Symbolism 2020

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Klaeger, Klaus Stierstorfer, Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Klaeger, Klaus Stierstorfer

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110717051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This special anniversary volume of Symbolism explores the nexus between symbolic signification and the future from an interdisciplinary perspective. How, contributors ask, has the future been variously rendered in symbolic terms? How do symbols and symbolic reference shape our ideas of the future? To what extent are symbols constitutive of futures, and to what extent do they restrain communication about what is possible and the imagination of fundamental change? Moreover, how have symbolic practices shaped not only artistic representations of the future, but also scientific attempts at forecasting and modelling it? What, then, is the relevance of symbolism for negotiations of the future in cultural and academic production? In essays ranging from literary and film studies to the philosophy of art and ecological modelling, the volume seeks to lay groundwork in theorizing and historicising 'symbols of the future' as much as 'the future of symbolism'.

Special Focus: Symbols of the Future. The Future of Symbolism

Corresponding editors:Florian Klaeger and Klaus Stierstorfer

Introduction: Symbols of the Future. The Future of Symbolism

Florian Klaeger

Klaus Stierstorfer

The work in this volume evolved in the context of the projects “Literary Modelling and Energy Transition (LMET)”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation in its programme “Off the Trodden Paths”, and “Cosmopoetic form-knowledge: astronomy, poetics, and ideology in England, 1500–1800”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 429827737. The editors gratefully acknowledge this support.

At the beginning of Ali Smith’s Winter (2017), the second instalment in the recently finished ‘Seasonal quartet,’ nature blogger Art plays a search engine game: “He is typing random words into Google to see if they come up automatically in frequent search as dead or not. Most of them do, and if they don’t immediately come up as dead they pretty much always will if you type [word] plus is plus the letter d.”¹ This produces the novel’s hibernal opening sequence:

God was dead: to begin with.

And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. [This list goes on for a while. Then:] Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water.

Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. (W, 3–4, original emphasis)

It later emerges that this is foreshadowing. The flower-ghost in question is the impression left on a page from Cymbeline in a certain copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio (the eponymous ‘Rosebud’ in Toronto’s Thomas Fisher library):

It’s the bud of a rose.

Well. It’s the mark left on the page by what was once the bud of a rose, the shape of the rosebud on its long neck.

And it’s nothing but a mark, a mark made on words by a flower. Who knows by whom. Who knows when. It looks like nothing. It looks like maybe someone made a stain with water, like an oily smudge. Until you look properly at it. Then there’s the line of the neck and the rosebud shape at the end of it. (W, 212, original emphasis)

In western culture, the rose is one of the most common symbols of love. This symbol undergoes several transformations in Winter: the rose in question is young, a mere bud. It is pressed between the pages of a book for preservation – which also means it was never allowed to bloom. Its book-sarcophagus happens to be one that is also preserved, against the odds, for centuries. The impression strikes Lux, a diasporic from former Yugoslavia, as “the most beautiful thing I have ever seen” (W, 212). Art, looking at a digital reproduction of the image later, sees “the ghost of a flower not yet open on its stem, the real thing long gone, but look, still there, the mark of the life of it reaching across the words on the page for all the world like a footpath that leads to the lit tip of candle” (W, 319). It is a trace, there and not there, life in death and death in life, without known origin or destination; free from intention or fixity of meaning. And yet, amongst “the furious winter’s rages” (Cymbeline, 4.2) it represents the hope of change: a ‘past future,’ unrealized yet preserved (and also, perhaps, unrealizable because preserved), which haunts the present with intimations of what might have been, and might still be. Symbols fly thick; rose/flower, book/words, footpath/road, candle/fire create a matrix between the ephemeral and the attempt to capture its essence, if only through the symbols themselves. In a novel that also features visions, by Art’s mother Sophia, of an (as yet) inexplicable floating child’s head that haunts her around Christmas-time, Smith’s point is clear: it is impossible for us not to see symbols, but it can also be very difficult to determine their meaning. In bed and literally depressed by the head’s weight, Sophia contemplates the faces of saints in medieval paintings and sculptures razed by Reformation zealots “in whatever self-righteousness of fury, whatever intolerant ideology of the day” (W, 109). She concludes that such literal defacement

was meant as a warning. Take a look at what your saints are truly made of. It was the demonstration that everything symbolic will be revealed as a lie, everything you revere nothing but burnt matter, broken stone, as soon as it meets whatever shape time’s contemporary cudgel takes.

