Our notion of the symbolic is rooted in a universe that is by now secular, where a symbol no longer has to reveal or hide the absolutes of religion, but the absolute of poetry. Our approach to symbols is profoundly affected by French symbolism, for which Baudelaire’s Les Corréspondences serves nicely as a manifesto: the living columns of nature allow only confused words to emerge, “comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent I dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité I vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté” (like distant echoes that dwindle in the distance / in a deep, dark unity, / vast as the night and brightness).
Only then can one say with Mallarmé “une fleur” and not decide on what the word should summon up for us, because that will be only the very absence, a pregnant absence, of all “flowerness,” and therefore everything and nothing, and we will sit in a daze asking ourselves endlessly what is meant by “le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui. “
But at this point objects no longer exist, whether they are emblems, mysterious figures, or isolated words that have symbolic value in themselves. Not even Mallarmé’s flower would be that were it not inserted into his strategy of the blank page. The symbolic becomes an effect of meaning produced by the text, and as such any image, word, or object can assume the status of a symbol.
What semiotic key can be offered, not for interpreting, but for identifying the textual strategy that I have decided to call the symbolic mode?
One suggestion was given to us some time ago, by a passionate and necessarily determined seeker after second meanings: Saint Augustine. When something in scripture appears semantically understandable but seems to us out of place, excessive, inexplicably emphatic, that is where we have to seek a hidden second meaning. Sensitivity to the symbolic mode stems from having noticed that there is something in the text that has meaning and yet could easily not have been there, and one wonders why it is there. This something is not a metaphor, because otherwise it would have gone against common sense, it would have polluted the stark purity of the degree zero of writing. It is not allegory, because it does not refer to any heraldic code. It exists, it is there, it does not disturb us that it is there, at most it might slow down our reading, but it is the surplus that it represents, its blameless incongruity, its presence looming so large in the economy of the text, that makes us suppose that its placement means it may be saying something else as well.
It is this figure’s superfluity, its gratuity, that makes it totemic. It is the question it inspires in us (“Why are you here, and at this particular point?”) that forces us to this interrogation that will elicit no answer. This is one of the rare cases when it is not our deconstructive hubris but the very will of the text that invites us to drift this way.
Why does Montale have to spend a good sixty “Old Lines” to tell us in the poem of that name how a horrible moth with its sharp beak ate through the thin fibers of a lampshade, insanely fluttering its wings over the papers on the table? It is the very irrelevance of the experience that makes it totemic, ” efu per sempre / con le cose che chiudono in un giro / sicuro come il giorno, e la memoria / in se le cresce” (and it was forever / one with those things that close in a circle / as certain as the day, and are enhanced by memory).
Why, after warning us that he intends to show us something different from our shadow at morning striding behind us, or our shadow at evening rising to meet us, does Eliot tell us in The Waste Land (and it is up to us to determine whether the sense of these lines is literal or metaphorical): “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”? In this example the symbol exceeds the very powers of the metaphor. This handful of dust could certainly be a metaphor for many things, but traditionally, through association, it is for failure. How many times in our life have we ended up with nothing but a handful of dust, and we have said so using this very idiom? But is it the fear announced and produced by this that Eliot wants to evoke? Failure disappoints, hurts, and diminishes us, but it does not frighten us, since it no longer contains anything unexpected. That handful of dust stands for something else there; perhaps it has been there since the big bang, and if it is someone’s failure it is that of the Demiurge. Or perhaps not; perhaps it is the epiphany of a universe without a big bang and without a Demiurge, the proof of our living-for-death (but then The Waste Land was written five years before Heidegger’s Being and Time).
Epiphany: there, I’ve said it. Basically the Joycean concept of epiphany is the most secular, or most religious (when with Barilli it becomes “materialistic ecstasy”), version of the symbolic mode. Something appears, and we know that it is an apparition, otherwise it would not be so out of place, and yet we do not know what it is revealing to us. A symbol is an epiphany with Magi whose origins and destination we do not know, nor whom they have come to adore. The stable at Bethlehem is empty, or occupied by, let’s say, an enigmatic object, a dagger, a black box, a glass ball with snow falling inside on the Madonna of Oropa, or a fragment of a railway timetable. And yet it flashes, at least for those of us who accept its invitation to the superfluous.
Returning to The Waste Land: Why does it say at a certain point, “There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!'”? Because Eliot and Stetson had been together at Mylae? Because last year Stetson planted a corpse in his garden, and now it has started to sprout? Why does he have to keep the dog “far hence”?
Roberto Cotroneo, in his book Se una mattina d’estate un bambino (Milan: Frassinelli, 1994), attempts an explanation: of course, who else wore a Stetson but Pound? Why not Mylae when, after this first defense of the West, in order to exorcize Carthaginian power Rome introduced the cult of the Phrygian goddess, which was followed by the coming together of the two worlds, and fertility rites? Certainly, this reading is legitimate, and authorized by Eliot himself, since he begins his notes with a refer enee to Miss Weston. But is that the end of the story? Certainly not. The unwanted appearance of Stetson continues to disturb us, and in any case a few lines before this Eliot gives us the sign that he is fully entering the symbolic mode. He has just mentioned the fact that Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours “with a dead sound on the final stroke of nine,” and at this point he inserts one of the few hermetic notes to his poem.
Commenting on this line 68, he says: “A phenomenon which I have often noticed.”
A sublime and totally superfluous observation. Why of all the events of that particular London, of that unreal city where a crowd flowed, so many that he did not think death had undone so many, where each man fixed his eyes before his feet, does Eliot have to tell us that he frequently observed that particular phenomenon, as though it were a Kantian noumenon?
And we readers, what are we meant to do? Eliot tells us immediately, borrowing an insult that lies at the origin of symbolism’s poetics: “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” By translating the vocative from French to English, he has decontextualized the address. Now it means something else. We have to ask why Stetson has appeared so suddenly, whether he is just a hat, and why we are hypocritically guilty of his arrival.
Note that once more the name Stetson is not a symbol in and of itself. It becomes one because of the context. There is an unjustified focus on it.
Nor must we think that incongruity equals lack of internal logic, or that gratuitousness means frivolity. Sometimes the symbolic mode exhibits its own rigid, though perhaps paranoid, logic, and the symbol is solid, geometric, and heavy, like the galactic obelisk that appears at the beginning of2001: A Space Odyssey.
Nor must we think that a symbol has to be something fleeting, an image barely alluded to, appearing in the text like a brief glimpse. If for Mallarmé naming an object meant suppressing three-quarters of its poetic pleasure (which consists in the joy of guessing bit by bit— “le suggérer, voilà le rêve!”), nothing is merely suggested in Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”; on the contrary, everything is described in extraordinary detail. Almost like an engineering treatise, or a legal exchange with a Talmudic flavor, the story constructs its “celibate machine,” and it is the entire description taken as a whole, extending page after page, that drives us to ask the reason for that presence. Not why it is there—for it is there, and that is enough—but rather what is the overall sense of this theater of cruelty. And
