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IMAGE, METAPHOR, SYMBOL, MYTH

Theory of Comparative Literature by Wellek and Warren.

The Articles illuminate how Myth Image and Symbol serve as an interdisciplinary field in the study of Literature and how possible literary comparisons could be made.

I. 1. Poems – classified by their subject matter or themes.

2. Next we go on to ask what kind of discourse poetry is.

3. We identify the 1 meaning of a poem – with its whole complex of structures.

4. We then encounter – as central poetic structure – a sequence represented by Image, Metaphor, Symbol & Myth

5. The two main organizing principles of poetry – are metre & metaphor (they ‘belong’ together – expounded by Coleridge in Biographia Literaria

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1) Semantically they overlap – they point to the same area of interest.

2) The sequence – Image< metaphor, Symbol, Myth – may represent the convergence of two lines (both important for the theory of poetry) 1. Sensuous particularity – This connects poetry with music and painting and disconnects poetry from philosophy and science. 2. Figuration or ` topology ‘– discourse which speaks in metonyms and metaphors.

3) These two are characteristics of literature, in contrast to scientific discourse.

4) Instead of aiming at system of abstractions poetry organizing a unique, unrepeatable pattern of words, each an object as well as a sign

IMAGERY

1) Imagery belongs both to psychology and to literary study.

2) Psychology – In psychology the word `image’ means a mental reproduction / a memory / of a past experience / not necessarily a visual be not usual only.

3) There are numerous classifications given by psychologists and aestheticians. There are not only

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a. ‘gustatory (taste) and ‘olfactory’ (smell) images but there are b . thermal images & presence images (kinesthetic, (sense of movement and tension) ‘hap tic’ (touch), ‘empathetic’ (identification with others feelings, etc.)

4) There is a distinction between sativa imagery and ` kinetic ‘or ` dynamic ‘imagery

5) The use of color imagery may or may not be traditionally or privately symbolic.

6) Synaesthetic imagery translates from one sense into another (that is, sound into color)

7) ‘Tied’ imagery – auditory & muscular imagery (aroused even through one reads to oneself)

` Free ‘imagery – visual (varying from person to person)

The efficiency of an image of comes from its being ‘a relict’ a representation of a sensation’.

ANALOGY AND COMPARISION

1) Visual images are not to be looked for un descriptive poetry.

2) Egs Pound, defined the ` image ‘not as a pretorial representation but as ‘that – which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, a ` unification of disparate ideas

3) Eliot says that `Dante’s is a visual imagination.

4) Dante is an allegorist and for a competent poet.

5) On the other hand Milton is a - audiologic imagination ex. The visual imagery in ‘L‘Allegro and ‘Il Penseroso’, is all general – this is on particularity and the union of words.

6) the visual image is a sensation / a perception, but it also ‘stands for ‘something ‘invisible’ something ‘inner’.

7) It can be both presentation and representation at once. Ex: ‘The black bat night has flown’ …. ‘Yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity’.

8) The image may exist as ` description ‘(as in the ex) or as ‘metaphor’

9) But, are not images seen by the mind’s eye ‘be symbolic’.

10) Is not every perception selective?

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SIMILIE AND METAPHOR

1) So Middleton Murray who thinks of simile ‘and metaphor’ as associated with the formal classification of rhetoric advises the use of image ‘as a term to include both.

2) But he warns that we must not think of image as only ‘visual’

3) The image may be visual, may be auditory of wholly psychological

4) In writers like Shakespeare, Emily Bronte and Poe we can see that the settings is a metaphor of a symbol

5) ex. The raging sea, the storm, the wild moa, the decaying castle.

SYMBOL

1) Like image ‘, symbol, has given this name to a specific literary movement.

2) Like image’, it continues to appear in different contexts and different purposes.

3) It appears as term in logic in mathematics, in semantics, in epistemology.

4) It is also used in theology, (symbol is the synonym for creed)

5) It is used in fine arts and poetry.

6) In all these it is something standing far ‘representing something else ‘

Does Symbol differ from ‘Image’ and ‘Metaphor’

1) We think in the re recurrence persistence of a symbol.

2) An image may be invoked once as a metaphor ‘but if it persistently recurs both as presentation part of symbolic mythic system.

3) For ex. In Blake’s lyrics the songs of Innocence and of Experience ‘there is little actual symbolism, but there is abundant use of symbolic metaphor.

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Poetic Symbolism

Whenever poetic symbolism is discussed, distinction is made between private symbolism ‘of the modern poet and the intelligible symbolism ‘of past poets.

Private Symbolism

1) The phrase was first an indictment.

