
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It was suddenly all so quiet.
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And when I looked around, it was as though the trees
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were standing in a circle around me,
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all silent and looking at me."
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Now that is a symbolic moment.
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A symbol is not a thing.
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It's a conspiracy among things.
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Or better, it's a conspiracy among perceptions.
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A conspiracy to reunify what habitual modes of perception
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differentiate the five senses, for instance,
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or body and mind, or part and whole.
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Robert Muziel's narrator goes on to say about his young
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protagonist, quote, "later, he was to be dominated
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by a peculiar symbolic ability.
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He could not help frequently experiencing events,
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peoples, things, and even himself in such a way
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as to feel that in it all, there was at once some insoluble
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enigma and some inexplicable kinship for which he
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could never quite produce any evidence."
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That's what comes to my mind when I hear the word "symbol,"
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something like a surplus of presence, of meaning,
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or of intensity in things for which one
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cannot produce tangible evidence, but which is palpably there.
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Coleridge says of the symbol that it is,
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"I quote, "characterized by a translucent
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of the special in the individual,
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or of the general in the special, or the universal in the general."
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Whatever that translucent is, one cannot produce any evidence
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of it.
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You either perceive it, or you don't.
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In that sense, it is akin to the Pauline definition of faith,
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namely the substance of things hoped for,
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and the evidence of things unseen.
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It's not by chance that Coleridge's famous definition
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of the symbol, which I just quoted occurs in the context
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of his discussion of the symbolic nature of the Bible.
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There's a copious literature on the nature of the symbol
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from the Greeks to the romantics and beyond.
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Today, on entitled "Pinions," we're
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going to trace some of that history with our guest,
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Nicholas Halme, a professor of English romanticism
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at Oxford University, who is currently visiting here
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at Stanford.
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Nick has recently published a very interesting book
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entitled "The Genealogy of the Romantic Symbol,"
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published by Oxford University Press.
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And I have invited him to speak with us today
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on exactly that topic, the genealogy
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of the romantic symbol.
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Nick, welcome to the program.
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Thank you for inviting me.
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So Nick, we want to devote a good portion of our hour
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talking about the romantic symbol as such,
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but to fully appreciate what the romantics had to say
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about the symbol.
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We need to know something about his genealogy, as you call it.
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So where would you like to begin?
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Well, I think to state that the discussion of the symbol
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is long and very contentious.
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And this partly because the term and the concepts associated
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with the term have had so many different meanings.
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And you've referred to the mysteriousness, the surplus of meaning.
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That characterizes the history of the word itself.
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Umberto Echo is a wonderful moment in his book,
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"Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language," which he
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describes as one of the most pathetic moments in the history
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of philosophical terminology, in which French philosophical
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dictionary first published in 1926,
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and reprinted many times for the next 40 years,
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has an entry under the word "symbal," in which there are three
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mutually exclusive definitions.
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And then more extraordinarily, the collaborators
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on the dictionary, a panda footnote, which is a transcript
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of their own arguments about the definition of the term.
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And in the course of that argument, they
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add a further eight to the three that they've already given
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in the text itself.
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And so anyone who's writing about the word
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has to confront that complex history.
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But I think the origins of the term are fairly clear.
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And in a sense, all of the subsequent meanings
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can be seen to arise from the original sense
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in classical Greece.
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So what are we talking about that original sense
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and try to go forward from there?
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What was the original literal sense?
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Well, the word "symbalone" in Greek,
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"symbal," signified a token of some sort.
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It could have been a fragment of pottery broken
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and a half, a piece of cloth torn in half,
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something of that sort.
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But it was used to signify, to indicate
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the participants in some sort of agreement.
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For example, the contract--
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so the people who participated in this contract
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would have this token which showed that they were both
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the parties to it.
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Or similarly, rights to hospitality,
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the guests and the host would each retain half of this token.
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And so that subsequent generations of the family
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could then present this token.
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And it would ensure their rights to hospitality.
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The point of it was that it made physical and visible
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in a prior agreement.
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So it was implied a kind of separation,
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but a previous connection that enabled
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a reconnection to take place.
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That enabled a reconnection to take place
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when the two pieces of the token, in that case,
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would be brought together again.
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And that's what I guess the etymology of the word "symbalone"
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is in Greeks, is to be thrown together.
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Things are thrown together.
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That's right.
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"symbalone" seemed together, "balline to throw."
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There's a vestige of that ancient concept
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in the practice of tearing a theater
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when you go into a movie theater.
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They tear your ticket in half.
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It's a vestige of that ancient practice.
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But already in the classical period,
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it acquired a literary use, which was related to that--
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were socially functional use.
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And that is, as Omen, you find this, for example,
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when Pinter's Olympian Odes, Aristotle's Finesis,
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play the birds.
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Iskullus's Prometheus on Bound.
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And that is assigned a bird, for example,
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another sign that the gods have given for man to read.
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So was it identical in meaning or connotation to our word "symb?"
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Yes.
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It is a kind of sign.
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That a sign would be the more generic category.
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But it's a kind of sign and it implies a previous agreement
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between gods and man.
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But it also entails an interpretive dimension.
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That is, not everyone can read the sign.
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You have to understand the sign.
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You have to recognize it and learn to read it.
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So in those two ancient usages, one
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as a token of identity or participation in a prior
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agreement, and in this other one, which is as an Omen,
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which we have to learn to read, you have the development,
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the beginnings of what's developed into all the subsequent uses.
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So the notion of contract is essential.
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And I can't help but think of the covenant
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in a different tradition.
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Obviously, the Hebrew tradition there.
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But it does bind two sides to an a common agreement
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or contractual relation.
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Throw them together in that sense.
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Yes.
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So circumcision in the Old Testament
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is a physical sign of the covenant between God and man.
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Or the rainbow is a sign of the covenant of God with man
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after the flood.
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So we have a physical manifestation of an agreement that
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can't itself be manifested physically.
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So when you say that all the subsequent theories and discussions
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of the symbol have an origin in this Greek understanding
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of the word, do you mean primarily this idea of a disconnection
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and an eventual reconnection between two things?
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That's the most basic aspect.
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Yes.
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Separation and a means of overcoming that separation
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by reference to a prior unity.
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But also the hermeneutic dimension, the interpretive dimension
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becomes important and subsequent uses of the sign.
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In subsequent-- and I'll already in the Greek usage
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you're saying that it was already there.
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Yeah, already at a literary usage in 5th century Athens.
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Now in the Christian period, of course,
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the symbol takes on a huge importance
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for in the theological debates, especially
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about the nature of the Godhead and of the relation
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between the three persons of the Trinity
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and the incarnation and so forth.
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And can you say a few words about what happens to the symbol
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when it's taken over by the church fathers
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or theorizing in the context of Christianity?
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Yeah, there's a very rich history in the use of the term
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in theological connections, not only Christian,
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but also pagan neoplateness.
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And those, in fact, get taken over into Christianity
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so that you have mystery cults and a neo-platonic mysticism,
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you have used the symbol to denote.
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On the one hand, signs that God is implanted in man,
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which indicate our connections with us,
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or signs in nature that God is implanted
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that indicate a fundamental and inherent connection
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between us and divinity so that we can return to divinity.
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And on the other hand, we have the interpretive dimension,
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which has taken over already from the ancient Stoics
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who were interpreting Homer, said there are symbols
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in Homer of what turns out to be stoic philosophy.
