SYMBOLISM AND THE
NOVEL
333
Le
rouge et Ie noir
with a quite full description of the small and
not especially interesting village of Verrieres. Verrieres is significant
only with respect to Julien Sorel. It constitutes the particular reality
into which he was born and which he tries to leave behind; in addi–
tion it is characteristic for petit-bourgeois life in provincial France
at that particular time. Or take Ippolito Nievo's great novel of 1867,
Confessions of an Octogenarian/
recently rediscovered in Italy, with
its description of the picturesque but shabby castle of Fratta, north
of Venice, where the hero, a penniless relative of the castellan, spent
his youth toward the end of the eighteenth century. Nievo depicts the
dilapidated towers, the archaic cavern of a kitchen, the incompetent
administrative hierarchy, the inhabitants of the castle and their di–
versions.
Are these symbols? In the specific sense, they are not. They
are genuine components of empirical reality, taken into the novel
as such components and not because they have the capacity to be
images. But they are components in which the forces that shape this
empirical reality concentrate and become visible. From this point of
view they are seen to concretize the meaning sought in reality. The
castle of Fratta, though not the village of Verrieres, comes close to
being a symbol. It is in a certain sense "a visible sign of something
invisible," insofar as it is taken to express forces that remain partially
invisible because they can only be conceived in the abstract. The old
castle, still managed in accordance with feudal custom, is among
other things also a symbol of the superannuated and chaotic condi–
tions prevailing in Italy at the time. Or better, it is the concrete and
particular expression of the ideas and forces that shape the reality,
and as such it can assume the functions of a symbol. The outstanding
difference between such "realistic" symbols and the symbols of mod–
em literature is that, unlike the latter, the former are not compact
images that make a single strong sensual impression, but are often
extensive and not easily delimitable segments of reality. In addition
they are always genuine components of reality, a:ctually to be found
in it (the true realist does not manipulate reality to produce them) ;
they are not indications added by the author simply to make his
meaning clear. This difference already shows the difference between
1 The original title of the posthumously published book was
Confessions of
GI'
Italian.