2) It implies a system and a careful student can construe a private symbolism ‘as a cryptographer can decode an alien message.

Natural Symbolism

1) Most poems use natural symbols – the reference of which we find it difficult to control: we think of ‘The Road not taken’, ‘The mountain’, miles to go before I sleep is literally true of the traveler we assume.

2) But in the language of natural symbolism to sleep ‘is to die’

3) Because of his natural symbolism, Frost has drawn a wide audience.

Myth

Myth ‘appears in Aristotle’s poetics as the word for plot, narrative, structure, fable’

2) Its antonym is logos.

3) The myth is narrative, story.

4) Myth is a favorite term of modern civilize, and it paints to an important are of meaning \, should by religion, folklore, anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis and fine arts.

5) In the 17th and 18th c the term myth was fiction – scientifically or historically untrue.

6) The emphasis shifted and myth is a kind of truth or equivalent of truth, not a competition to historic or scientific truth.

7) Historically myth is spoken part of ritual – the story which the ritual enacts.

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8) The ritual is performed for a society by its priestly representative.

9) It is an agendum, which is recurrently, permanently necessary. (Like various customs of culture)

10) But in under sense myth means an anonymously composed story telling of origins and destinies, the pedagogies images of the native and destiny of man

Literary Theory

1) For literary theory, the important motives are probably the image or picture, the social, the supernatural, the narrative or story………

2) Today appeal to myth may centre on any of these.

3) If the creator’s |authorship is forgotten – it will give the status as myth.

4) Today the terms points to an area of meaning – we hear of poets and painters in search of a mythology,

-We hear of the myth ‘progress of democracy

-We hear of the return of myth in world literature.

Yet we also hear that one can’t create of myth.

5) For an imaginative writer, the need for myth is a sign of his felt need for communion with his society, for recognized status as artist functioning in society.

6) For many writers, myth is the common denominator between poetry and religion.

7) There is a modern new (represented by M. Arnold and I. A. Richards that poetry will take the place of the supernatural religion.

8) But poetry cannot take the place of religion. It can scarcely survive it.

9) Religion is the greater mystery, poetry the lesser.

10) Religious myth is the large – scale another pattern of poetic metaphor.

Form and Matter

1) Image metaphor, symbol, myth call or attention to the aspects of a literary work which bridge’ and blind’ two divisive components – Form ‘and Matter’

2) These terms indicate the pull of poetry towards picture’ and world ‘on the one hand religion of weltanschauung (comprehensive philosophic world view) on the other.

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3) In the many years of literary study, theory and practice have been pursued.

4) There have been attempts at reducing, all minutely, subdivided figures – a) schemes’ & tropes b) sound figures ‘and sense figures’ 3) speech ‘or verbal form figures of thought’.

5) Tropes ‘of poetry can be divided into figures of contiguity and figures of similarity.

6) Traditional figures of contiguity are – metonymy and synecdoche.

7) Each period style has its own characteristics figures experience of its weltanschauung in the care of basic figures like metaphor, each period has its own kind of metaphoric method.

Poetic Imagery (Henry wells pub. 1924)

1) Wills present seven types of imagery arranged in his own order – a) the Decorative b) The sunken c) The violent d) The Radical e) The Intensives f) The Expansive g) The exlcbevant . (they may be rearranged according to – historical and evaluative hints given by Wells.

2) The indent forms aesthetically are the violent and the decorative or the metaphor the masses’.

3) The decorative image – in Sydney’s Arcadia – is typically Elizabethan.

4) Fustian – constitutes a large and socially important body of metaphor’.

5) Exuberant image – is a subtler version of the violent.

6) Intensives – a subtler version of the decorative. (neatly visualizable image)

7) Sunken – image of classical poetry.

8) Radical – image of metaphysical.

9) Expansive – image of predominantly of Shakespeare, Bacon, Broun.

Einfuhlung (empathy)

The ultimate type of metaphoric intuition,

1) It is divided into the mystic ‘and the magic’ (from the mystics)

2) Magical – magical metaphor is interpreted after the fashion of the art historian Warmonger as an abstraction from the world of nature.

3) Anthropologists find both animism and magic in primitive cultivars.

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4) Animism- seeds to reach, preoperative, persuade, and unite into personalized spirits.

Magic – studies has laws of power exerted by things – sacred words, amulets, rods, wands, images, relies.

4) There is white magic and Black magic. White magic – by Christian cabbalists. Black magic – evil men

5) The mystical metaphor and magic are both de – animating. They summon up the other ‘– the impersonal world of things, monumental Art, physical law.

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