Salome, Simile, Symboliste

Abstract

As if fortuitously, the term symbolcomes to us in its earliest form not in a Greek treatise on rhetoric but in the Homeric hymn to Hermes and his mythic invention of the lyre. The song is ominous in its marriage of murder and music, and so it may also be a fine point of departure for a discussion of Oscar Wilde’s tragedy Salomeas a murderous and musi- cal keynote for Symbolist aesthetics. In Homer, we are thrown together with this term symbol, which is derived from the word for ‘a throwing together’, an encounter, by way of a story seemingly about something else, just as Hermes on the first day of his existence is thrown together by chance—and most happily, most joyously, as he exclaims—with the tortoise he will slaughter to make his song from the exquisite shell. Too bad for the tortoise, its munching contentment cruelly interrupted by a fatal appointment with art! Assuring the tortoise that he acts in its best interest, the trickster Hermes cuts off its limbs and scoops the flesh from the shell, which he fits with strings and fashions into a lyre. The symbol we all know, the rhetorical figure torn from its original referent and given a transcendent new life by the inspired artist, emerges from this hymn as both a mere shell and a fortuitous meeting—a meeting of sign with new referent, of an instrument with its artist. In this chance encounter, the original occupant of the shell, the creature that first gave it form, the creature it was designed to shield and preserve, has been killed into art, its flesh literally replaced by the sensual abstraction of music, a second life that makes the shell vibrate with the immortality of an inspired aesthetic expression.