Hateful Contraries

Studies in Literature and Criticism

W.K. Wimsatt

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813185620
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

These ten essays, written over a period from 1950 to 1962, are bound together by their common concern with questions of the meaning of criticism and the larger meaning of literature itself. These difficult questions W.K. Wimsatt treats with characteristic wit and penetration, ranging easily from a broad consideration of principles to incisive comment on individual writers and works.

The first part of the book is devoted to a discussion of literary theory. Wimsatt reviews the development of critical dialectic from the German romanticism of Schelling and the Schlegels to the mythopeic bravura of Northrop Frye. Himself a classical ironist, he nevertheless exposes here some of the extravagances of the ironic principle as flourished by the systematic Prometheans.

The second and third parts contain essays on more particular topics: the meaning of "symbolism, " Aristotle's doctrines of the tragic plot and catharsis, the theory of comic laughter, and the objective reading of English meters. Here too are extended comment on particular writers—a study of the imagination of James Boswell, an analysis of the comedy of T. S. Eliot in The Cocktail Party, and a contrast in the handling of similar themes by Tennyson and Eliot. The fourth part is a comprehensive statement of the demands and opportunities confronting the critic in his or her role as teacher.

Two

TWO MEANINGS OF SYMBOLISM: A GRAMMATICAL EXERCISE

THE TERM “symbol” as it is used in modern times represents a large field of meanings, with two poles exerting complementary semantic energies through the whole. For one thing, there is symbol in the general sense of verbal sign (or any other deliberate human sign), the sign that is related to the world of things by an expressive act of the mind and which just in virtue of this act differs from signs in the merely symptomatic order of cause and effect (smoke, for instance, as a sign of fire). The symbol-sign represents things, or stands for them, or takes their place as an object of negotiation. Symbol conceived in this way, with a further stress on the creative power of the symbol-making human mind, is the key to several recent forms of idealistic thinking—philosophies arguing that the act of expression, and most properly the act of linguistic expression, is the primary reality, from which all else is scientific abstraction. Language “produces and posits” its own world of reality.¹ That formula would fit, I think, without great unfairness (if a few qualifications were kept in mind) the ideas of Croce, Cassirer, W. M. Urban, or Mrs. Langer. In certain statements by Cassirer, and in various more special theories of symbolism (in English, the literary theories of Eliot, Pound, or R. P. Blackmur, for instance), the claim stops short of full idealism. Symbols are assigned only a quasi-creative status; they are unique halfway points of control between man and his experience, stabilizers and carriers of experience, mediated presentations. These moderate notions are likely to be applied in a special way to the literary use of language² rather than to language in general, but in any case they tend to cast a light in the direction of language in general. This whole group of notions constitutes, if you like, some sort of analogy to the ancient doctrine of the Logos.

But in the second place, to turn back to more ordinary ways of thinking, there is “symbol” in the far more restricted sense of some special kind of thing or event in the world of reality—a flower or a flame if one happens to look at these in a certain way. And from this meaning there is also “symbol” in the sense of some special detail of a painting or some special word or group of words in a writing, a literary symbol in the full or proper sense, the words that refer to the flower or the flame.

It may be worthwhile dwelling for a few moments on the great variety of logic which such symbols are capable of showing. Sometimes they work in a fairly simple way from the specific to the general and from the concrete to the merely abstract. If a novelist describes a character riding in a Cadillac or wearing a big diamond pin, those objects will be identified by the critic as symbols of the character’s affluence and power. (Such symbolism is the ordinary reliance and the ordinary limitation of the nineteenth-century propagandist method known either as realism or as naturalism.) But again, symbols may work along various associational lines, synecdochic and metonymic. They may also work along the horizontal lines of the logician’s tree,³ from concrete object to comparable concrete object, from species to species, as, for instance, do the numerous sexual symbols or the father symbols which are so interesting to psychologists. This is like metaphor, the difference lying in the fact that metaphor is an image called in for illumination of some object already in focus as part of a story or argument, whereas symbol is itself in focus as part of a story or argument, though in such a way as to show significance beyond itself. Characteristically, symbol combines both the vertical abstractive movement and the horizontal metaphoric. It works both from the individual toward the universal and from the object of less interest to the object of greater interest, from the artificial to the natural, from the outer to the inner, from the physical to the psychological, the spiritual, and the transcendent. The concrete symbolizing the abstract is not the same as the physical symbolizing the spiritual, but the two have a close relation, especially in neo-Platonic literature. They have in common a reference from the more tangible to the less tangible. Symbol can hardly work in directions opposite to these I have named. We do not speak of love symbolizing a flame, or of the maternal womb symbolizing a pottery vessel.⁴

