Symbolism
Symbolism And The Unconscious
Symbolism was part of a wider cultural trend in which the order, clarity, and hierarchy that had long been associated with traditional academic art were replaced by modes of representation that focused instead on experimentation with representational form and an emphasis on individual sensibility. In this sense, symbolism is connected to Impressionism in painting and naturalism in literature. In fact, many symbolist artists emerged from this naturalist milieu. Unlike naturalism, however, symbolism emphasizes the sensuous suggestiveness of language and form and the tendency of this suggestiveness to solicit individual interpretations from viewers and readers. Because symbolism suggested rather than instructing or describing, and because its subjects were so often themselves dreamlike, it seemed to open the door to a proliferation of fantasies in its audience. Thus the symbolist project was part of broader challenges to the notion of the autonomous human subject—a male subject for whom thought and representation had the potential to be transparent. When the boundaries of this traditional male subject position were opened up, many consequences, both aesthetic and political, followed.
The symbolist movement was one element in a general reconceptualization of human subjectivity that took place just as the existence of the unconscious mind was being imagined by psychologists and sociologists. One salient example of this theorization of the unconscious and the consequent questioning of the nature of subjectivity is to be found in the popular fascination with hysteria, hypnosis, and "suggestion." The power of suggestion was thought to be especially strong when the subject had a weak or nervous personality (for example, children, primitives, and women). There was much debate over whether "normal" men with strong personalities were also subject to the suggestion of others. In 1891, Alfred Fouillee summed up the consequences of recent psychological discoveries, saying "contemporary psychology has wrested from us the illusion of a bounded, impenetrable, and absolutely autonomous ego (p. 811). The discovery of the unconscious led to the possibility that human beings were not truly in control of their thoughts and actions. Works of art were deemed to have the potential to open their audiences to a suggestibility analogous to the state of hypnosis. Thus, paradoxically, the symbolist rejection of material reality in favor of the world of dream took shape at approximately the same time empirical science was confirming the importance of fantasy in daily life.
Conservative critics such as Ferdinand Brunetière in France or Max Nordau in Germany worried that symbolist work, with its incantatory echoing sounds and forms and its refusal to point readers or viewers to clear edifying messages, might encourage a loss of control not only in the artists who produced it but in the audiences who experienced it. Brunetière believed the aesthetic experience should serve as an edifying point of focus for the reasoning mind. He charged that the "empty forms" and "hollow rattling words" of symbolism would "dissolve the unity of the self in a diversity of successive states … give it over to the wandering voluptuousness of dream," which would lead to "the glorification of egoism" rather than the betterment of society (Shaw, p. 192). Nordau's book Degeneration described symbolism as a symptom of a general decline in Western civilization. Yet the very qualities that critics such as Nordau abhorred were the things that made symbolism a turning point in the arts. Symbolism opened new aesthetic possibilities of experimentation and abstraction and created space for alternative subject positions. It created the possibility, that is to say, for many of the wide range of avant-garde movements that followed in the early twentieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mal. Edited by James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
———. Les Fleurs du Mal: The Complete Text of The Flowers of Evil. Translated by Richard Howard. Brighton, U.K.: Harvester; Boston: D. R. Godine, 1982.
Brunetiere, Ferdinand. "Le Symbolisme Contemporaine." Revue des deux mondes (1 April 1891): 685–686.
Denis, Maurice. Theories, 1890–1910: Du symbolisme et de Gauguin vers un novel ordre classique. Paris: L. Rouart and J. Watelin, 1920.
Dorra, Henri, ed. Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Fouille, Alfred. "Les grandes conclusions de la psychologie contemporaine: la conscience et ses transformations." Revue des deux mondes 107, 1891.
Harrison, Charles, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds. Art in Theory, 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998.
Huret, Jules. Enquete sur l'evolution littéraire. Paris: G. Charpentier and E. Fasquelle, 1984.
Hustvelt, Asti. The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de Siècle France. New York: Zone, 1998.
Huysmans, Joris-Karl. Against Nature. Translated by Margaret Mauldon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Kahn, Gustave. "Response des Symbolistes." L'evenement (28 September 1886).
Mallarmé, Stéphane. Selected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Mary Ann Caws. New York: New Directions, 1982.
Mangravite, Andrew, ed. An Anthology of French Symbolist and Decadent Writing Based upon The Book of Masks by Rémy de Gourmont. London: Atlas, 1995.
Moréas, Jean. "Le Symbolisme. Manifeste de Jean Moréas." In Les premieres arms du Symbolisme. Paris: Leon Varnier, 1889.
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Translation of Entartung (1892).
Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Work. Translated by Paul Schmidt. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Verlaine, Paul. One Hundred and One Poems by Paul Verlaine: A Bilingual Edition. Translated by Norman R. Shapiro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Block, Jane. Les XX and Belgian Avant-Gardism, 1868–1894. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984.
Bowlt, John E. The Silver Age: Russian Art of the Early Twentieth Century and the "World of Art" Group. Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1979.
Cooke, Peter. "French and European Perspectives." In Symbolism, Decadence, and the Fin de Siècle, edited by Patrick McGuinness, 122–143. Exeter, U.K.: University of Exeter Press, 2000.
Cordulack, Shelley Wood. Edvard Munch and the Physiology of Symbolism. London: Associated University Press, 2002.
Deak, Frantisek. Symbolist Theater: The Formation of an Avant-Garde. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Debussy, Claude. Monsieur Croche et autres écrits. Edited by François Lesure. Paris: Gallimard, 1971.
Dellamora, Richard. Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Druick, Douglas W. et al. Odilon Redon: Prince of Dreams, 1840–1916. New York: Harry N. Abrams/Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1994.
Eisenman, Stephen F. Gauguin's Skirt. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997.
Fulcher, Jane F., ed. Debussy and His World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Hollier, Denis, ed. A New History of French Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. See especially pages 723–819.
Kearns, James. Symbolist Landscapes: The Place of Painting in the Poetry and Criticism of Mallarmé and His Circle. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1989.
Lacambre, Geneviève. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream. Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1999.
Marlais, Michael. Conservative Echoes in Fin-de-Siècle Parisian Art Criticism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.
Mathieu, Pierre-Louis. The Symbolist Generation, 1870–1910. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.
Matthews, Patricia. Passionate Discontent: Creativity, Gender, and French Symbolist Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Peterson, Ronald E. A History of Russian Symbolism. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993.
Prettejohn, Elizabeth, ed. After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999.
Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty's Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Pyman, Avril. A History of Russian Symbolism. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Shaw, Jennifer L. Dream States: Puvis de Chavannes, Modernism, and the Fantasy of France. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.
Smith, Richard Cándida. Mallarmé's Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Weisenberger, Edward, ed. The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985. New York: Abbeville, 1986.
Jennifer L. Shaw
Additional topics
Science EncyclopediaScience & Philosophy: Swim bladder (air bladder) to ThalliumSymbolism - Symbolism In French Literature, Symbolism And Music, Les Vingt And Belgian Symbolism, Russian Symbolism