A note on Symbolism

Ramesh Mukhopadhyaya

The word symbol could mean many things. When something represents something else the former symbolises the latter. Thus, every letter in an alphabet is a symbol that represents a particular sound. The sound is not the letter. The letter is not the sound. The symbol stands for a sound as arbitrarily determined by a convention. Again you always know a Bengali woman as married when you see vermillion on the parting of her hair.A virgin might sportingly put vermillion on the parting of her hair. Then we will deem her as a married woman. How do we know that she is a married woman? Only if we are acquainted with Bengali culture we can recognize the meaning of vermillion on the parting of the hair of a Bengali woman. An American lady visiting Calcutta might sportingly put on vermillion thinking that she has decked herself like a Bengali. But she does not know that although she is a virgin she is read like a married woman. Vermillion on the parting of hair is thus a symbol of being married for Bengali women. This is semiotics or science of signs. The connotation of the word symbol in symbolism is wider. Emmanuel Kant pointed out that this is a world which we half create and half perceive.Whatever we see in this world we see in time and space. By the by according to Kant time and space are not there out in the world. We are born with a priori notion of time and space and we add them to the world. Hence according to Kant the thing in itself or the reality is unknown and unknowable to man. Fine. The poets however posited that though the thing in itself cannot be perceived with the aid of senses it can be intuited perhaps. And the experience of the same though baffles our language could be communicated through symbols. What are the symbols? On the surface, they do not have any meaning as because they are capable of meanings on different planes. But they evoke the experience of the indeterminate reality in the reader. The poet is here something like a magician or a shaman.
Symbolism as an aesthetics seems to have shot up in reaction to the realism of the 19thcentury Europe. In the contingent, it was Baudelaire who wrote a poem entitled Correspondence. The appreciation or rather the apperception of the same gave birth to two schools of symbolism. One was led by Mallarme and Valerie. The other was led by Rimbaud and Verlaine. In England WB Yeats took the cue from French symbolists and revelled in an emergent kind of poetry. His The Second Coming is a triumph of symbolic art. There for example he exclaims that the centre cannot hold. Those who are logo centric could read in this symbol the fact that the world is getting out of joints. But on another level does it not give the foretaste of the emergent postmodern values. There are some who posit that that which cannot be told in prose is communicated through poetry. In that light, all true poetry is symbolic.