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And in neoplatonism, similar to the interpretation
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of Greek myths as symbol of symbols.
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And Christianity takes over these senses of the term.
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That's very interesting, because if the Stoics are
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looking at Homer for symbols of what will then be stoic doctrines,
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that means that they were already thinking
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in terms of what the Christian tradition is known
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as a typological interpretation, which
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is one that is historically dynamic where you look at events
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that take place in the past or in the texts that proceed
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and see in them, intimations of or figural
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announce pre-enouncements, pre-ludes of something
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that will then be fully realized later in time.
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And you're saying that the Stoics were already reading Homer
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in this kind of symbolic way.
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You already in Hellenist period.
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So from the 4th century BC to the beginnings
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of the Christian era, there's this practice
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of systematic allegorical interpretation.
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They use the word symbols, but it's fundamentally
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allegorical interpretation, assimilating
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the text of Homer into stoic philosophical tradition.
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OK, because then, of course, the relationship
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between symbol and allegory becomes a very vexed one
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later on.
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But you're saying that in this case,
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it might be allegorical interpretation,
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but they were calling it symbolic interpretation.
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Yes.
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And the distinction between symbol and allegory
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doesn't occur until the end of the 18th century.
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So the ancients made no such distinction.
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But the idea was that you take something
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that's of immense cultural importance,
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the Greek, mess, scriptural text.
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And you incorporate them into your own ideological
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or theological philosophical context.
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And the argument is that you're discovering things
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that are already inherently there.
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Correct.
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And therefore, there is some way in which the literal meaning
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of the text is not excluded or repudiated,
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but it just acquires a surplus meaning
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or kind of extra supplemental or fulfilled meaning,
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in a fuller meaning by events that occur later in time.
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Is that correct?
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Yeah.
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And so it's not merely a subjective interpretation.
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The assumption is that these are objectively present.
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They've been placed there.
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They've been divinely instituted.
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And of course, in the Christian tradition,
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the typological reading of what
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used to be called the Old Testament as an archive of figures
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for events and characters in the Christian era,
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which would be the fulfillment of these hour back
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is very famous for this theory of the Figuudana.
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And yet, of course, we don't typically
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associate that with the word symbol.
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At least I don't insofar as other words
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have been used for, type, figure, allegory.
|
| 00:18:18.760 |
And is there something more specific about the use
|
| 00:18:23.360 |
of the word symbol on in the Christian theology?
|
| 00:18:26.960 |
Because I would imagine that it's the relationship
|
| 00:18:29.000 |
between the first person of the Trinity
|
| 00:18:31.880 |
and the second person of the God and the Son.
|
| 00:18:36.840 |
That would be-- that's the symbol of some kind of unity
|
| 00:18:40.520 |
that is also separate, but then promises a reunification
|
| 00:18:45.400 |
maybe at the end of time with the last judgment and so forth.
|
| 00:18:50.080 |
The typological sense is really a Protestant reading above all.
|
| 00:18:57.000 |
So it comes into use later.
|
| 00:18:58.840 |
But already in the fifth, sixth, sixth centuries,
|
| 00:19:02.280 |
AD, Christian interpreters are using it in a way that's not
|
| 00:19:06.200 |
unlike the original use that is to signify relation
|
| 00:19:10.000 |
of a membership of a group, a party to a prior agreement,
|
| 00:19:16.880 |
those who are entitled to salvation.
|
| 00:19:19.080 |
And it's used in the sense of the creed.
|
| 00:19:21.800 |
That is a profession of faith.
|
| 00:19:23.800 |
So the Latin word symbol on means primarily
|
| 00:19:27.080 |
profession of faith.
|
| 00:19:28.000 |
I believe in the one go on and so on.
|
| 00:19:30.560 |
So that's one sense in which it's used.
|
| 00:19:33.160 |
Another is in the mediation between God and man.
|
| 00:19:38.400 |
And this is allied with the Neoplatonic sense
|
| 00:19:40.720 |
that God has implanted these symbols of us,
|
| 00:19:43.200 |
which we can recall.
|
| 00:19:45.240 |
In the pagan tradition, it was through mystical incantations
|
| 00:19:49.440 |
of some sort.
|
| 00:19:50.600 |
In the Christian tradition, it's through the sacraments.
|
| 00:19:54.240 |
And so the Eucharist becomes a primary example of that.
|
| 00:19:58.320 |
That there is this connection, this symbolic relation
|
| 00:20:02.600 |
between God and man that Christ himself is instituted.
|
| 00:20:06.640 |
And we richly repeat.
|
| 00:20:09.840 |
So is a symbol and a sacrament, if not identical,
|
| 00:20:15.240 |
then very, very close in meaning in the Christian tradition?
|
| 00:20:19.040 |
In early Christian tradition, yes.
|
| 00:20:20.960 |
In the Protestant tradition, symbol
|
| 00:20:23.320 |
comes to mean something different.
|
| 00:20:24.800 |
Correct.
|
| 00:20:25.600 |
But, and it has a primarily negative connotation.
|
| 00:20:28.560 |
It means merely symbolic, merely a signifier
|
| 00:20:32.000 |
of the arbitrary, not to be taken substantially.
|
| 00:20:35.040 |
Because this is a great debate with the Protestant revolution
|
| 00:20:40.600 |
about what the status of the Eucharist is.
|
| 00:20:43.200 |
Is it the real body of Christ?
|
| 00:20:45.320 |
Or is it just a symbolic namely?
|
| 00:20:47.280 |
Is it just a sign of the body of Christ?
|
| 00:20:49.280 |
But that the real presence of Christ is not in the Eucharist.
|
| 00:20:53.640 |
It's just a symbol in the denigrated sense of the word symbol,
|
| 00:20:59.120 |
right?
|
| 00:20:59.640 |
Yes.
|
| 00:21:00.400 |
And in the Catholic tradition, it's the inherent presence,
|
| 00:21:03.760 |
the transformation of the bread and the wine
|
| 00:21:07.200 |
into the body and blood of Christ.
|
| 00:21:09.240 |
That's so important.
|
| 00:21:10.120 |
So there is that inherent connection
|
| 00:21:12.120 |
between the physical presence of the objects of the Eucharist
|
| 00:21:17.280 |
and the divine presence.
|
| 00:21:19.000 |
Protestant tradition then tries to minimize that.
|
| 00:21:22.400 |
And I will never, for the life of me, understand
|
| 00:21:24.440 |
why the Protestants would want
|
| 00:21:26.600 |
to get rid of the inherent presence of something
|
| 00:21:29.280 |
in the sacramental sense and why they would want to impoverish
|
| 00:21:33.640 |
the whole community through this symbolization
|
| 00:21:37.000 |
in the bad sense of the term.
|
| 00:21:39.800 |
But we'll leave that aside.
|
| 00:21:42.320 |
I haven't grown up in a Catholic tradition.
|
| 00:21:46.440 |
Why settle for a sign of the thing
|
| 00:21:48.600 |
when you can have the thing itself in its substance?
|
| 00:21:51.720 |
And I guess maybe it's vestiges of this upbringing
|
| 00:21:55.680 |
in my mind, which makes me so favorably disposed and partial
|
| 00:21:59.880 |
to this kind of rather slightly mystical understanding
|
| 00:22:03.520 |
of this symbol in the romantic period.
