336
PARTISAN REVIEW
larization of our world. For the transfer of meaning to the image
does not arise, as
in
the case of the less pretentious metaphor, from
a daring comparison.
It
stems from the world of faith, myth, legend,
f.airy tale, magic. It is a parallel, with magic as connecting link. In
The Golden Bowl
the fairy tale elements are clearly visible through
the modern disguise. The beautiful daughter of the (dollar-King )
father who is looking for a son-in-law; the motif of the wedding gift
with the secret flaw or curse, which is rendered harmless by clever–
ness and persistence-these are age-old fairy tale situations, familiar
in a thousand variations. There is even an interesting variation of the
wicked stepmother motif. It is this world of fairy tale and myth to
which the symbol traces its origin, and it has maintained the closest
relationship with it down to this day. It is no coincidence that myth–
ological and legendary motifs, which the early realistic novel would
have rejected, appear today in the novel together with the symbol.
How strong is the connection between modern symbolism and its
mythological origins is apparent from Eliot's "Notes on The Waste
Land." Not only the title," Eliot writes, "but the plan and a good
deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by
Miss Jessie
L.
Weston's book on the Grail legend,
From Ritual to
Romance."
As
a further source Eliot mentions Frazer's
Golden
Bough.
After all, meaning and image are not comparable in rational
terms; the connection between them is metasensory.
Even when the symbolic novel does not make use of more or
less disguised mythological material, it tends to draw its images from
the realms of religion and myth. And this is not so simply because
the most striking images are to be found in religion and myth but
rather because it is only these realms that provide an authoritative
interpretation of the symbol through the belief, or at least a memory
of the belief, that genuinely links meaning and image. Symbols with–
out such a mythological past are private inventions, and as such
they cannot be counted on to affect our imagination. Virginia
Woolf's lighthouse and Eliot's cocktails are feeble results of private
symbol-making, as are the railway terminals and gas stations which
have recently been so popular as symbols of man's homelessness. On
the other hand, when Henry James uses not any random precious
object with a crack in
it
as his symbol, but a golden bowl, he es–
tablishes a connection with our memories of the sacred symbol of the