Sometimes the order of images in a story follows or apparently follows the lines of representational necessity or probability, though at the same time a symbolic significance is managed. Then we have realism, though realism of a superior sort, the poetic sort. Sometimes the order openly prefers the norms of symbolic meaning to those of representation. Then we move off through various shades of romance, allegory, myth, and surrealism.

Thus I conclude my diagram of the special symbol or literary symbol proper.

Let me now risk a preliminary and tentative statement that I do not believe the difference between the word-symbol in the poem and the thing-symbol outside the poem to be an important difference for literary criticism, at least not in the sense that one part of a critic’s discourse can be directed to the word-symbol, another to the thing-symbol. The critic’s effort must in this respect be all at one level. There are no flowers or flames or other things pasted into a poem as in a collage. The literary critic, like the poet, has to stop with the words. Or, to put the matter somewhat differently, the realm of thing-symbols can enter the poem only as that realm is mediated by words.

The difference between the two main meanings which I have been defining, the symbol as verbal expression in general and the symbol as special word naming a special thing, may in certain instances be so great that, as I have suggested, the term “symbol” seems to fall apart into two almost equivocally related uses. Nevertheless, the term does hang together and in a great deal of literary criticism manages to keep both meanings present without generating for most readers a sense of contradiction or cheating. The aim of this paper is to proceed, by a somewhat devious route, to show some relations between these two radical meanings of the term.

II

EVEN A CURSORY GLANCE at the history of symbolism will raise some difficult theoretical problems. It is not really my aim in this essay to take that glance. Yet I cannot continue without some reference to the fact that the origins of the symbolist tradition in patristic and medieval exegetic procedure bring us back to that difference between thing as special symbol and word as special symbol, a difference which does not seem to me important to the literary critic. The fact is, as we read for instance in Aquinas, that the Biblical exegetes were thinking directly about things, a universe of things, as special symbols. And a poet like Dante followed the exegetes, at least in his theorizing. That kind of thinking came down into fairly modern literary theory by the route of Renaissance nature philosophy and the doctrine of “signatures” or “correspondences” as entertained by visionaries like Boehme or Swedenborg. In mid-eighteenth-century England, the correspondences are illustrated for poetry by that curious figure Christopher Smart in his antiphonal commentary on the cosmos, Jubilate Agno, written in the madhouse. All through romantic literature, in the Germans from Herder on, among the English in Coleridge and Carlyle,⁵ and among Americans notably in Emerson, we trace ideas of the “great alphabet of nature,” “universal signs . . . diffused through nature,” the “visual language of God.” (These phrases are quoted from De Quincey, who was partly a sceptic in the matter, but they might be readily paralleled.)⁶ It should be observed, however, that by this period, theories of imagination and of knowledge in general had been so far idealized, the outer objective world and the inner creative force of knowing had been so far unified, that these expressions no longer have quite the clean-cut meaning which once they might have had. The English idealist Bishop Berkeley at the beginning of the eighteenth century was a rhapsodic exponent of such symbolic doctrine. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth we have a situation such as Wallace Fowlie has recently reported to us, where Claudel, following both Aquinas and Mallarmé, combines the notion that the poet names each object in the universe and gives it its rightful place with the further notion that the world is constantly reborn for the poet and that each poet “bears in himself . . . a subjective maze of images” corresponding to the endless metaphorical richness of the world.⁷