|
| 00:22:06.400 |
Well, I think the Protestants
|
| 00:22:07.600 |
distrusted the ritual of it.
|
| 00:22:09.640 |
And they emphasized a subjective understanding of faith
|
| 00:22:14.320 |
so that the profession of one's faith
|
| 00:22:17.880 |
becomes more important than the performance of the ritual,
|
| 00:22:20.680 |
which is needed to enact the mediation between God and man.
|
| 00:22:24.880 |
Yeah, but then it becomes a very brainy thing that is
|
| 00:22:27.200 |
using where the understanding is privileged as the medium
|
| 00:22:32.000 |
of access to God.
|
| 00:22:33.120 |
And it seems that the whole doctrine of the incarnation
|
| 00:22:41.520 |
is one in which if the divine has become human
|
| 00:22:46.920 |
or has taken on human flesh, a very ambiguous word
|
| 00:22:53.040 |
to be sure, the psalm out or the sark in Greek,
|
| 00:22:56.760 |
the-- it does seem to indicate that there's
|
| 00:23:00.640 |
some kind of sacralization of the material thing
|
| 00:23:04.960 |
that Jesus has become, which is the body.
|
| 00:23:08.760 |
And therefore, the body, if we're understanding it
|
| 00:23:12.720 |
in an expansive sense, it's where it's all happening,
|
| 00:23:15.440 |
not so much in the understanding and the interpretation.
|
| 00:23:18.280 |
And I mean, to relate to God strictly
|
| 00:23:20.560 |
through your intellect seems to me of one that takes--
|
| 00:23:28.880 |
it makes the arena of that relation much more abstract
|
| 00:23:33.240 |
and takes it in some sense out of the world that we dwell in.
|
| 00:23:36.880 |
Whereas for me, what appeals to me in a kind
|
| 00:23:41.480 |
of idealized Catholic notion is a constant attempt
|
| 00:23:46.680 |
to resacralize the world of the body and nature
|
| 00:23:55.520 |
and general, but the material as such.
|
| 00:23:57.440 |
So that we no longer see it as material,
|
| 00:23:58.920 |
but we see it as charismatic and self-transcendent.
|
| 00:24:03.520 |
And it's the assurance.
|
| 00:24:05.200 |
It's the empirical assurance of the divine presence.
|
| 00:24:09.040 |
Because in our fallen state, we don't have other assurance
|
| 00:24:12.600 |
of that.
|
| 00:24:14.520 |
And that's why it's a difficult issue for the Protestants
|
| 00:24:17.960 |
themselves.
|
| 00:24:18.960 |
I mean, Luther, for example, does not deny the real presence
|
| 00:24:22.160 |
of Christ in the bread and wine.
|
| 00:24:25.760 |
He just wants to explain it in a different way
|
| 00:24:29.800 |
from the Catholic tradition.
|
| 00:24:31.800 |
So that it doesn't--
|
| 00:24:33.480 |
bread and wine don't become completely transformed
|
| 00:24:36.000 |
into the body of Christ.
|
| 00:24:37.240 |
They coexist as bread and wine with the body and blood.
|
| 00:24:42.800 |
Whereas other reformers like sing, Leanne Calvin
|
| 00:24:46.160 |
were much more hostile to the notion of the real presence.
|
| 00:24:49.720 |
Well, obviously, a lot more to be said about the Christian
|
| 00:24:54.200 |
chapters of this genealogy that you deal with in your book.
|
| 00:24:58.120 |
And you have a lot more to say about that, obviously.
|
| 00:25:00.040 |
So I will refer our listeners to your book,
|
| 00:25:02.680 |
the genealogy of the romantic symbol
|
| 00:25:05.480 |
for a deeper discussion of the Christian.
|
| 00:25:07.960 |
But I think if we could kind of take the jump
|
| 00:25:10.720 |
into the romantic period, it's a big leap, I understand.
|
| 00:25:13.600 |
But it's not that big a leap because I gather that the primary
|
| 00:25:18.480 |
theorists of the symbol in the romantic period
|
| 00:25:24.400 |
have inherited the Christian understanding of the symbol.
|
| 00:25:29.240 |
To an extent-- and this was a controversial issue--
|
| 00:25:32.720 |
some people argue that they take over Protestant notions
|
| 00:25:36.200 |
of the Eucharist.
|
| 00:25:37.360 |
And that seems to me fundamentally incorrect.
|
| 00:25:40.320 |
Because for exactly the reason that you said
|
| 00:25:42.840 |
that the Protestant notions insofar as they minimize
|
| 00:25:46.520 |
the idea of the real presence reduce the Eucharist
|
| 00:25:50.160 |
to mere token and not a substantial token
|
| 00:25:54.000 |
of the divine presence.
|
| 00:25:56.320 |
Disenchant the world.
|
| 00:25:57.960 |
They reduce the significance of the physical
|
| 00:26:01.000 |
in its connection to divinity.
|
| 00:26:03.080 |
And you look at what the German or Antics in particular say.
|
| 00:26:06.560 |
They write about the Protestant Reformation
|
| 00:26:09.560 |
with Dizme, the German philosopher Friedrich Schallen, for example,
|
| 00:26:14.600 |
says it was historically necessary,
|
| 00:26:16.760 |
but it was unfortunate.
|
| 00:26:19.080 |
And it deprives us precisely of symbolism and mythology.
|
| 00:26:24.080 |
Who are the primary German theorists of the symbol
|
| 00:26:26.760 |
in this period?
|
| 00:26:28.560 |
Well, the first and foremost is good,
|
| 00:26:32.600 |
although in German literary criticism,
|
| 00:26:35.120 |
he's not usually considered a romantic.
|
| 00:26:37.800 |
In this context, he is an agreement with them.
|
| 00:26:40.840 |
And he and Friedrich Schallen, he and Friedrich Schallen
|
| 00:26:44.120 |
were in close communication between 1798 and 1803.
|
| 00:26:48.520 |
Gerta develops the idea of the symbol in its romantic form.
|
| 00:26:53.720 |
He's the one who first distinguishes it from Allegore
|
| 00:26:56.400 |
in 1797-98.
|
| 00:26:58.800 |
Then he passes this distinction onto Schallen,
|
| 00:27:01.680 |
and Schallen teaches it in his lectures
|
| 00:27:03.760 |
at the University of Jainum.
|
| 00:27:06.600 |
And then it gets transferred one way or another over to Samuel Taylor
|
| 00:27:11.280 |
Coleridge, whom you quoted at the beginning.
|
| 00:27:13.760 |
Great.
|
| 00:27:14.040 |
Well, I have a quote from Gerta, actually, that if you don't mind
|
| 00:27:17.800 |
Al Rieder because it does refer precisely
|
| 00:27:20.080 |
the distinction between allegore and symbol.
|
| 00:27:22.000 |
And maybe you can unpack what Gerta is saying in this passage,
|
| 00:27:26.040 |
which I'm actually getting from one of these glossaries
|
| 00:27:28.760 |
that I have on my shelf.
|
| 00:27:31.400 |
So Gerta writes, there is a great difference
|
| 00:27:33.640 |
whether the poet seeks the particular for the sake of the general
|
| 00:27:38.400 |
or sees the general in the particular.
|
| 00:27:42.360 |
From the former procedure, there ensues allegory
|
| 00:27:46.200 |
in which the particular serves only as illustration
|
| 00:27:50.600 |
as example of the general.
