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Types of Symbols
Symbols are often classified as being traditional, original, or private, depending on the source of the associations that provide their meanings.
1. TRADITIONAL SYMBOLS. ‘Traditional symbols’ are those whose associations are the common property of a society or a culture and are so widely recognized and accepted that they can be said almost universal. The symbolic associations that generally accompany the forest and the sea, the moon and the sun, night and day, the colors black, white and red, and the seasons of the year are examples of traditional symbols. They are so much a part of our culture that we take their significance pretty much for granted. A special kind of traditional symbols is the “archetype”, a term that derives from anthropologist James G. Frazer’s famous study of myth and ritual The Golden Bough (1890-1915) and then depth psychology of Carl Jung. (Jung holds that certain symbols are so deeply rooted in the repeated and shares experiences of our common ancestors – he refers to them as the “collective unconsciousness” of the human race – as to evoke an immediate and strong, if unconscious, response in any reader). Conrad’s use of blackness in “Heart of Darkness”, with its obvious overtone of mystery, evil, and Satanism, is in example of an archetypal symbol. Stories which focus on the initiation of the young – for example, Sherwood Anderson’s I Want to Know Why, James Joyce’s Araby, Flannery O’Connor’s Artificial Nigger, and Katherine Anne Porter’s The Grave – all carry with them archetypal overtones; Frazer discovered that such rites of passage exist everywhere in the cultural patterns of the past and continue to exert a powerful influence on the patterns of our own behavior.
2. ORIGINAL SYMBOLS. ‘Original symbols’ are those whose associations are neither immediate nor traditional; instead, they derive their meaning, largely if not exclusively, from the context of the work in which they are used. Melville’s white whale is an original symbol, for white whales are often associated in the popular imagination with brute strength and cunning, Moby Dick assumes his larger, metaphysical significance (for Ahab he is the pasteboard mask behind which lurks the pent-up malignity of the universe) only within the contextual limits of Melville’s novel. Outside that novel, a whale is just a whale.
3. PRIVATE SYMBOLS. ‘Private symbols’ restrict the source of their meaning even more that original symbols. Just as all of us have certain objects in our lives that call to mind a variety of private associations (the way a family heirloom does), certain authors employ symbols that are the products of their own peculiar and idiosyncratic systems of philosophy or belief, as is the case with a number of the symbols found in the poetry of William Blake and William Butler Yeats. Private symbols, by virtue of their source, are esoteric and largely unintelligible, except to those whom the author or the author’s critics and interpreters have succeeded in educating. Fortunately, most of the symbols that the average reader encounters are either traditional or original. The presence of traditional symbols, it should be noted, does not mean that we are free to ignore the framing context of the work and to impose from the outside one pattern or another as we see fit. Traditional symbols, for all their accompanying associations, must always be established by the context of the work and find their significance inside the work, not beyond it.