But it worked the other way round too. They looked, those vandalized saints and statues, more like statements of survival than of destruction. They were proof of a new state of endurance, mysterious, headless, faceless, anonymous. (W, 110; original emphasis)

The very assault on symbols – which here seem to signify not only signification as such, but signification of some real, numinous truth – only asserts their power. Symbols – once clear, definite, inspirational – acquire more, and new, symbolic force as they are broken. In a world haunted by the eternal return of destructive fury, the symbol remains a challenge to our faculty of making sense of things in the face of senseless violence and the ravages of time.

In Winter’s sequel, Spring (2019), we encounter Florence, a twelve-year-old girl capable of effecting change against all odds. She charms train conductors into giving her free rides; she walks unfazed into immigration removal centers and shames their administrators into treating their charges more humanely; and she reminds the hard-nosed detention guard Brittany of what it means to live soulfully. As they compare their favorite seasons in a highly meta-referential passage, Florence opts for spring and Brittany (Brit for short, poignantly) for winter:

You’d be the end of me, Brit said. You’d kill me off.

No, you’d make me be possible, the girl […] said.²

This exchange illustrates that even as time-worn symbols as the seasons³ are capable of ambiguity and re-definition. Symbolism facilitates communication across boundaries of age and ethnicity (otherwise rather entrenched in Spring, as in Winter and Autumn), but it also highlights differences in world-view. As such, it crystallizes the problem of the ‘burden of the past’ that hampers negotiations of futures at the same time as it enables them.

Spring has more to say on the topic of symbolism. Florence also writes prose, and one of her pieces offers a version of the myth of the scapegoat⁴: in midwinter, a frightened community “decided that the only way to make life come back to the world was to choose a young woman from among the maidens and sacrifice her as a gift to the gods by making her dance herself to death” (S, 225–226). The chosen girl, however, refuses:

I’m not a symbol, she said.

The dance stopped.

The music stopped.

The villagers gasped out loud.

She said it louder.

I’m not your symbol. Go and lose yourself or find yourself in some other story. Whatever you’re looking for, you’re not going to find it by making me or anyone like me do some dance for you. (S, 227)

Ritual – based, like symbolism, on repetition – relies on the acceptance of the symbolic function. To escape from repetition, to break the patterns of the past, here means to reject compartmentalization and prejudice. Another of Florence’s writings, quoted immediately preceding this one (S, 223–224), constitutes a collage of vulgar cyber-bullying against what is clearly a young woman or girl. It reminds readers immediately of the infamous online denunciations against Greta Thunberg, the highly symbolic figurehead of the Fridays for Future movement.⁵ Thus, the subsequent renunciation of symbolic function comments on the way symbolism works to limit and restrict meaning. As the chosen scapegoat-girl tells her elders, who ask her to “Tell us a bit about yourself”:

As you well know, […] that’d be the first step towards me vanishing altogether […]. Because as soon as you all hear me say anything about myself, I’ll stop meaning me. I’ll start meaning you. […] My mother told me, they’ll want you to tell them your story, the girl said. My mother said, don’t. You are not anyone’s story.

(S, 229, original emphasis)

If the first three quarters of this quartet are anything to go by, symbolism is not dead. (As of May 2020, the Google autocomplete game agrees.) Against the copious cultural casualties of the present moment, Smith shores symbols from the past. They remind us of who we are and can be, of how we make sense of the world, of how we communicate and create shared meanings. They are not fixed in their meanings: they may transform into new things, “something rich and strange,” as the Shakespearean riff in the quartet’s first novel, Autumn, has it.⁶ Acceptance of some definite symbolic meaning is precisely not required any more to affirm membership in a community (as was the function of ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ symbolism⁷) – a new community may emerge from the very rejection of a traditional symbolic code. Indeed, the very rejection of symbolic function may be central to effecting change. Symbols may be dead in life, like the rosebud, and they may offer a vision of life in (social, moral, aesthetic) death.

In this sense, Smith explores the seasons as both symbolic representations of change and of stability – and thus as the contested ground between the classical world-views of Parmenides and Heraclitus. The idea of some ideal past’s ‘return’ or restoration is at work in the very notion of a canon of fixed symbols (what was true once remains true always), and it is also at the heart of current, vague ideas of nostalgia described by Zygmunt Bauman as ‘retrotopian.’⁸ To ef...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Special Focus: Symbols of the Future. The Future of Symbolism Corresponding editors:Florian Klaeger and Klaus Stierstorfer
• Book Reviews
• Index