|
| 00:27:52.960 |
The latter procedure, however, is genuinely
|
| 00:27:56.000 |
the nature of poetry.
|
| 00:27:57.200 |
It expresses something particular
|
| 00:27:59.520 |
without thinking of the general or pointing to it.
|
| 00:28:02.600 |
Allegory transforms the phenomenon into a concept,
|
| 00:28:07.440 |
the concept into an image, but in such a way
|
| 00:28:11.360 |
that the concept always remains bounded in the image
|
| 00:28:15.040 |
and is entirely to be kept and held in it
|
| 00:28:17.640 |
and to be expressed in it, the image.
|
| 00:28:20.520 |
Symbolism, however, transforms the phenomenon into idea,
|
| 00:28:25.320 |
the idea into an image, and in such a way
|
| 00:28:29.240 |
that the idea remains always infinitely active
|
| 00:28:33.080 |
and unapproachable in the image
|
| 00:28:36.880 |
and even if expressed in all languages
|
| 00:28:39.440 |
still would remain inexpressible.
|
| 00:28:42.200 |
So first question, is allegory to be understood
|
| 00:28:49.840 |
as a one-to-one correlation between two different orders
|
| 00:28:53.400 |
of signification?
|
| 00:28:57.680 |
That's how the romantic's understood it.
|
| 00:28:59.640 |
It was fundamentally in 18th century now,
|
| 00:29:01.800 |
Shneb allegory, which you have a literal meaning
|
| 00:29:04.120 |
that points continuously and obviously
|
| 00:29:08.200 |
to a figurative level of meaning.
|
| 00:29:10.120 |
And the figurative is always more significant.
|
| 00:29:14.040 |
The literal is always subordinate to the figurative.
|
| 00:29:17.080 |
So it implies a very strict and rather reductive parallelism.
|
| 00:29:22.080 |
Right, and I don't want a backtrack here,
|
| 00:29:24.200 |
but Dante has a distinction between what he called
|
| 00:29:26.440 |
the allegory of the theologians and the allegory of the poets,
|
| 00:29:29.840 |
where he says the allegory of the poets
|
| 00:29:32.240 |
is the one that you just described.
|
| 00:29:34.160 |
So the romance of the rose is an allegory
|
| 00:29:37.160 |
for a kind of sexual erotic object or something.
|
| 00:29:39.920 |
Whereas the allegory of the theologians is the Old Testament
|
| 00:29:43.400 |
where there is an exodus, a literal exodus,
|
| 00:29:46.800 |
historically true event, but it also has a higher order
|
| 00:29:51.200 |
of meaning, but the literal and the figurative
|
| 00:29:53.680 |
are still bound together.
|
| 00:29:56.360 |
So I guess here, a good day speaking about the allegory
|
| 00:29:58.840 |
as the allegory of the poets, what Dante would call it.
|
| 00:30:01.480 |
But when he speaks about the symbol, what do you make
|
| 00:30:05.600 |
of this idea that it transforms a phenomenon into an idea
|
| 00:30:09.240 |
rather than into a concept and then that there's something
|
| 00:30:12.880 |
always inexpressible and underproachable in the symbol?
|
| 00:30:17.480 |
Yeah, he's articulating what becomes a central aspect
|
| 00:30:21.360 |
of romantic symbol of theory.
|
| 00:30:23.280 |
And that is, it's irreducibility to concepts.
|
| 00:30:26.520 |
It's uninterpretability.
|
| 00:30:28.240 |
It's pure meaningfulness rather than any collection
|
| 00:30:33.840 |
of particular meanings.
|
| 00:30:35.040 |
And it can't be interpreted.
|
| 00:30:38.280 |
And I think it's reflective of a desire
|
| 00:30:40.680 |
to discover meaningfulness precisely
|
| 00:30:42.880 |
where it's absent, where it's not intuitively present.
|
| 00:30:46.360 |
Gerrit has distinction between symbol and allegory
|
| 00:30:49.320 |
as I think been very unfortunate.
|
| 00:30:52.320 |
Both for our understanding of the romantics themselves
|
| 00:30:55.560 |
and for subsequent literary theory.
|
| 00:30:57.960 |
And it's been a vaccine problem ever since.
|
| 00:31:00.440 |
Of course, we have romantics themselves blame for it.
|
| 00:31:03.480 |
But it implies that these are two poetic modes
|
| 00:31:07.640 |
that are being contrasted.
|
| 00:31:10.200 |
And that really wasn't the case.
|
| 00:31:13.120 |
Gerrit also says of the symbol, everything
|
| 00:31:15.760 |
can be a symbol of something else.
|
| 00:31:19.920 |
And by pointing to itself points to everything else.
|
| 00:31:23.880 |
And he uses the term not just in literary context.
|
| 00:31:27.400 |
In fact, primarily not in literary context,
|
| 00:31:29.960 |
but in natural philosophical context,
|
| 00:31:32.600 |
is understanding of nature.
|
| 00:31:34.480 |
But he contrasts it with allegory, which
|
| 00:31:36.600 |
was understood at the time to be a literary mode.
|
| 00:31:39.520 |
And it creates-- it's a false comparison.
|
| 00:31:42.160 |
And I think, as I said, he's been most unfortunate
|
| 00:31:44.680 |
for the understanding of the term in the romantic period
|
| 00:31:48.520 |
itself.
|
| 00:31:50.600 |
It probably has a negative stimulus
|
| 00:31:52.600 |
from enlightenment semiotics, which makes
|
| 00:31:54.840 |
a rigorous distinction between signs and their meanings
|
| 00:31:58.160 |
and implies the dualism of the physical marker
|
| 00:32:02.000 |
and its abstract meaning.
|
| 00:32:03.920 |
Allegory is the literal-- in the 18th century,
|
| 00:32:06.600 |
that is, is the literary manifestation
|
| 00:32:09.160 |
of that idea of an artificial sign.
|
| 00:32:11.920 |
And so Gerrit who wants to posit a kind of representation
|
| 00:32:15.640 |
that isn't arbitrary, isn't motivated,
|
| 00:32:18.640 |
and isn't simply reducible to abstract concepts.
|
| 00:32:23.720 |
Well, Gerrit was also highly committed
|
| 00:32:28.080 |
to the study of nature and committed
|
| 00:32:31.720 |
to the notion of organic forms, where the reduction
|
| 00:32:35.040 |
to the part and the whole in an organism or in a plant
|
| 00:32:39.280 |
was crucial.
|
| 00:32:40.360 |
Did his concept of the symbol have something
|
| 00:32:43.080 |
to do with his understanding of organic form
|
| 00:32:46.040 |
in terms of the inseparability of the part from the whole
|
| 00:32:50.640 |
and vice versa?
|
| 00:32:51.680 |
It had everything to do with it.
|
| 00:32:53.920 |
The concept of the symbol is founded on an organic philosophy
|
| 00:32:58.000 |
of nature, and it's no accident that Gerrit
|
| 00:33:00.560 |
comes to the idea of the symbol after his trip to Italy
|
| 00:33:05.080 |
when he is looking at-- he's studying botany,
|
| 00:33:09.520 |
and he wants to find an original plant form
|
| 00:33:11.880 |
that manifests itself in all subsequent platforms.
