To this warning that we must beware not to take figurative or transferred expressions as though they were literal, a further warning must be added lest we wish to take literal expressions as though they were figurative. Therefore a method of determining whether a locution is literal or figurative must be established. And generally this method consists in this: that what-ever appears in the divine Word that does not literally pertain to virtuous behavior or to the truth of faith you must take to be figurative. (3.14; Eng. tr. D. W. Robertson, On Christian Doctrine [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977] p. 87)
The symbolic mode, as theorized by Decadent and contemporary aes-thetics has also been, and can also be, implemented in different cultural frameworks. In Gerard de Nerval’s Sylvie, the narrator, in the first chap-ter, lives a conflict between his actual love for an actress (seen as an unattainable ideal woman) and the crude everyday reality. A piece of news read by chance plunges him (at the beginning of the second chap-ter) into a state of half-sleep, in which he recollects the events of an imprecise past—presumably his childhood, in the village of Loisy. The temporal contours of this reverie are blurred and misty: he remembers the apparition of a mysterious and ethereal beauty, Adrienne, destined for the convent.
In the third chapter, when awakening from his state of half-sleep, the narrator compares the image of Adrienne with the actress and is caught by the suspicion that they are the same person, an unreasonable hypoth-esis, indeed, but he still suspects having overlapped the two images, loving the disappeared girl of his childhood in the shape of the actress of his adult age. Suddenly, he decides to set foot into reality again. Inci-dentally, at this point the narration abruptedly shifts to the present tense; previously it had been carried on by the imperfect (a tense that in French stresses the intemporal vagueness much more than the sup-posedly equivalent English tenses can do). Returning to the reality, the narrator decides to go back to Loisy, not to see the girl of his dreams, but to see Sylvie, who in the second chapter appeared as the representa-tive of the humble reality as opposed to the enchanted Adrienne. He wonders what time it can be, realizing that he has no watch. He steps back to ask the doorman, and with this concrete information he takes a cab to go back in space and, ideally, in time.
However, between the first question about the right time and his visit to the concierge, the narrative sequence is interrupted by the following description:
Among all the bric-a-brac splendours which it was cutomary to collect at that period to give local colour to an old apartment, shone the restored brilliance of one of those Renaissance clocks, whose gilded dome surmounted by the figure of Time is supported by caratides in the Medici style, resting in their turn on semi-plunging horses. The historical Diana, with her arm round her stag, is in low relief on the face, where the enamelled numbers of the hours are marked on an inlaid background. The works, excellent no doubt, had not been wound up for two centuries. I had not bought that clock in Touraine to learn the time from it. (Nerval 1853; Eng. tr., pp. 80-81)
What is the narrative function of this description? None. The reader already knows that the narrator had no reliable watch. At the discursive level, this long digression does not add much to the knowledge of the habits of the character. The presence of that clock sounds strange and strangely delays the action. Thus the clock must be there to mean some-thing else.
What it could mean will be inferred throughout the further course of the story. In the fourth chapter, Nerval does not narrate the present trip to Loisy. Just at the end of the third chapter, the author abandons the narrator sitting in the cab and follows his new memories. The narrator muses on another time, different from the one of the second chapter. It is some temporal state between the remote childhood and the time of the narration, an imprecise moment of the narrator’s adolescence, which lasts from chapter four until chapter six.
At the beginning of the seventh chapter, there is a very short return to the present (time and tense); then the narrator starts a new reverie about a bewitched voyage to the Abbey of Chaalis — where he believes he saw Adrienne for a second time. The temporal contours of this experience are absolutely gloomy: was he there before or after the experiences remembered in the previous three chap-ters? Moreover, did he really meet Adrienne, or was it a hallucination? This chapter is a revealing clue that impels the reader to consider the following, as well as the preceding, chapters in the light of an unsuccess-ful quest for the things of the past. Nerval is not Proust; he does not come to terms with his past.
Sylvie is the story of the failure of memory as well as of the failure of identity: the narrator is unable to distinguish not only the present from the bygone times but also the imaginary from the real. Sylvie, Adrienne, and the actress are three ‘actoriar embodi-ments of the same actant— each woman becoming in her turn the in-stance of a forgotten and lost ideal, as opposed to the crude presence (or -absence and death) of the others. The narrator fails to understand which one he really loves and which one he really loved.
At this point the reader catches the possible symbolic meanings of the Renaissance clock. It was a symbol standing for a nebula of alternative and nevertheless complementary contents, namely, the vagueness of remembrance, the incumbence of the past, the transiency of time, the longing for the rem-nants of an idealized heroic era— perhaps the clock is the symbol for Sylvie as a whole, a story within a story —and so on in infinitum. The novel encourages as many interpretations as there are readings. This symbol is open; it is, however, overdetermined by the co-text. It is undoubtedly a symbol, since its interpretation is doubtful, and there were only doubtful reasons for its textual appearance.
The episode is interpreted as symbolic exactly insofar as it cannot be definitely interpreted. The content of the symbol is a nebula of possible interpretations; open to a semiosic displacement from interpretant to in-terpretant, the symbol has no authorized interpretant. The symbol says that there is something that it could say, but this something cannot be definitely spelled out once and for all; otherwise the symbol would stop saying it. The symbol says clearly only that it is a semiotic machine devised to function according to the symbolic mode.
In this sense, a symbol is different from a metaphor. When facing a metaphor, the interpreter, in discovering that the metaphoric expression does not tell the truth, is obliged to interpret it metaphorically. In the same way, when facing the flouting of a conversational maxim, one is obliged to assume that the expression should express something else.
On the contrary, when meeting an allegory, the interpreter could also decide to interpret it in its literal sense. The fact that, at the beginning of the Divine Comedy, Dante is in a gloomy wood can be taken as a report of a literal event, disregarding the possibility of seeing it as the adven-ture of a human soul lost in the wood of sin.
Both symbol and allegory are signaled, at least, by a feeling of literal waste, by the suspicion that spending such a textual energy for saying only this, is pragmatically ‘uneconomic’.
The further difference between symbol and allegory stands in this: that the allegory is more insisted upon than the symbol and, further-more, that the allegory is a piece of extended narrativity, whereas usu-ally a symbol is the sudden apparition of something that disturbs the course of a previous narration. Moreover, an allegory should immediately suggest its own key; it should point toward a portion of encyclopedia which already hosts the right frames for interpreting it (it represents an explicit intertextual reminder), whereas a symbol leaves the interpreter face to face with the uncoded.
Thus a symbol cannot send back to a Previously coded cultural competence; it is idiolectal because it holds only for the textual environment where it appears (otherwise it is only the ‘quotation’ of a previously catachresized symbol). In this sense, aesthetic symbols are subtracted from every ‘political’ control; they detonate, but they cannot be elaborated from the outside. The aesthetic experience cannot by a mystical one, because it cannot be interpreted and tamed by an external authority. No critical achievement has the force to establish an interpretive tradition; when this happens, the aesthetic symbol has provisionally (perhaps definitely) lost its appeal —it has become some-thing that can be quoted as ‘shibboleth’ by the members of a critical clique, the ‘gesture’ of a frozen ritual, the mere mention of a previous symbolic experience. The living symbol is then substituted with a Kitsch label.
4.6. Conclusions
If one then makes an abstraction from any possible underlying metaphysics or mystical assumption, the symbol is not a particular sort of sign, endowed with mysterious qualities, nor is it a particular modality of sign production. It is a textual modality, a way of producing and of inter-preting the aspects of a text. According
