Symbolism and American Literature

by Charles Feidelson

1953: by C. Feidelson.

366 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1953

Reviews

[alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

tough sledding here. The section on Puritan thought absolutely sings though. A great exploration of the figurative, symbolic mind of Christian Millenarians in the wilderness. A great counterpoint to Perry Miller's two-volume"The New England Mind". The tough stuff is the exploration of Emerson's Transcendental theory. It really reminds me how his basic program outlined in essays like "Nature" and "The American Scholar" are pretty digestible in one read, but the more you read of him and drift away from the shore, the waters get murky quick and Feidelson is happy to tread all day there.

The long closing chapter on Melville is okay. Not sure why, but it didn't really click. It could be that the last handful of books I've read have closed with a long theory on Melville. But this one seemed particularly obtuse. And it centered around a reading of Pierre, which, try as I might, can not rustle up the energy to care about it.

So I'm a little all over the place on this one. I'll probably come back to it again later this year. Really great stuff in here, and some pretty impenetrable stuff. Guess I'll have to get smarter first then take another crack at it

[Steven Critelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Feidelson, Jr. was a member of the Yale University faculty from 1947 to 1988, when he retired as the Bodman Professor of English Literarature. He was a scholar's scholar and "stood at the head of the study and teaching of American literature and of literary modernism for 35 years," according to then-Dean Sidney Altman of Yale College. Symbolism and American Literature represents one of the pinnacles of 20th century scholarship and yields a remarkable history of the use of language in the first 250 years of American letters.

Feidelson begins with an review of Hawthorne's attempts to "open an intercourse with the world" somewhere between the realism of Anthony Trollope and the imaginative flights of romanticism. Although Hawthorne initially employed allegory, it proved an ineffective answer to his aesthetic goals; mainly because, in allegory, it was unnecessary to show that the parallel spheres of "ideas" and "things" were "real" or that reality consisted in their interaction. As Hawthorne found in The Scarelet Letter, the symbol imported a world of meaning that generations had lived with through time; symbolism "transcended analytic thought while suggesting the unconventional, the novel, the disorderly and potentially dangerous." Feidelson concludes his introductiary chapter with a view of the other end of the spectrum in symbolism's most potent practitioner, Whitman. As seen in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," symbols "behave like characters in a drama," not as objects to which the poet assigns meaning as in allegory. Although the poem is an elegy on Lincoln's death, Lincoln is seldom mentioned in the poem, whose main focus is the presentation of the poet's mind at work in the context of Lincoln's death.

In the antirationalist bent of romanticism, the world is subservient to the willful projection of emotion, whereas the symbolistic world explores not emotion, but a mode of existence that is the process of becoming. In many ways, however, Whitman dodged the impediments of "fierce enigmas" and "strangling problems" and never questioned his own proceedings. Melville, instead, saw these as advantages in his fictions. Symbolism, as Feidelson illustrates in Moby Dick, enhances our emotional and psychological connection to the work, not simply because of the tractable correspondences with reality being exemplified, but even more so because of the complexity and intractable paradoxes that appear the deeper we dive. This was Melville's principal disagreement with Emerson, who regarded the world of contradictions as "secondary," whereas they were primary fact in Melville's experience. Ahab knows his defiance of reason risks a strange perversion of outlook, but as "disappointed transcendentalist" he knows no other way of proceeding. Ahab's motives of vengeance against nature is a revolt from God, and in this way we understand how Ahab is the mortal version of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. Each character in Moby Dick has his own perception of and interaction with the symbol, which is readily seen in the "Doubloon" chapter where Ahab pledges the coin to the first man who spots the white whale. Poe now seems prescient by taking the concept of the symbol's contrarieties further, considering the poet a craftsman "deliberately constructing the vehicle of irrationality." So in "The Fall of the House of Usher" the deterioration of the Usher Mansion is reflected in the mental derangement of Roderick and his twin sister. Ahab's descent into madness mirrors that of Poe's antihero, and in both cases man fails in the face of the immutable symbol of the immortal, whether it be nature, God or art.