|
| 00:33:15.640 |
And then that expands to an original phenomenon in nature
|
| 00:33:19.200 |
that then can be found manifested somehow
|
| 00:33:23.280 |
in all subsequent stages of development in an organism.
|
| 00:33:28.680 |
The orphan--
|
| 00:33:29.800 |
The orphan--
|
| 00:33:30.480 |
Does he find such an orphan phenomenon in Italy?
|
| 00:33:35.000 |
Well, he begins to articulate the theory of the symbol
|
| 00:33:38.760 |
precisely because he doesn't find the original plant,
|
| 00:33:42.480 |
the orb flaunts, the originary plant.
|
| 00:33:44.800 |
He looks for it, and then he concludes when he's
|
| 00:33:46.640 |
in the botanic garden in Palermo
|
| 00:33:48.920 |
that it isn't going to be found as such,
|
| 00:33:51.800 |
and he needs to rethink its relation,
|
| 00:33:54.560 |
and he begins to rethink it in developmental terms.
|
| 00:33:57.480 |
And then that's when the idea of the orb plant
|
| 00:34:00.680 |
becomes the orb phenomenon, and it becomes
|
| 00:34:03.520 |
the basis of a much more comprehensive organic theory
|
| 00:34:07.360 |
which he then discusses with shelling
|
| 00:34:09.280 |
and becomes the basis of shelling's own natural philosophy.
|
| 00:34:12.800 |
But really, the idea of the symbol for shelling
|
| 00:34:15.960 |
and for good is that of the organism itself.
|
| 00:34:20.480 |
How much of their concept of the symbol
|
| 00:34:23.520 |
has to do with the phenomenon?
|
| 00:34:26.160 |
In other words, manifestation, something
|
| 00:34:28.320 |
that comes into the realm of appearance,
|
| 00:34:30.840 |
and in so doing brings into appearance,
|
| 00:34:35.880 |
something that Kant might have referred to as the numinal.
|
| 00:34:42.080 |
Well, it's exactly that.
|
| 00:34:44.440 |
Because and Kant himself had anticipated this,
|
| 00:34:47.080 |
not with the use of the word symbol,
|
| 00:34:48.800 |
but with what he called an aesthetic idea.
|
| 00:34:51.160 |
And then he said metaphysical ideas of reason,
|
| 00:34:55.000 |
immortality of the soul, other ideas
|
| 00:35:00.680 |
can't be known empirically.
|
| 00:35:02.080 |
They're not objects of knowledge,
|
| 00:35:03.640 |
and yet they have to be the basis for our morality.
|
| 00:35:07.120 |
And yet we wish that there was some empirical manifestation
|
| 00:35:11.160 |
of these ideas.
|
| 00:35:12.320 |
Kant called this the aesthetic idea.
|
| 00:35:15.800 |
But because the premises of his philosophy
|
| 00:35:18.960 |
were so resolutely dualist, he couldn't actually
|
| 00:35:22.320 |
explain how this might occur.
|
| 00:35:24.400 |
The idea of the symbol is an attempt to explain
|
| 00:35:27.080 |
how that will occur, how the numinal becomes phenomenal.
|
| 00:35:31.400 |
Well, here, let's go into the naughty issues, Nick,
|
| 00:35:35.680 |
if you don't mind, because there was one thing
|
| 00:35:37.520 |
that you said earlier when you were characterizing good
|
| 00:35:39.560 |
this thing of the symbol, which for me sounded
|
| 00:35:42.800 |
a little bit dissonant because you said that there
|
| 00:35:45.360 |
is this symbol serves to at least promise a kind of surplus
|
| 00:35:51.800 |
of meaning that it was a kind of ultimately very
|
| 00:35:54.840 |
meaningful thing where something is not intuitively present.
|
| 00:35:59.880 |
Now, I understand that in Kantian terms,
|
| 00:36:04.560 |
where he says that there can be a lack of intuition
|
| 00:36:07.760 |
for certain concepts, and therefore those concepts remain
|
| 00:36:11.360 |
basically incomplete.
|
| 00:36:15.560 |
But I would imagine that you can look at it in a different way,
|
| 00:36:21.080 |
which is that the romantic--
|
| 00:36:24.040 |
English romantic pose could see that there's
|
| 00:36:27.240 |
such a surplus of things given in intuition.
|
| 00:36:33.800 |
And in the immediate perception and experience of phenomena,
|
| 00:36:38.720 |
but that it's precisely the inadequacy of our ideas
|
| 00:36:41.960 |
or of our concepts to contain them.
|
| 00:36:43.880 |
This is what the contemporary philosopher
|
| 00:36:47.200 |
and theologian Jean-Luc Marjean
|
| 00:36:49.320 |
calls the saturated phenomenon, that the phenomenon
|
| 00:36:53.280 |
is so saturated with a kind of intuitive surplus
|
| 00:36:58.280 |
that it's in excess of the apparatus of intentionality
|
| 00:37:02.760 |
and subjectivity to actually contain it.
|
| 00:37:04.480 |
And therefore, that would be the unapproachability
|
| 00:37:09.000 |
of the inexpressibility and excess rather than a deficiency
|
| 00:37:13.040 |
of intuition and intuitional givenness.
|
| 00:37:16.520 |
You use the word subjectivity now,
|
| 00:37:18.160 |
and that's exactly the issue because the romantic
|
| 00:37:22.560 |
wanted to posit a symbolism that was precisely not subjective
|
| 00:37:27.720 |
and couldn't be identified as intentional.
|
| 00:37:30.800 |
And that's why there is so sparing of examples
|
| 00:37:33.280 |
when it came to literary discussion of the symbolic.
|
| 00:37:37.800 |
And even in the discussion of natural examples,
|
| 00:37:40.760 |
they were much more interested in developing a theory of it
|
| 00:37:45.120 |
in order to condition our perception of elements
|
| 00:37:48.200 |
than they were of stating what symbols were in nature,
|
| 00:37:53.040 |
which objects were symbolic, which were not
|
| 00:37:55.000 |
how they were symbolic, and so on.
|
| 00:37:57.160 |
So it was in the absence of an ability
|
| 00:38:00.360 |
to see that excess of meaning that they
|
| 00:38:02.640 |
were developing the theory of the symbol in order to.
|
| 00:38:06.000 |
And in order to protect themselves from the charge
|
| 00:38:09.280 |
that this is merely meaning that's being imparted to
|
| 00:38:12.000 |
an object subjectively.
|
| 00:38:15.520 |
In his lectures on the philosophy of art,
|
| 00:38:18.120 |
shelling in 1802, 1803, addresses exactly this problem.
|
| 00:38:23.520 |
And he says, if any intention can be glimpsed in its meaningfulness,
|
| 00:38:28.360 |
the object itself is annihilated for us.
|
| 00:38:32.920 |
What's he mean by that?
|
| 00:38:34.600 |
That means that if we perceive a human intention
|
| 00:38:39.760 |
to lie behind the choice of an object as symbolic,
|
| 00:38:43.240 |
if we recognize it as subjectively created,
|
| 00:38:47.800 |
it no longer functions as symbolic for us.
|
| 00:38:51.240 |
It has to appear objectively present.
|
| 00:38:54.280 |
And that's why it had this foundation,
|
| 00:38:56.600 |
at least in romantic theory, of metaphysics of participation.
|
| 00:39:00.760 |
You spoke of a relation of parts and whole.
