The Art of Symbolism and Motif

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Human? Machine? Beckett’s symbolic warning of technological dominance in Krapp’s Last Tape

Read Time: 2 mins

Without headphones we can’t hear, without microphones we can’t speak. Our world is heading towards technological domination. Technology is evolving alongside our human race; a concept Beckett symbolises through Krapp’s tape recorder. This Tragicomedy is a mirror for humanity to look upon to see the dangers we’re heading towards. How far will we go until we become the machine, or even scarier, the machine becomes us. 

This is not absurdist; it’s real and is happening right now.  

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

My first impression of Krapp was a self-obsessed, middle-aged man. However, with Beckett’s symbolism, my eyes opened wider beyond my artificial screen light. Knowlson says we experience Krapp’s 'faded aspirations and frustrated ideals’. Krapp breaks the fourth wall inviting us into his reality, a motif used where one ‘implicitly acknowledges the artificiality of the environment’. A space where everything evolves ‘quietly’, particularly the tape recorder, his ‘memory-bank’. This device is something Krapp can’t function without as it controls him, it gains an identity of its own. This leads us to analyze technological power, questioning, when has our digital world gone too far?  

‘Krapp finally becomes a fully technological subject as his fallible body is erased by the mediation of the machine.’ Goody, pp.156-57.

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Krapp’s identity dissolves, he’s a slave to the machine with his ritualistic obsession brainwashing any sense of humanity left within. His vocal presence decreases as the play progresses, symbolizing the machine as subconsciously stealing it from it, eventually leaving him static.

His repetitive…

‘[Pause]’

Sorry, just had to reboot there…

His repetitive pauses symbolize his body restarting, mirroring that of a technological device, needing to refresh in order to function properly.

This sounds like Post-humanism, as Hayles claimed ‘we can see a harbinger of the post-human body’. Here, the distinction between robots and humans falls away. This personification of the recorder is furthered through its resemblance to Krapp’s lover. He quotes, ‘my face in her breasts and my hand on her’, her, as in the tape recorder! Therefore, not only displaying his lost concept of humanity, Beckett symbolises the tapes identity as human with its technological features mirroring human anatomy. The ‘[Brief laugh in which Krapp joins]’ gives the recorder a voice of its own. It holds Krapp’s memories and desires, therefore holds an automatic dominance over his submissive persona.

All you have to do is look at Sophia the Robot... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5t6K9iwcdw

Beckett himself told French actor Pierre Chabert to become one with the machine, in order to face the reality upon technology. Whilst we might see the tape recorder as a comfort to Krapp, his intimacy with it also results in a number of problematic issues. Alongside, his reliance, he too starts to imitate it, symbolizing the role swap between human and machines. Krapp’s description of ‘[switches on and assumes listening posture, i.e., leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front.]’, symbolises his gradually physical, mechanised transformation. The ‘eyes’ of the human represent the ‘eyes’ of the machine, always watching and learning, symbolising humanities identity as compromised by robotic spies.  

Gontarski argues the ‘light and dark’ imagery as symbols of Krapp’s doubled ‘sides of his nature.’ The table and adjacent area under strong white light juxtaposes with the rest of stage dowsed in darkness. Such binaries symbolize the technological corruption taking over Krapp’s authentic identity. His obsession is eating all senses of normality, visually manipulating his realist vision.  

Photo by Ronaldo de Oliveira on Unsplash

This is important in our technological society!

As Weiss claims, ‘Krapp edits out certain memories and emphasised others’, allowing him to ‘rewrite the past and present’, therefore allowing him to distort identity. Who is Krapp? Are we presented with the real Krapp or has the tape recorder presented us with another identity? This exposes the dangers of technology.

Do we really know what or in this case who is behind the screen, monitoring our every move, responding to our every command? We must question how long it will take until these devices start to control us like Krapp.

Or are they already doing so? I mean, you’re relying on a tablet to read my discourse right now. Are you a slave to your screen?  

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Concrete Jungle of Nightmares- T.S. Eliot’s symbolic variations of the modern world

Read Time: 2 mins

Our understanding of what it means to be modern is constantly evolving. With the rapid pace of technological development, anxieties are bound to occur, right? Well, Eliot certainly had concerns. Throughout his poetry we face symbolic fears towards high modernism. He warns us of the consequences of renewed western cultural orders through his melodic stanzas.

‘Paint not the thing but the effect it produces’

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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock explores the city, exciting yes? No!

The city is ‘cheap’ and ‘restless’, symbolising the contemporary world as drained of any sensation. The speaker’s trapped within repeated metre, rhyming couplets and rotating conversations of ‘Michelangelo’, symbolizing the inescapability of modern cultural advances. It’s hard to navigate our way out of this sequential world, wading through ‘pools’ of the ‘yellow fog ‘of endless developments. North argues, the ‘metaphor dissolves into metonymy’, explaining how Eliot struggled to find his familiar world as it’s now dowsed in a ‘tobacco trance’ of technology. Modernism is villainized through this gothic motif of darkened ‘streets’, not revealing its true motives for our future.

Eliot waltzes with traditionalist ghosts, fearing to trust this nightmarish culture.

Who is Prufrock then?

He’s a fictionalized character, symbolizing Eliot’s fear of ‘dying’ streets. Instead Prufrock takes his place, trapped in Eliot’s literary nightmare and cyclical modern limbo. FOREVER. Prufrock’s deteriorating body, symbolises Eliot’s deteriorating mindset. Time will never ‘reverse’ as everything mechanically develops, even Eliot’s entitled masculine gaze must die out amongst the new modern woman. He symbolizes society as an individualized cyclical loop presenting his struggle upon how to adapt to these new, non-collective ways.

It’s a love song of the past, an echo to traditionalism.

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In Preludes we explore modernity through musicality, investigating why many ‘Symbolists experimented with the musical properties of language’. Eliot’s composition fluctuates, symbolizing a typical orchestral movement. Sentences begin rhyming, however, drift into a disjointed nature, emphasising this break from collective concepts journeying into staccato ideas. Eliot said the melody is ‘often responsible for heightening our awareness of the style’, the meanings. Here, it heightens our awareness that everything is changing, the composition is too far advanced for alterations.

With modernism ‘Stretched tight across the skies’, there’s no escape; even our dreams become ‘sordid’, robotic visions! As old traditions fade ‘behind a city block’, new machinery rises when ‘the morning comes to consciousness’, it’s uncontrollable.  

Eliot’s warning us, using symbolism to heighten our fears. Ezra Pound even said that ‘poets who will not study music are defective’; Eliot knew what was coming! Written in 1915, Eliot symbolizes the buildup to WW1, referencing cultural destruction, the key to civilization. War ‘had a profound effect on the cultural and literary’ generation Eliot resided in, therefore he’s questioning not just the deterioration of his familiar literary world, but also his traditional collective society. 

The war symbolized our future societal wars, wars we live in too this day!

‘The music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning’

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Continually, in Rhapsody on a Windy Night we experience musicality of the beating countdown. The repetition of ‘Half-past one’ etc. symbolizes our impending doom through the ