Meaning, characteristics and exponents of symbolism, a 19th century movement that manifested itself in literature and art.
SYMBOLISM, DECADENTISM
To give a correct definition of Symbolism , one must first introduce the concept of Decadentism . This term designates several phenomena: a cultural current that developed in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century; at the same time, a series of aesthetic and literary attitudes that spread in the late nineteenth century. This current is closely related to other contemporary ones, such as aestheticism , Parnassianism and Symbolism . Aestheticism is an artistic and literary movement of the second half of the nineteenth century. One of its characteristics is the extreme cult of beauty and art, and its motto can be the formula “art for art’s sake”, that is, the exaltation of art for itself, separated from any moral and social context and conditioning. Its organic and integral development can be found precisely from Parnassianism onwards. The latter can designate all the expressions of modern classicism and aestheticizing cult of beauty, which reveal a basis of mythical and nostalgic yearning: therefore they hide a decadent sensibility. Every classicism, in the modern era, contains, if you look closely, an opposite face of restlessness that we can generically call decadent. From the tumultuous and disorderly movement of the décadents, symbolism was born : in 1886 an article, Le Symbolisme , by Jean Moréas was published . Around these two movements, decadentism and symbolism , converge broader cultural lines that testify to a taste and a culture spread throughout Europe and that contextualize the two movements within a wider context.
EUROPEAN SYMBOLISM: CHARACTERISTICS AND EXPONENTS
Symbolism was born in France in 1886 with Jean Moréas , René Ghil and Stéphane Mallarmé and the lessons of these symbolists quickly went beyond national borders. In Great Britain , the highly original lyric poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins developed , a Jesuit priest and preacher who was able to blend his profound Christian religiosity with a bold linguistic and stylistic experimentation. The symbolist influence is also noticeable in a large part of contemporary poetry; not exempt from it, to name just one, is the lyric poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot , one of the greatest English poets whose lesson greatly influenced Eugenio Montale . In Russia, at the time particularly open to Western culture, the symbolist movement developed around some particularly important personalities: Ivanov , disciple of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche . Ivanov is one of the main protagonists of the cultural life of St. Petersburg between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, acting as a true “seer” of symbolism, which he understood as a privileged language capable of relating the human with the divine plan of existence. A more complex personality is Aleksandr Blok , the poet of the crisis of dissatisfaction and inner torment, who comes to deny symbolism after having been one of its greatest lyric and theoretical exponents (one of his important critical essays is The Current Situation of Russian Symbolism , 1910). Not even the German-speaking world remains foreign to the symbolist revolution.
We remember names like Stefan George who frequents Mallarmé’s group in Paris and fights with positivism and naturalism in the name of a poetics in which the contingent plane of matter is clearly contrasted with an eternal world of immaterial perfection, of which the poet is, even before being a singer, the priest. Benn also deserves a mention , a contradictory personality of novelist and poet who delves into the depths of the unconscious in search of the true identity of man and a more authentic relationship with nature. In the world of the Spanish language the echo of the symbolist lesson is felt very strongly in Rubén Darìo who frequents the masters of symbolism in Paris . They exercise a profound influence on his youthful lyricism, characterized by a refined and sensual descriptivism of aestheticizing taste. We also remember Antonio Machado who is able to harmonize the dictates of decadent aesthetics with a shared and emotional attention to the rhythms and themes of the folklore of his country.
PASCOLI SYMBOLISM
The refuge in the “nest” of domestic affections . Among the symbols of Pascoli’s poetry, the most important is that of the “ nest ”. Pascoli depicts the nest as a warm cell, bristling with thorns on the outside, but welcoming on the inside:
“ how rough it is on the outside, roots and twigs,
but on the inside it is all wool and lichen .” (From the Canti di Castelvecchio).
The father has the task of providing food, the mother that of anxiously guarding the sacred place. From the image of the nest that of the cradle is born. This positive image seems to spring from a negative context: the nest is in fact primarily a refuge, protected by mutual complicity, against the evil of the world, mourning and violence. The story seems bad to the poet: the father was killed by blind violence. The image of the nest is regularly accompanied by impending dangers, as if to confirm that only in the nest can one live; outside there is loneliness and misunderstanding. Certainly, one can speak, with regard to Pascoli, of an infantile attitude, of rejection of adult life and ultimately of reality. In this context, every departure from the nest is a betrayal: Pascoli declares this in “Per sempre”, speaking of his sister Ida’s engagement.
The reason for death . Linked to the symbolic chain of the nest is the presence of the family dead. The dear dead are tenaciously tied to the nest and continue to return there. In “ La voce ” and in “ Canti di Castelvecchio ” the mother’s voice comes to urge the poet, then in prison, not to commit suicide, because he must support his sisters and because he must avenge his father’s death. All of Pascoli’s symbolism arises from an attempt to escape death, to exorcise it; the most terrifying enemy of the nest is not other men or the evil of history but death.
Against this obsessive presence Pascoli deploys his many symbols – the nest, the return to the cradle, the bells, the voices of the birds, the conversation with the dead, the flowers of the countryside – as a dam against death.
But the latter pervades landscapes, situations, destinies and is found everywhere. If Leopardi invited knowledge, whatever the cost, Pascoli arrives at the opposite result: it is better not to know, not to understand; better therefore not to act.