|
| 00:39:03.040 |
The idea is that in an organism, we are all parts of a larger
|
| 00:39:07.320 |
whole.
|
| 00:39:07.880 |
We can be understood only in relation to that whole.
|
| 00:39:10.640 |
Exactly the same thing applies in the theory of the symbol.
|
| 00:39:14.600 |
That the symbol is an ontological part.
|
| 00:39:18.440 |
It's an essential part of what it represents.
|
| 00:39:21.640 |
And Coleridge, for example, says this.
|
| 00:39:23.800 |
In the same work where you, from which you quoted,
|
| 00:39:26.840 |
is a discussion of the Bible, the statesman's manual of 1816.
|
| 00:39:31.560 |
He says, by a symbol, I mean not a metaphor or an allegory
|
| 00:39:36.160 |
or any other figure of speech.
|
| 00:39:37.920 |
So he's rejecting rhetoric altogether.
|
| 00:39:40.240 |
But an actual and essential part of that, the whole of which it
|
| 00:39:44.720 |
represents.
|
| 00:39:46.400 |
Yes.
|
| 00:39:46.760 |
And he, in the quote I read, which is not what you just read,
|
| 00:39:51.000 |
he does go on to say the symbol always partakes of the reality,
|
| 00:39:55.520 |
which it renders intelligible and which--
|
| 00:39:58.280 |
and while it enunciates the whole,
|
| 00:39:59.840 |
abides itself as a living part of that unity of which it is
|
| 00:40:03.800 |
the representative.
|
| 00:40:04.920 |
Exactly.
|
| 00:40:06.240 |
So there's an appeal to an inherent connection
|
| 00:40:09.440 |
between the symbol and its meaning.
|
| 00:40:12.280 |
And this is fundamentally metaphysical assertion.
|
| 00:40:16.160 |
So yeah, but yeah, I guess you're going to have to persuade me
|
| 00:40:20.000 |
that all the burden falls on meaning and metaphysical
|
| 00:40:24.080 |
representation, because if I read again that translucent
|
| 00:40:28.000 |
of the special in the particular--
|
| 00:40:30.160 |
let's say the species in the particular--
|
| 00:40:31.800 |
or the genus in the species and the universal in it,
|
| 00:40:36.200 |
why can I not say that in a plant that I see phenomenally,
|
| 00:40:44.000 |
there's a translucence of something that's more,
|
| 00:40:46.880 |
that does evoke its species, its genus, its biotic matter
|
| 00:40:55.800 |
in general?
|
| 00:40:56.960 |
Or let me shift the rules of the discourse.
|
| 00:41:02.000 |
Ezra Pound rewrites a poem in a persona
|
| 00:41:04.560 |
where he tells a woman in a voice, "I could not love the half so much.
|
| 00:41:10.880 |
Did I not love woman kind more?"
|
| 00:41:15.840 |
So if you take the particular woman there,
|
| 00:41:18.120 |
you say that what is loved is not that you're
|
| 00:41:21.720 |
loving woman kind and that the woman is just a particular kind
|
| 00:41:28.080 |
of access to the general.
|
| 00:41:29.640 |
But in the individual and in the particular,
|
| 00:41:34.480 |
there is a surplus which is intuitively given, not as meaning,
|
| 00:41:38.680 |
but as presence.
|
| 00:41:40.760 |
I guess we're going back to that same issue that--
|
| 00:41:45.880 |
in other words, does it have to always translate into idea?
|
| 00:41:49.280 |
I know that Goethe insists on the presence of the idea,
|
| 00:41:52.040 |
but can there not be something phenomenally given,
|
| 00:41:55.200 |
even in the intuitive mode, that points to the surplus?
|
| 00:42:02.920 |
And which therefore suffuses the phenomenon
|
| 00:42:08.680 |
with its own sort of phenomenological access?
|
| 00:42:14.080 |
It comes back to the question of subjectivity, though.
|
| 00:42:17.120 |
And as her Pound's case, you have to have an idea of what
|
| 00:42:20.200 |
woman kind is before you can make a kind of statement of that.
|
| 00:42:23.400 |
In other words, to recognize a part of something
|
| 00:42:25.960 |
as a part of something, you already
|
| 00:42:27.960 |
have to have an ocean of the whole.
|
| 00:42:29.880 |
And this goes back to the very ancient roots of the word
|
| 00:42:33.120 |
that there's this prior agreement which
|
| 00:42:35.560 |
makes the token of identity, of participation,
|
| 00:42:40.040 |
and the agreement comprehensible.
|
| 00:42:42.360 |
And what the rheumatics are trying to do
|
| 00:42:43.840 |
is lay down the philosophical foundations
|
| 00:42:46.760 |
that will provide that basis for seeing nature as symbolic.
|
| 00:42:51.600 |
There's a wonderful passage in a notebook of colorages,
|
| 00:42:55.320 |
in 1805, in which he's looking out
|
| 00:42:59.480 |
at the window, and he's in Malta at the time.
|
| 00:43:03.640 |
And he says, "I seem rather to be seeking as it
|
| 00:43:06.440 |
were asking a symbolical language for something within me
|
| 00:43:10.080 |
that already and forever exists than observing anything new."
|
| 00:43:15.400 |
Yet still, I always have an obscure feeling
|
| 00:43:18.200 |
as if a new phenomenon where the dim awakening of a forgotten
|
| 00:43:21.920 |
or hidden truth in my inner nature,
|
| 00:43:24.840 |
it's interesting as a word, a symbol,
|
| 00:43:27.640 |
which is logos, the creator, but that asking, seeking,
|
| 00:43:31.320 |
as it were asking for a meaning is exactly.
|
| 00:43:35.240 |
I think what is needed, before he can find the symbol,
|
| 00:43:38.280 |
he needs the assurance that there's something
|
| 00:43:40.800 |
it can be a symbol of.
|
| 00:43:42.600 |
And so you need a metaphysics that will help explain that.
|
| 00:43:45.640 |
I think that's what the rheumatics were trying to do.
|
| 00:43:48.240 |
And that's why I don't think they're
|
| 00:43:49.720 |
able to describe it in the symbol as they theorize it
|
| 00:43:54.720 |
in actual literary works, because it
|
| 00:43:56.960 |
wasn't yet present to them.
|
| 00:43:59.560 |
And they hadn't solved the question
|
| 00:44:01.440 |
of how you can create a literary work that
|
| 00:44:03.280 |
isn't risk the charge of merely being a subjective use
|
| 00:44:06.760 |
of a symbol.
|
| 00:44:08.080 |
The example that Shelley always falls back on
|
| 00:44:10.840 |
is that of mythology.
|
| 00:44:12.560 |
The figures of Greek mythology.
|
| 00:44:16.280 |
Of the gods?
|
| 00:44:17.120 |
Of the gods, exactly.
|
| 00:44:18.480 |
Why?
|
| 00:44:18.840 |
Because they've always existed.
|
| 00:44:21.800 |
No individual created them.
|
| 00:44:24.120 |
And so he formulates the project of a new mythology.
|
| 00:44:27.200 |
And he says, well, now we're going to create a new mythology
|
| 00:44:30.440 |
modeled on the old, but serving the needs of the new.
|
| 00:44:33.440 |
This will be the repository of the new symbolism.
|
| 00:44:36.840 |
But you can't create a philosophical mythology out
|
| 00:44:40.320 |
of nothing.
