Symbolism

 Throughout my life, I have at great intervals experienced an odd sensation. A confluence of circumstances will suddenly remind me of something. I will feel that whatever just occurred has a great yet inexplicable meaning. It's tempting to describe this feeling as a type of déjà vu, if only to help me find the words to describe it, but it's not exactly as if I feel—in these moments—that I have experienced the same thing before. Rather, it's as if whatever just occurred reminded me of a particularly important idea. Yet, in contrast to the familiar and more common type of realization, the importance of the ideas disclosed in these moments remains wholly incommunicable. And, more noteworthy still, I invariably forget them a few minutes later, and can never retrieve them again (I cannot even now, in writing this, think of a single specific example of the phenomenon in question—it is part of its nature to elude recollection). 

I've been tempted at various times by the thought that I should carry a small notebook in my pocket everywhere I go, so that whenever these moments of mysterious recollections occur to me, I could jot down something about their content—to catch them in the wild, as it were. Yet, I can never bring myself to put this scheme into practice. What stops me from implementing it—apart from its obvious impracticality and inconvenience—is the fear that if I ever started jotting these sensations down when they occurred, somehow it would make the visitations stop. I am sure that if I wrote these sudden "ideas" on paper, they would appear as meaningless to me the next day (or even the next hour) as most dreams usually are a half-hour after waking. And worse, I'm convinced that it would somehow kill my capacity to receive these transmissions. Like the old stand-by canard of the charlatan medium—I worry that the spirits would go quiet if I ever tried to record their speech. 

I was reading Edmund Wilson's classic of literary criticism, Axel's Castle, the last few days—a work that has sat on my shelf for years, beckoning to me, as a lifelong admirer of Wilson, but its time to be read somehow did not arrive until now—and it gave me for the first time a language to start to think about this esoteric sensation. Indeed, Wilson seems to imply, the presence of this oddly incommunicable frisson—the sense that "something just occurred that reminded me of something deeply important, yet important only to me—only within the private galaxy of my mind"—is the basis of modern literature. The contention of Wilson's book, after all, is that the literary High Modernism of the 1920s—the high water-mark of Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, etc.—is a kind of further development or efflorescence of the Symbolism of the late nineteenth century. And, in defining Symbolism (a notoriously elusive task), Wilson is led to discuss something a great deal like the sensation I have described. 

The "symbols" of literary Symbolism as a nineteenth century artistic movement, Wilson explains, are not the "symbols" of conventional myth, art, or allegory. They are not straightforward signs pointing to something external by analogy, and in accordance with the conventionalized meanings of our society and its language. To the contrary, they are images with rich yet wholly private meanings. They are the products of "events," as Wilson puts it—a confluence of unique and unrepeatable circumstances—that derive their meaning solely from their relation to the subjective history of the intellect perceiving them (Wilson compares them in this regard to the moving objects of an Einsteinian universe, and therefore considers Symbolism a kind of literary analogy to the Theory of Relativity in the sciences—or, we might add, to Quantum Mechanics). The importance of the symbols of Symbolism is therefore always shimmering just on the remote edge of expressibility and communicability. This is often what gives a Symbolist poem or painting its eerie power. 

Wilson then goes on to trace this fascination with inexpressible yet privately-meaning-laden psychological "events" through the writings of the great High Modernists. He quotes Yeats on the subject: "There is for every man some one scene [...] some one picture, that is the image of his secret life [...] and [...] this one image, if he would brood over it his whole life long, would lead his soul, disentangled from unmeaning circumstance and the ebb and flow of the world, into that far household where the undying gods await[.]" Florid, perhaps, yet undeniably and profoundly true to anyone who has felt the hidden tug of these mysterious psychological "events," when one feels yet cannot explain the importance of some trivial incident or recollection that has just occurred. 

Wilson also finds the same idea in Proust, and we are intrigued to discover that, while the French novelist's famous sudden waves of recollection are often thought of purely as a phenomenon of the memory, they are actually in Proust's telling something more like the "events" of the Symbolists. As Wilson summarizes his literary program: "[O]ne finds the true reality only there: in those enduring extra-temporal symbols—incidents and personalities as well as landscapes—which have been precipitated out by the interaction with one's continually changing consciousness with the continual change of the world." 

Wilson senses the great lure of this excavation of the consciousness—this quest to find and label the mysterious private symbols of each individual's subjective life—yet he is also made uneasy by it. Axel's Castle in this regard has a great deal in common with Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return. Both are works of the 1930s, written from the perspective of that decade and looking back with a certain shame yet fascination on the literary ideals of the 1920s and earlier (stretching back to late nineteenth century Aestheticism). Cowley and Wilson are both aware of the Great Depression wreaking misery around them, and of the new sense of social obligation on the part of writers and artists it has awakened. They fear that the examination and excavation of the individual mind and its inexpressible symbols may be a kind of treachery to the social impulse. In both books, we encounter the same by-now-familiar cautionary tales: the great mythic incidents in modern literary history that show the perils of excessive Aestheticism: Proust in his cork-lined bedroom; Valéry and his twenty-year silence; Axël and his statement that one should leave mere "living" to the servants—all supposedly indicative of the dangers of attempting to divorce art from life so fully that it becomes an utterly sterile formalism.

Yet one cannot escape the feeling that Wilson is trying to convince himself of something. He rejects Proust's involvement in the intricacies of his own subjective consciousness as a "sickness" and a "perversity"—yet Wilson has chosen to write this work that examines the methodology of Symbolism with more sympathy perhaps than any other book of literary criticism; and he wrote it, moreover (as we learn from Mary Gordon's introduction to the 2004 edition) from a bed in a psychiatric hospital where he was recovering from a nervous breakdown. He claims to reject and thereby distance himself from the Symbolist's preference for art over life and from the "sickness" of Proust; but perhaps it is precisely because he senses their appeal. He is trying to disown something in himself, as much as he is trying to disavow something he has found in these authors. 

The truth is that, however seriously one takes one's social obligations or humanitarian impulses, nevertheless, it is inescapable: so long as one has lived an intellectual life, one cannot help but side with the Symbolists (this is the "treason of all clerks," as Auden once put it, that makes intellectuals and artists ultimately such terrible allies to any social struggle). Anyone who has felt an intellectual passion (as Wilson obviously has, otherwise he could not have written this great book or his other masterpieces of literary criticism) will have no trouble sensing inwardly that Yeats and the Symbolists were right to prefer the ideal realm to that of quotidian existence. They will agree implicitly with Proust that an hour spent on the demands of sociality is an hour wasted, since it could have been devoted to artistic production. (See Edmund White's little book on Proust—not to be confused with Edmund Wilson—for the novelist's observation on this point, which I have quoted before). With these authors, they will sense that the subjective world is more real, has a higher reality, than the world of so-called "reality,"—the reality of the "reality principle" with its inevitable disappointments. 

But perhaps the most significant lesson of the Symbolists is that one need not make a choice between the two worlds anyway—the choice is made for one. The mysterious unbidden moments in which one senses the interconnections of experience—in which one encounters once again one of the "symbols" of one's secret language, in the wild—cannot be deliberately sought out. They either happen or they don't. This is why, when trying to understand the meaning of my own mysterious "events," as I discussed at the outset, the best I could think to do was to simply keep a notebook by me to catch one the next time it alighted on my brain. I know, after all, that I am utterly unable to retrieve them by conscious and deliberate effort. 

This is likewise the great insight of Surrealism—which Wilson traces too, plausibly enough, to the parent-theory of Symbolism (by way of the halfway-house of Dadaism). I recall the passages on this subject from André Breton's Nadja. Breton's surrealist novel is filled with vociferous protests against the evils of work. Work in a factory; work in an office—nothing for Breton could be more foul and debasing than these. And the reason, fundamentally, is one that proceeds from his aesthetic theory. He argues that the best to be had in one's art, as in life, is that which comes to one without effort—it is when those mysterious connections, those occult communications we have been discussing, suddenly arrive unbidden. To try to form them with intention would be to destroy them. Effort kills. Only when one is not trying to find them at all will they condescend to appear. Hence, work is the enemy. "The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life's meaning," writes Breton, "—that event which I may not yet have found, but on whose path I seek myself—is not earned by work." (Richard Howard trans.)  

What Breton seems to be telling us is that whatever mysteries we will unlock or whatever secrets or occult truths will be vouchsafed to our consciousness in life, they are only the ones that will come to us without our choosing. What we are meant to do, what we are put here to do (metaphorically speaking) is whatever comes to us without volition, effort, or intention. This is a frustrating truth, perhaps, but one familiar to everyone who has attempted something creative. The muse either speaks or is silent. One can deliberately try to think of an idea for years and come up empty, whereas the best ideas one will ever have are those that come to one unsought and unprompted. As Emerson once put it, in the first of his lectures on Representative Men, "every one can do his best thing easiest." All one can do, therefore, is wait in a condition of readiness. One can raise one's antenna so as to receive the secret radio signals from the "events" of one's private consciousness. 

Since this is all one can do anyways, then one does not need to spend another moment worrying about the conflict between "art" and "life." One simply does not choose. One lives one's life anyways, because one has no alternative. One lives because it is inevitable. But the reality of that life is not to be compared to the importance of those secret moments when something profound and inexpressible is conveyed to one. It is really for the sake of the latter that one lives—the rest is just waiting. As Hesse observes in Steppenwolf, even the life of a Mozart, say, was permitted to play host to only periodic visitations of genius—and we can only guess at what hells of anticipation must have filled the intervals, while he was waiting for her next arrival.