But there is another element to symbolism if it is to function with full-bodied effectiveness in a work of art, and that is what has been called a “vital basis” provided by history and tradition. In the U.S. flag there is very little natural basis for symbolism; it is almost wholly conventional. But the fact that it has been saluted for so long, that it has been present on battlefields, that the bodies of military dead have been wrapped in it, and so on—that is, the fact that it has acquired a life, a history—has given it an “affect” (human emotion or mood) it did not have before. Melville and Tolstoy not only represented the whale and the train. They invested these representations with such strong emotional affect that readers are much more inclined than they would be otherwise to say that these objects are the symbols of the qualities ascribed to them.
When some item in a work of art is construed as a symbol, it is always infused with these vital qualities. Clearly, not every case of one thing standing for something else is a symbol in this sense. A carrot in a painting does not, just by itself, symbolize growth. But barbed-wire fences do symbolize tyranny, not only because many prisoners have been enclosed in barbed-wire fences (this is the natural basis for the symbolism) but also because of concentration camps and the countless tragic events of modern history that have provided the “vital basis” for the symbolism. Meaning
Do works of art have meaning? The answer depends once again on how the question is construed: the word “meaning” is an equivocal term that can itself mean many different things.
Clouds mean rain, a falling barometer means that a storm is coming, a twister in the sky means an approaching tornado—that is, the one is a sign of the other; these relations exist in nature and were discovered, not invented, by humans. On the other hand, a bell ringing means the end of class, this note on the score means that D-sharp is to be played on a certain instrument, and the word cat to someone who knows English means a certain species of domesticated quadruped; these relations are conventional, established by humans. But both the natural and the conventional items are examples of meaning in its most general sense—one thing (A) standing for another (B).
Since the medium of literature is words, and words are conventional vehicles of meaning, literature has meaning in a way that the other arts do not, since every word, to be a word at all, must have a meaning. In the sense in which the word cat means something, middle C and an ellipse do not have meanings at all.
When the question is asked about meaning in art, however, it is not usually the individual ingredients in it that are being referred to. If it were, the answer could simply be, “Yes, this word has a meaning and that word has. So does the sentence as a whole. And items in paintings sometimes have meaning; for example, the halo over the Madonna’s head symbolizes holiness.” What is being asked is whether the work of art as a whole has a meaning. But what does the question itself mean? Several different things can be meant: (1) “What is it about?”—in which case the question is about subject matter, already discussed. (2) “What is its theme?” For example, is the motion picture He Who Must Die (1957) really a parable about the life of Jesus? (3) “What is its thesis?” For example, what is the message of the Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) to the reader in “A Modest Proposal”? (4) Or the inquiry may be about the effects of a work of art on the recipient—either what these effects are or what they could or should be. In this sense, all works of art have meaning, since they all have effects (whether there is one type of effect that a given work of art should have is another question). This is, however, an extremely misleading use of the word meaning. Indeed, the entire discussion of “meaning in art” is a most confusing one—and the fault does not lie in art, but in the human users of words. Endless unnecessary mysteries can be created by using such nebulous words as meaning as if they were simple, straightforward, and susceptible to one interpretation. It would contribute greatly to the clarification of discussions of philosophy of art if the word meaning were not used in them at all but some conception clearer and more specific. Art as expression
The view that “art is imitation (representation)” has not only been challenged, it has been moribund in at least some of the arts since the 19th century. It was subsequently replaced by the theory that art is expression. Instead of reflecting states of the external world, art is held to reflect the inner state of the artist. This, at least, seems to be implicit in the core meaning of expression: the outer manifestation of an inner state. Art as a representation of outer existence (admittedly “seen through a temperament”) has been replaced by art as an expression of humans’ inner life.
But the terms express and expression are ambiguous and do not always denote the same thing. Like so many other terms, express is subject to the process-product ambiguity: the same word is used for a process and for the product that results from that process. “The music expresses feeling” may mean that the composer expressed human feeling in writing the music or that the music when heard is expressive (in some way yet to be defined) of human feeling. Based on the first sense are theories about the creation of art. Founded on the second are theories about the content of art and the completion of its creation. Expression in the creation of art
The creation of a work of art is the bringing about of a new combination of elements in the medium (tones in music, words in literature, paints on canvas, and so on). The elements existed beforehand but not in the same combination; creation is the re-formation of these pre-existing materials. Pre-existence of materials holds true of creation quite apart from art: in the creation of a scientific theory or the creation of a disturbance. It applies even to creation in most theologies, except some versions of Christian theology, in which creation is ex nihilo—that is, without pre-existing matter.
That creation occurs in various art mediums is an obvious truth. But once this is granted, nothing has yet been said about expression, and the expressionist would say that the foregoing statement about creation is too mild to cover what needs to be said about the process of artistic creation. The creative process, the expressionist wants to say, is (or is also) an expressive process, and for expression something more is necessary than that the artist be creating something. Great care must be taken at this stage: some say that the creation of art is (or involves) self-expression; others say that it is the expression of feeling, though not necessarily of one’s own feeling (or perhaps that and something more, such as the feeling of one’s race, or of one’s nation, or of all humanity); others say that it is not necessarily limited to feelings but that ideas or thoughts can be expressed, as they clearly are in essays. But the distinctively expressionist view of artistic creation is the product of the Romantic movement, according to which the expression of feelings constitutes the creation of art, just as philosophy and other disciplines are the expression of ideas. It is, at any rate, the theory of art as the expression of feelings (which here shall be taken to include emotions and attitudes) that has been historically significant and developed: art as specially connected with the life of feeling.
When people are said to be expressing feelings, what specifically are they doing? In a perfectly ordinary sense, expressing is “letting go” or “letting off steam”: individuals may express their anger by throwing things or by cursing or by striking the persons who have angered them. But, as many writers have pointed out, this kind of “expressing” has little to do with art; as the American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) said, it is more of a “spilling over” or a “spewing forth” than expression. In art at least, expression requires a medium, a medium that is recalcitrant and that artists must bend to their will. In throwing things to express anger, there is no medium—or, if one’s body is called the medium, then it is something one does not have to study to use for that purpose. It is still necessary to distinguish a “natural release” from an expression. If poetry were literally “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as William Wordsworth (1770–1850) said, it would consist largely of things like tears and incoherent babblings. If artistic creation can plausibly be said to be a process of expression, something different from and more specific than natural release or discharge must be meant.