|
| 00:44:40.960 |
And so the project remains merely theoretical.
|
| 00:44:44.400 |
Well, this is a strong claim in your book
|
| 00:44:46.160 |
that the symbol in the way the rheumatics theorize it
|
| 00:44:50.440 |
does not exist, or they cannot produce any evidence for it,
|
| 00:44:53.560 |
or it's more of a doom to remain in the realm of theory
|
| 00:45:00.000 |
rather than in the world.
|
| 00:45:02.120 |
And you say that if it were to exist,
|
| 00:45:05.120 |
it would not refer to things or symbols in poems.
|
| 00:45:09.480 |
It would require a complete alteration
|
| 00:45:11.800 |
of one's modes of perception in order to have access to it.
|
| 00:45:15.720 |
And that appeals to me a great deal,
|
| 00:45:17.280 |
because first it reminds me of Blake, who put a lot of emphasis
|
| 00:45:24.480 |
on perception, and trying to--
|
| 00:45:27.760 |
when he says, when the doors of perception are cleanse,
|
| 00:45:31.240 |
the world will appear as it is infinite.
|
| 00:45:34.680 |
So it's not that the world is not over abundantly sacred
|
| 00:45:41.520 |
or the modes of perception have to be cleansed.
|
| 00:45:47.760 |
And I think that in Shelley's defensive poetry, which I had
|
| 00:45:52.680 |
occasion to reread because when I read about your book
|
| 00:45:55.520 |
on the Amazon page that you are calling for--
|
| 00:45:59.560 |
lifting the veil of familiarity on our concept
|
| 00:46:02.400 |
of the romantic symbol, the way Shelley calls for lifting
|
| 00:46:06.800 |
that poetry should strip the veil of familiarity
|
| 00:46:09.560 |
from the world.
|
| 00:46:11.280 |
Now, why can the symbol not be that which appears
|
| 00:46:16.200 |
or is rendered manifest or brought out of unconcealment
|
| 00:46:20.920 |
to use a high-to-garian term for it?
|
| 00:46:23.680 |
In that moment, when you strip the veil of familiarity
|
| 00:46:27.720 |
from the world?
|
| 00:46:30.640 |
Well, I think it's that it's significant that Shelley is saying
|
| 00:46:34.240 |
that we need to do that.
|
| 00:46:35.600 |
And we need to do that because we're not doing that already.
|
| 00:46:38.600 |
It's the declarative act that I find fascinating.
|
| 00:46:42.520 |
And for me, that's what signals that this is not an actual
|
| 00:46:45.520 |
object that they are finding in nature or in poetry or anywhere
|
| 00:46:49.320 |
else, that they are articulating the desire to find it.
|
| 00:46:53.360 |
It's the declarative act.
|
| 00:46:55.640 |
It's the act of instituting the symbols they want to find.
|
| 00:46:58.680 |
And that's still there in Baudelaire's correspondence.
|
| 00:47:01.840 |
It's not that they're merely the symbols.
|
| 00:47:05.000 |
It's that he's articulating there as a forest of symbols.
|
| 00:47:07.880 |
He has to tell us as a forest of symbols.
|
| 00:47:10.080 |
It's not intuitively evident.
|
| 00:47:12.120 |
Now, there's a parallel between the poetic project
|
| 00:47:14.960 |
of Shelley, words, words, and others.
|
| 00:47:17.080 |
And it exists exactly in that desire to reform perception.
|
| 00:47:21.840 |
The romantic theorists of the symbol are doing it in
|
| 00:47:23.920 |
theoretical terms.
|
| 00:47:25.400 |
Shelley, words, words, and others want to do it in practical,
|
| 00:47:28.680 |
as well as theoretical terms.
|
| 00:47:30.440 |
But it does have to do with reforming perception,
|
| 00:47:33.520 |
re-enchanting the world.
|
| 00:47:35.200 |
It can be seen as a kind of reaction against that
|
| 00:47:38.560 |
Protestant and enlightenment heritage in which the perceiver
|
| 00:47:44.520 |
and the perceived object seem completely alien.
|
| 00:47:49.000 |
And sundered one from the other.
|
| 00:47:50.400 |
Exactly.
|
| 00:47:52.240 |
Well, it's true that Baudelaire has to make the declarative
|
| 00:47:54.760 |
statement.
|
| 00:47:55.280 |
There is a forest of symbols and in that forest,
|
| 00:47:57.880 |
this and that takes place.
|
| 00:47:59.760 |
But if you read Le Flourdumal, the whole collection--
|
| 00:48:03.680 |
I mean, it's divided between E-dayal and spleen.
|
| 00:48:07.840 |
And spleen is that state of mind in which the world is completely
|
| 00:48:14.000 |
stripped of any symbolic self-transcendence in things.
|
| 00:48:17.560 |
It's a highly disenchanted, very literalized, materialized
|
| 00:48:23.720 |
view of objects in their kind of denuded, literal
|
| 00:48:27.640 |
signification.
|
| 00:48:29.000 |
Whereas there are moments that don't just declare, but actually
|
| 00:48:33.040 |
describe the E-dayal where there is a certain magic.
|
| 00:48:36.960 |
And it's certainly not a sustainable way of being.
|
| 00:48:40.360 |
And it's a sustainable state of mind.
|
| 00:48:41.880 |
There are exceptional moments.
|
| 00:48:44.680 |
But nevertheless, poetry, I don't think, would exist if there
|
| 00:48:50.120 |
had not been always these moments, exceptional moments of wonder,
|
| 00:48:54.520 |
where there is an intense presence of something that
|
| 00:48:57.000 |
reveals itself.
|
| 00:48:57.920 |
And Hambou has a year or a year and a half there where he's
|
| 00:49:02.240 |
writing illuminations, Yurumi Nacian and some poems where he
|
| 00:49:05.840 |
seems to be in immediate touch with some kind of symbolic
|
| 00:49:09.520 |
revelation of things that look so weird that when you read those
|
| 00:49:14.160 |
prose poems of his, it's hard for us with our habitual modes
|
| 00:49:18.560 |
of perception to understand what he's actually seeing, what he
|
| 00:49:21.440 |
saw there.
|
| 00:49:24.280 |
Likewise, the Theophanese in Greek mythology and other
|
| 00:49:29.880 |
moments of epiphany in the Christian tradition.
|
| 00:49:32.880 |
Every now and then, when the phenomenon manifests itself in
|
| 00:49:37.360 |
truly intense forms, things become symbolic, I think in the way
|
| 00:49:42.640 |
that you're described.
|
| 00:49:43.200 |
So I would agree with you that we cannot sustain, we cannot live
|
| 00:49:48.200 |
within the symbolic, except by exception.
|
| 00:49:50.320 |
But I'm not sure I want to go all the way and say that it's a
|
| 00:49:54.040 |
complete, unapproachable, empty idea of something that has no
|
| 00:50:01.720 |
correlate in actual experience.
|
| 00:50:04.800 |
Well, the correlation will be that there is an expression of
|
| 00:50:09.000 |
something that can't simply be reduced to a series of
|
| 00:50:11.440 |
meanings and some mysteriousness.
|
| 00:50:13.320 |
It is not an uninterpretability, but so much as an inexhaustibility
|
| 00:50:19.960 |
of interpretive possibilities.
|
| 00:50:22.520 |
And there's an underlying desire for meaning, for connections
|
| 00:50:26.280 |
between things, over-accom alienation, sense of alienation between
|
| 00:50:30.240 |
individuals in society.