The thesis—taken at its most hardheaded, that is in a medieval or early Renaissance, rather than a postromantic, form—means (or at least involves the concept) that individual things in the objective world and classes of things have more or less properly definable symbolic meanings or at least ranges of such meaning. For the purposes of the Scriptural exegete, it would appear to me (though I don’t stake a great deal on this guess) that a simply traditional or revelatory fixation of symbolic meaning would be sufficient. That is, if the individual object Jerusalem appears in certain documents in such a way that it stands for the Christian society or for Heaven, or if the specific object or substance water appears in such a way as to symbolize death and rebirth, then those meanings will legitimately enough tend to attach to the same objects in later works written in the same tradition. From the literary point of view some complication may be thought to occur through the fact of prefiguration—the individual and historical correspondence of Old Testament persons and situations to those of the New Testament, a matter with which Scriptural exegetes are greatly concerned. But I am ready for the moment at least, to say that here is something that lies beyond or to one side of the question about poetic symbolism. For I suppose that we ought to keep our poetic discussion of Dante—or for that matter our poetic discussion of the Bible—at a level where what we are talking about may be appreciated either with or without involving our Christian belief. The poetic discussion has to get along without appealing to the prophetic, the historical, the supernatural. The poetic universal is of a different sort from the historic and Incarnational. It is true that Professor Auerbach in his Mimesis and in other essays has recently shown the relevance of Scriptural figura or typology to medieval poetics and poetry. Extraordinarily rich adaptations of the method run through The Divine Comedy. The conjunction of humble and exalted in the exegetic tradition (harlot and Church, scarlet thread and blood of Christ) does help to explain the medieval indifference to the classically separate decora of comedy and tragedy.⁸ But I think it is the adaptation of the Scriptural method by the secular poet, the overlay and more abstract play of symbolic meaning, which mainly enters into the poetic problem. Dante’s Comedy makes massive use of Scriptural materials. The poem is in some sense founded on history. We can, furthermore, talk about the solidity and realism of his narrative technique and can contrast it to the Platonic thinness of full allegory, the mere “allegory of poets” which he attempted in the Convivio.⁹ But the Comedy is after all not real history; it is a fiction (a bella menzogna) and only as such is it an object of full poetic criticism.

III

TO PUSH OUR INQUIRY into the definition of symbolic meaning very far we have to turn from individual historical objects to natural classes of objects. The interpretation of such classes may no doubt be affected in traditional ways, but at the same time they put to us much more insistently than do individual objects the question, basic for the natural art of reading poetry, whether the world and its parts have symbolic meanings that are at all strictly determinate, whether the “book of nature” described by such authors as Saint Bonaventure in the thirteenth century and Drummond of Hawthornden in the early seventeenth, is written in one language, a scientifically specific language, or in the polysemous ambiguity of poetry itself. A quidditative and teleological view of the world invites, I suppose, some fairly restrictive theory of its symbolism. I have never read a full-dress defense of such a theory by a modern poetic theorist. The “archetypal” and apocalyptic myths of which critics nowadays so often speak are qualities of “the collective unconscious” rather than of the physical universe.¹⁰ The blending of the old objective theory with shades of expressionism such as I have alluded to in Claudel would seem to be fairly normal even among neoscholastic writers—so long, that is, as they are looking at poetry rather than at interpretation of the Scriptures. As for secular criticism the thesis of a speaker at the meeting of the Modern Language Association in Detroit a few years ago seems to me perfectly sound—that the modern conception of fluid symbolism has much less in common than some may like to think with the fixed theories that appear in earlier times.¹¹

The defense of something like fixed, or correct, or at least central areas of natural symbolic meaning will proceed today, I suppose, along a line that one might term “total contextualism.” The defender would say that we have to try to see through the special and local contexts in which an object may be placed, so as to understand its place in the whole universe of space, time and spirit—so far as any of us may grasp that universe. He would say that a given class object or substance (like water) or a natural object of universal experience (like the sun) may have many momentary and local meanings, but that at the same time it will have some more basic meaning or range of meanings. The sun over the Sahara desert may mean to somebody thirst and death, but universally, even to that person, it has or has had the meaning of life. Water may kill a man who drowns, but more universally it is a necessity of life. This defender would speak, I suppose, of an...