IMAGE, SYMBOL, MYTH

Lecture notes by S. Sreekumar

In our study of poetry/drama and prose fiction, we come across these words quite frequently. However, many students have only vague ideas about the exact meaning of these terms. In this post, we are trying to give simple, lucid explanations for these three terms.

Image

‘Image’ has given us a literary movement. [Please refer to Imagism in the earlier posts].

The word ‘image’ means a mental reproduction, a memory of a past sensational or perceptual experience, not necessarily visual.

Images are used for analogy and comparison. Ezra Pound defines the image as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, a ‘unification of disparate ideas’.

Types of images

The visual image——This is a sensation or perception. It also ‘stands for’/ refers to something invisible, something ‘inner’. It can be both presentation and representation at once.

Example——‘the black bat night has flown’—— is both presentation and representation.

Auditory image­—— the mental representation of any sound and it is vital in imagining and feeling a situation

Example—— ‘At the next table a woman stuck her nose in a novel; a college kid pecked at a laptop’.

Olfactory image——evokes our sense of smell.

Example—— "I was awakened by the strong smell of freshly brewed coffee”.

Gustatory——image that appeals to our sense of taste

Example——"Tumbling through the ocean water... Mark unintentionally took a gulp of the briny, bitter mass, causing him to cough and gag.

Tactile——image which appeals to the sense of touch

Example—— “The bed linens might just as well be ice and the clothes snow”.

Kinesthetic——describes the sense of movement or tension.

Example—— "Tossing their heads in sprightly dance". [Wordsworth]

Organic imagery——Organic imagery concentrates on recreating internal sensations like hunger, thirst, fear or fatigue.

Example—— 'It's when I'm weary of considerations/ And life is too much like a pathless wood.' [Robert Frost]

SYMBOL

Like ‘Image’, the symbol has given us a specific literary movement [symbolist Movement].  The term also appears in different contexts with very different purposes. It appears in logic, mathematics, semantics and semiotics. It has also a long history in theology.

The shared element in all the current uses of symbol is probably that of something standing for, representing, something else. But the Greek verb (symbol= to throw together, to compare) suggests that the idea of analogy between sign and signified was originally present. The sense still survives—-the intrinsic relation between ‘sign’ and ‘signified’: the cross, the lamb, the Good Shepherd.

Differences between symbol and image

Symbol is recurrent and persistent.

An image may be invoked once as a metaphor. But if it persistently recurs, it becomes a symbol.

Private Symbolism and Traditional Symbolism

Private symbolism is a system designed by a particular writer. A writer can construe a private symbolism as a cryptographer can decode an alien message. Blake and Yeats used private symbols. Private symbols, sometimes, overlap traditional symbols.

Traditional/natural symbolism

Frost uses natural symbols. In ‘Stopping by Woods’, ‘miles to go before I sleep’ is literally true of the traveler. However, in the language of natural symbolism, ‘to sleep’ is to die.

MYTH

In Aristotle’s Poetics, myth means plot, narrative structure and fable. Its antonym is ‘logos’. Myth is narrative story as against dialectical discourse or exposition.

Myth is irrational, intuitive as against the systematically philosophical.

‘It is the tragedy of Aeschylus as against the dialectic of Socrates’.

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries the term had an unhappy connotation: a myth was a fiction—scientifically/ historically untrue.

However, after the German Romanticists, Coleridge, Emerson, and Nietzsche it has become an equivalent of truth—not a competitor to historic or scientific truth but a supplement.

Historically, myth follows ritual. It is the spoken part of the ritual. It is the story the ritual enacts. It is an ‘agendum’ which is always necessary for harvests and human fertility, for initiating the young into their society’s culture and a proper provision for the future of the dead.

It is also an explanation a society offers its young of why the world is and why we do as we do.

Does modern man lack myth?

Nietzsche said that Socrates and the Sophists^*, the ‘intellectuals’ had destroyed the life of the Greek culture.

Similarly Enlightenment destroyed the Christian mythology.

Others think the modern man as having shallow or perhaps even ‘false’ myths of ‘progress’ or of equality, or of universal education.

For many writers myth is a common denominator between poetry and religion. Poetry cannot take the place of religion since it cannot survive for a long time. “Religion is the greater mystery; poetry, the lesser”.

·       A Paid teacher of philosophy especially one associated with moral skepticism and specious reasoning.

Lecture notes by Dr. S. Sreekumar