|
| 00:50:35.680 |
That's, I think, the basic connections, the desire to discover
|
| 00:50:39.280 |
meaning to assure that the individual has a place in a larger
|
| 00:50:43.920 |
hole and is able to express that place somehow, find assurance of
|
| 00:50:49.360 |
that place.
|
| 00:50:50.360 |
Nick, I'm going to have to get you together with our friend and
|
| 00:50:53.520 |
colleague Tom Sheehan.
|
| 00:50:54.920 |
I did a show on Heidegger with him last year and we had the same
|
| 00:50:58.680 |
sort, it was the same sort of fault line.
|
| 00:51:00.360 |
I know he kept talking about design as this meaning, searching,
|
| 00:51:04.240 |
meaning, questing, meaning, making form of existence.
|
| 00:51:07.840 |
And I was trying to take the emphasis off the meaning and
|
| 00:51:11.480 |
try to get a back to presence.
|
| 00:51:12.760 |
And then that sense, I think that the two of you really
|
| 00:51:17.640 |
should come together and have fruitful discussion of that.
|
| 00:51:23.720 |
Now, I gather that one of the arguments you make in your
|
| 00:51:28.640 |
book is that the disenchantment of the world led to this attempt to
|
| 00:51:35.440 |
re-enchant it through the notion of the symbol.
|
| 00:51:38.120 |
But that sense, as you just said, it's not something that is readily
|
| 00:51:43.240 |
available in experience, if at all.
|
| 00:51:45.600 |
You look for other extraneous reasons why the romantics would
|
| 00:51:50.880 |
have been, have this nostalgia for a kind of symbolic
|
| 00:51:57.400 |
creation to the world.
|
| 00:51:58.400 |
And you find it in social and communitarian concerns or that they're
|
| 00:52:05.160 |
trying to make up for a sense of lost community of some.
|
| 00:52:08.760 |
Do I get you right on that?
|
| 00:52:10.160 |
Yeah, it's a form, various forms of alienation.
|
| 00:52:13.160 |
One, and it's a reaction against various forms of dualism.
|
| 00:52:17.400 |
Yeah, but I mean, thank God you don't have this kind of banal Marxist
|
| 00:52:21.640 |
reading of the whole discourse as super structural and that basically
|
| 00:52:26.800 |
is the alienation of the workforce and so forth and therefore it's just this kind of
|
| 00:52:31.080 |
epiphenomenon of the alienation from the means of production and so forth.
|
| 00:52:36.720 |
So, yeah, go on.
|
| 00:52:38.520 |
No, it's multifaceted for one thing.
|
| 00:52:42.640 |
But it's a reaction against mechanistic science that reductive
|
| 00:52:48.360 |
explanation of scientific phenomena, mathematical terms and
|
| 00:52:53.000 |
reduction of explanation of cultural phenomena and semi-autic terms, all of which imply
|
| 00:52:58.160 |
a fundamental bifurcation between a perceiving subject and a perceived object.
|
| 00:53:04.960 |
Constalism is another example of that in which the ideas of reason can never be known empirically
|
| 00:53:13.200 |
and yet, as Kant himself insists, we want them to be present empirically.
|
| 00:53:18.440 |
So it's an attempt to find an aesthetic basis for metaphysical ideas.
|
| 00:53:24.840 |
There is a social element to it as well in the German critic,
|
| 00:53:30.040 |
or philosopher Montfredne Fronk, has traced 19th century socialist ideas back to this project,
|
| 00:53:36.480 |
this romantic project of a new mythology, which is supposed to be socially cohesive
|
| 00:53:43.480 |
as they imagine the ancient mythology was, for example.
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So it's a response, I think, dualism in various forms and a desire to overcome dualism.
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But for me, the problem with it is that it's so resonatively theoretical.
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So you don't believe that it was a successful attempt to overcome dualism.
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I think Shelley himself didn't because he abandoned the idea of the new mythology and he
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begins to look for symbols in the old mythology. So he turns to lecturing on religion and on mythology
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rather than articulating its project. He says essentially that the new mythology will have
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to wait for the further development of natural philosophy and so on.
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So it's a project deferred, as it were.
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And with all this, you don't mean to deny the existence of literary symbols in a maybe
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different understanding of the notion of symbol because you're not particularly interested
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in the literary symbol per se, but you wouldn't have any problems considering the great white
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whale of Moby Dick a symbol, no?
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No, it is a symbol, but it's a symbol that, and it's a symbol whose meaning is imprecise
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is obscure, but clearly there's an excess of meaning in relation to the narrative, but
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it's a symbol that Melville put there. And it's not the same thing as seeing a fig tree
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as good to want it to do and seeing a fig tree and announcing that it's pregnant with meaning.
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And in that regard one could specify a number of symbols in modern literature that do work
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as an excess of meaning where they kind of overflow the narrative containment that they
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were intended to have. And there's something gets away from this is where our colleague
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Denise Gigante, right, her book on life and an organic form that even the monstrous becomes
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something uncontainable in terms of an excessive literary vitality within certain works where
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| 00:55:52.920 |
it would be closely associated with this symbolic and later understanding of it, I guess.
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Yeah, and this later understanding can be seen to derive from the romantic one. It's
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how, what would a literary manifestation be? Well, it's an idea of a mysterious, uninterpretable
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symbol, but without the metaphysical substructure that the romantic concept had. And
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it does survive in the 20th century. It's very influential. Yates, for example, articulates
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an idea that on the face of it has a lot in common with colorages. And he says, "A symbol
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is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about
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a spiritual flame." And then he distinguishes it from allegory, which he says is one of many
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possible representations of an embodied thing and belongs to fancy and not to imagination.
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So that's a very important vestige of the romantic concept.
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Yeah, and I think also of Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim, when he sees Jim on a top of a hill,
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and he says, "I don't know why he always struck me a symbolical." And then he goes on to
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say how he rep, you know, there was something in him that was the embodiment of his
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race and of his kind and of his, you know, the English and yet there was a shadow in the
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light because he had this failing in his character. And then he, in heart of darkness,
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| 00:57:15.000 |
he also speaks about the way Marlowe, Marlowe's tales are told differently than most people's
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stories because there was always a kind of symbolic kernel to the thing. And I think that Conrad
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is someone who was nourished on the symbolist, French symbolist above all, and there was
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something that was decisive for the kind of novelist that I think he became.
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So yeah, it's a kind of romantic symbol with diminished expectations. That's how I put it,
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because it's confined to the literary sphere, and it doesn't make these
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pretensions of arguing that the entirety of nature is symbolic.
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That's great. That's a good place to conclude our discussion. So let me remind our listeners,
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we've been speaking with Professor Nicholas Halmeve, who is on visit here at Stanford from Oxford
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| 00:58:02.120 |
University. It's a professor of the literature of romanticism in British romanticism primarily,
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| 00:58:09.720 |
but not only. And his book is the genealogy of the symbol recently out with Oxford University Press.
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So, and you all stay tuned. Now Nicholas, I know that there's certain symbols in literature,
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but I'm going to leave us with a song, which is, you know, that has a great symbol. It's called
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The White Bird from an old Bay Area band called It's A Beautiful Day. So thanks for coming on.
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This is Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Please tune in next week.
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Thank you. Bye-bye.
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