Like any specialty, literary analysis is full of specialized terms, and many of them are terms, and like any, there is sometimes a disjunction between the term as it is used by specialists and the term at it is used by people every day. I thought it might be useful to write a series of short articles defining and explaining some of these terms. This time: symbolism.
The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms gives a helpful definition of symbolism the begins by saying that the simplest meaning of a symbol is just something that stands for something else. We can distinguish here between what is literal—that is, it means exactly and only what it is—and what is figurative—or it has meanings beyond itself.
Now in this sense, almost everything we interact with is symbolic. It is a cliché that humans are meaning-making machines, but cliché or not it’s such a part of human nature to make meaning of our world that it is hard to think of examples of things that are completely literal, especially if we want to nitpick about it.
The collection of lights on your screen that you are looking at right now is arranged into shapes. Each of those shapes represents a sound. So we might say that the shapes are symbols. They are arbitrarily linked to sounds, which themselves are arbitrarily linked to meaning.
In literary circles, though, we would usually call that kind of direct simple arbitrary link between a thing an a meaning a sign rather than a symbol.
This tree is symbolic of literary terms
In a literary context, symbols are usually images that strongly suggest a particular idea that is distinct from their literal meaning. So a particular collection of shapes suggests the idea of a tree; that is a sign. But that tree, like the tree in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is connected to the idea of a person’s life and thriving; that is symbolism.
We can distinguish symbolism from metaphor. Metaphor is a comparison—the tree of my argument is growing too many branches and needs to be pruned. There isn’t actually a tree anywhere in my sentence, I’m just implying that my argument is like a tree, but nevertheless the comparison is stated relatively explicitly and directly.
Symbolism is usually implicit rather that explicit. The image is associated with an idea rather than directly compared to it.
I will return to symbolism in a future article, and when I do I’ll write about how we can also distinguish between symbolism and allegory, the difference between archetypal symbols and contextual symbols, and more.