D’ANNUNZIO’S SYMBOLISM
The identification between life and works . When Gabriele D’Annunzio , very young, enters the literary scene, the culture of aestheticism prevails, to which he conforms in everything: in his works, precious from every point of view (style, language and content) and in his private life: the very elegant clothing, the famous love affairs with beautiful, well-known and often extravagant women, the luxurious houses, the worldly and daring sports: from horses, to dog racing, to the automobile and the airplane, following technological progress with great timeliness.
Another fact to underline is the great readiness of D’Annunzio in assimilating cultural and literary novelties and in transporting them to Italy, mostly from France. His culture proceeds according to the most up-to-date European experiences, until it takes possession of the myth of Nietzsche’s superman in the nineties . In the preface to the short novel “ Giovanni Episcopo ” (1981) D’Annunzio writes: “Either renew yourself or die!”. These words can be considered as the manifesto of his entire career, distinguished by a continuous renewal of forms, themes, and ways. Within the “renewal” it should be noted that D’Annunzio is the Italian writer most sensitive to the symbolist and decadent European culture which, in various forms and always initially relying on foreign models, he transplants to Italy and brings to life in his works. From this derives both the constant attention, increasingly marked, to symbolism, hidden beneath reality; and the very high power attributed to the word and to writing.
THE PLEASURE
Il Piacere is D’Annunzio’s first novel and was written in Francavilla, Abruzzo, in the house “Il Convento” in 1889. Il Piacere is ofa symbolist natureand imbued withdecadent culture. The story includes a contemporary hero, an aristocratic and cultured aesthete, Andrea Sperelli; in a splendidly evoked Rome, he is torn between his passion for his elusive former lover, Elena Muti, who has reappeared in the city now married after having suddenly abandoned him two years earlier, and the charm of a woman of a completely different kind, the pure and faithful Maria Ferres, recently met in the country residence of his cousin, when Andrea is convalescing from a wound in a duel. The conclusion is tragic and affects the most innocent of the trio, Maria: her husband is discovered cheating and Maria is forced to leave Rome, after a final and dramatic love encounter with Andrea, who lets slip the name of his rival.
A symbolist novel . While it is true that reality is analyzed with attention to detail, the author’s attitude is nevertheless to grasp its most hidden aspects; he suggests that the universe and every facet of reality hide their secret, which is revealed to those who search for it with a restless and sensitive soul.
Here we find an echo of the theory of the symbol and of Baudelaire ‘s ” Correspondences ” . The consonance of the landscape with the various feelings of men is a symbolist element strongly insisted in “Pleasure”. The love triangle Andrea-Elena-Maria is also presented by the author in symbolic ways. In “Pleasure” he plays on the “doubling” of the sequences that see the two women on stage, creating continuous symmetries: both women in the meetings with Andrea prepare tea, both interrupted by Andrea’s kisses; Andrea’s first meeting with Elena is favored by his cousin, and so is his first meeting with Maria; on both occasions Andrea arrives anxious and excited, almost foreseeing the importance of the meeting; and again, Elena and Maria are very different, but united by one detail: the very similar voice, which Andrea uses in Maria to hear Elena again, just as he tries to get his new lover to give him caresses that remind him of the previous one.
SYMBOLISM IN ART
Symbolism is a current that exalts through a system of analogies and symbols the communication with a mystery hidden under the appearances of reality. The maximum of Charles Baudelaire and of French symbolism and post-symbolism, which penetrates Pascoli and D’Annunzio, is the technique of symbolic correspondences with which reality is explained. Among the eminent artists we find Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon .
Moreau and Redon are painters of French symbolism loved by Des Esseintes, the protagonist of the novel Against the Current by Joris-Karl Huysmans, for their refined aestheticism and symbolism. The novel describes the painting “ The Apparition ” by Gustave Moreau , in which we find a synthesis of the themes and aesthetic choices of the symbolist painters. The apparition represented constitutes a free elaboration of the biblical story of King Herod and John the Baptist. The true protagonist of the story becomes the female figure of Princess Salome who seduces the king with her dance, forcing him to execute John. Moreau seems to renounce, right from the title, a precise narrative restitution. In fact, we do not witness the unfolding of Salome’s dance nor the presentation of the martyr’s head by the executioner. The woman’s gesture is as if petrified and her left arm does not imperiously point, as in other versions, at the monarch or the executioner in the background, but is directed at the macabre apparition – which gives the painting its title – of John’s severed head. The head levitates magically in the center of the space, rising above the princess and irradiating the entire scene with a mystical and unreal light. The saintliness victim of lust symbolically represents the intellectual figure of the genius and the artist, prisoner and martyr of the vices of bourgeois society in which he cannot integrate.
Moreau seems to give shape to a new female archetype: his Salome does not remain relegated to an object of male desire or an instrument of political revenge, but exercises her charm as an instrument of an occult and primordial power that allows us to read her dance and the sacrifice of the Baptist as a precise liturgy.
The jewels and the crown of the princess, the lotus flower she holds in her right hand, the monumentality and the rich ornamental apparatus of the architectural environment: everything refers to an evocation of distant, oriental civilizations, testifying to the author’s meticulous study of every decorative detail.