With symbolism, we develop a special awareness of the linguistic medium and literary structure. Unlike romanticism whose language is a vehicle for the expression of personal ideas and emotions, symbolistic language takes on an autonomous quality where, as I.A. Richards said, words "come together" as "the occasion and means of that growth which is the mind's endless endeavour to order itself. That is why we have language. It is no mere signalling system." The symbol "produces and posits a world of its own," but not in the sense of mere figures which refer to some given reality by means of suggestion and allegorical renderings. Feidelson elaborates, a "symbol stands as a kind of synecdoche for the metaphors into which it has entered." And we are introduced to more of the hydra-headed faces of symbolism, which irrevocably turn back to perspective and purpose. Quoting R.P. Blackmur, there is "no longer a question. . . of a self to be expressed or an external reality to be described but only of a medium to be exploited." This became the way of 20th century writers, so that Samuel Beckett could say of James Joyce, "his writing is not about something; it is that something itself."

One revelation of Feidelson's tome is that American symbolism was born principally as a reaction to the restrictive rationalist linguistic regimen of Pilgrim religious method and practice. The Puritans, in rejecting Roman Catholicism, jettisoned the entire Medieval view of language where words contained a multiplicity of meaning. [Dante operated in this tradition, considering The Divine Comedy a "polysemous" work having several meanings all converging in the literal one.] In their zeal to mate religious method to the currency of the scientific and rationalist one, rhetoric and figure were considered by their intellectual guide, Peter Ramus, as "mere decoration added to and presupposing a logical framework." The "Ramistic scheme offered no ground for functional symbolism." As Alfred North Whitehead observed, "nature in atomistic form grew upon the modern consciousness" by means of "high abstraction," as "products of logical discernment supervening upon the world as it is concretely experienced." Thus, Calvinist Protestantism was the "theological counterpart of the contemporary science, where the pattern of a simplistic logic issued in "the mechanism of God" was equivalent to the scientific method's issuing in the "mechanism of matter." This, of course, invalidated the organic structure of poetry and nullified the organic world of experience that poetry claims to render. Nevertheless, the mind's desire to locate latent harmonies was undeniable. Hence, a science of "typology" was developed by the Puritans to account for the correspondence between Old Testament and New (Adam and David as types of Christ; the deliverance from Egypt and Babylon foreshadowed the deliverance of the Church from the Antichrist). But "typical" thinking of a figurative nature was dangerous and subversive. Therefore, in Feidelson's judgment, a shadow was cast over American literature, so that the crudity and conventionality of American literature between 1640 and the third quarter of the 19th century was due to the "inherited mental habits that proscribed a functional artistic form." The symbolism of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne and Whitman was "an attempt to hew out such a form in defiance of the intellectual methods that denied its validity."

Feidelson has much more to tell about the birth of symbolism and the decline of Calvinistic Protestant linguistic practice, with significant helpings (or more) from Alexis de Tocqueville, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Horace Bushnell, Emerson, Thoreau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Melville again. The Postcript brings us into the 20th century with the relevant views of T.E. Hulme and T.S. Eliot. The book is a wonder of original scholarship, with approximately a third of the volume devoted to footnotes which not only annotate the magnificent plenitude of authoritative citations, but also elaborate on those citations with even more food for thought. I can say more in praise of Symbolism and American Literature, but even honor must make a seemly end.

[Gabriel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feidelson tries (and fails) to rein in the mass of contradiction that is "symbolism" by describing what it is not. Foolish approach? Yes it is. To give Feidelson credit, what he is trying to say seems much more interesting than what is said, precisely the rationale (not that there is one) behind symbolism.

This book only really picks up steam with the chapter on Melville, which is the last chapter of the book. It is nonetheless an interesting and "insightful" (oh boy!) read, as the jacket copy claims. In fact, it would behoove the potential reader of this book to start there and judge whether he/she wants to continue. It does a much better job of describing what Feidelson is after than any of the chapters that precede it, which can then cheerfully be treated as appendices.

I am giving Feidelson an extra star because I am still thinking about the book, still turning it over in my mind. Essentially, the book claims to synthesize and thereby create a unified "movement" in American Literature, which is completely beside the point for me (the idea of "movements" in literature). But the ideas that Feidelson claims for that movement are interesting nonetheless. And pretty well-founded, if explained poorly.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

The postscript of the book is the most understandable and informative part of the book, the rest is difficult to understand and is not clearly articulated.