the transmutation of ideas into images, is the product of the formative power of human cognition and is realized in all the ways in which verbal, mental, perceptual, optical, and graphic images interact. F. punctuates the complexity of time and space with interpretable forms, including all kinds of signs; the very idea of an “idea” is linked to seeing and hence to the eidolon or “visible image.” Platonic trad, distinguishes between idea and image (q.v.) by conceiving of the former as a suprasensible realm of forms, types, or species and the latter as a sensory impression that provides a mere likeness ( eikon ). Mental imagery or f. has been a central concern of theories of mind since Plato’s cave allegory in the Republic and Aristotle’s On Interpretation and continues to be a cornerstone of psychology, as in Gestalt construction of images. And at least since Macrobius’ commentary on the Dream of Scipio in Cicero’s Orator , dreams and esp. visions have been understood as interpretable in various figural senses.
While it is a function of allegory (q.v.) to personify abstractions, f. works in the reverse direction, treating real persons or things in a formulaic way so that they become concrete or living ideas grounded in a shared quality. In medieval literary fiction and interp., when the things treated are historical persons taking part in God’s providential structuring of time (as in Dante’s Comedy), imbuing them with the power to delineate events, the resulting narrative is called figura (Auerbach). Yet figura need not treat only Christian events; in the Aeneid , for example, the hero arrives at the site of Pallanteum just at the moment when the rites of Hercules are being performed. The day is to be interpreted as significant because this arrival refers back to Hercules’ own rescuing mission at the same site, and at the same time prefigures the advent of the emperor Augustus, Virgil’s patron, at the same site again, fresh from his triumph over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. For Dante, in turn, Aeneas’ founding of Roman civilization not only facilitates but also prefigures the birth of Christ within the bounds of the Empire and the resulting renovation of humanity. Figura , or narrative typology, is thus but one specialized instance off., which is essential to all interpretive strategies.
In the constitution of literary works, f. is the means whereby a system of beliefs and ideas is rendered palpable. A large quotient of figurative expression accounts for much of the traditional distrust of poetry among philosophers. Literary discourse provides authors with a great deal of latitude, whereas figures (taken in the sense of rhetorical strategies) which become part of ordinary lang, tend to lose their figural status. For example, Lat. pastor ‘shepherd’ was augmented by a Christian figurative meaning, “head of the congregation,” an idea which has survived, defiguralized, in modern Eng. In texts, f. retains a strong visual connotation: when Walter Pater uses the term “figure” to represent the It. Ren., the model for the figure is always visual.
The history and theory of f. is, therefore, inextricably bound up with the status of images. Hume follows Locke and Hobbes in the use of pictorial figures to describe the chains of cognition and signification: ideas are “faint images” or “decayed sensations” that eventually become linked by conventional associations with words. The ensuing conception of meaning traces it back to its origin in an impression, with the consequent understanding of lang, as the means of retrieving that original impression. The view of poetry and of lang, in general as a process of pictorial reproduction exemplifies one idea off. In romantic poetics (q.v.), verbal, mental, and pictorial imagery were assimilated to the process of imagination (q.v.) as redefined in opposition to the mere “recall” of mental pictures. Abrams finds that figures of expression come to replace figures of mimesis in the course of the 19th c. Indeed, an abstract figure such as the Coleridgean symbol displaces or subsumes the notion of the figure as a representation of material reality.
A progressive elevation or sublimation of the figure reaches its logical culmination when an entire poem is regarded as a figure, as in the “verbal icon” of Wimsatt, a synchronic structure embodying a complex figure. Poetic iconicity (q.v.) ranges from a literal basis in shaped and concrete poems, in which the text is charged with pictorial features, through forms such as the sestina (q.v), in which f. is implicit, to ekphrastic poetry, where the text represents a work of visual art, to dialogue (q.v.) forms, which appropriately figure the dialectical method of argumentation.
Formalist crit. programmatically demonstrates the congruence or lack of congruence among a poem’s propositional content, its architectonics, and its figurative energies so as to display the many dynamic patterns cohering within the whole. The concept of the entire poem as figure notwithstanding, the main direction of figurative interp. in the modern era has been to proceed from the manifest or surface content to the word conceived as latent meaning, lying beneath the aesthetic surface. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams while not a text of lit. crit., articulates a poetics of dreaming which assimilates the psychic material of which dreams are made to the material of visual art. Dream analysis provides strategies for extracting the hidden verbal message from a possibly misleading and certainly inarticulate pictorial surface, namely the four figurative processes of condensation, displacement, identification, and symbolism.
The symbolic connection of dreams to experience is thus one of f., wherein symbols and the things symbolized are integrated in a speculative reality in which they participate mutually. The establishment of such invisible bonds is characteristic of poetic conceptions of the universe, which may, for example, produce descriptions which intertwine physical setting and human emotion where connections of a causal type might otherwise have been invoked. Yet often a setting presented as figurative by a description, without overt justification, does the work of postulating so strong a participation between persons and environment that the smallest occurrence can assume permanent symbolic value.
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