Patterns & Metaphors
Language and literature
Template:
Symbol-making, that is, language is the most important class of human behaviour after those that are concerned with sustaining life. The essentially symbolic function of language is illustrated by the instances of language without meaning, that is, unintelligible, indecipherable, obscure or arcane language: for example, the biblical 'handwriting on the wall', the Sagan tablet on the Voyager spare ship which is to communicate enigmatically to extra-terrestrials, Scandinavian runes, petroglyphs, etc. Their meaning firstly is their humaneness, the fact they they are artifacts of intelligent life. Secondly, such language, even as primitive as runes or knots, indicates the purpose of communication which, in a general sense, also indicates the societal or organized nature of human life. Thirdly, the symbolic medium is the message in that there is always a specific content to language that is partly understood by the very circumstances or contexts of its mode, place and time of delivery. Thus two savages from widely separated tribes when initially encountering each other, though having different primary signs for peaceful intentions, by their circumstances alone will give meaning to apparently meaningless peaceful gestures if only simply by indicating a wish to signal or communicate rather than to fight.
Metaphor:
Though built upon animal signalling, human communications took the primal showing of hand and tooth and utterance of whimper, grunt and howl, and developed a universal range of symbols to represent such things as specific objects and beings and classes of these; times of events; relationships of beings to each other and to objects; quantities; qualities, conditions and states; and a certain number of philosophical ideas concerned with orders of reality and extended notions of place and time. Therefore language is both inherently and structurally symbolic. On top of this has been the conscious development of language to be a symbolic meta-language, that is, a language whose function of communicating elusive, difficult, or extremely refined meanings is enhanced by the use of indicators, many of them comparisons and many, categorizations. These indicators may point literally to a comparative object or event or process in the same class or category, or they may point figuratively to a comparison usually in another class. This is the nature of figures of speech, tropes, euphemisms, allusions, images or imagery, personifications, metaphors, similes, etc, among 'well-turned' phrases, and the phrases themselves exist in such symbolic forms of expression as allegories, fables, parables, apologues, parodies and satires. Literature may be symbolic in other senses, for example structurally, as Dante's tripartite Divina Commedia, or as the matrix into which is projected elements from the author's unconscious. It can be said that both language and literature are inherently, essentially or behaviourally symbolic; that they are or may be more or less structurally symbolic; and that they may carry symbolism from conscious or subconscious sources including the archetypes that refer to human development.<
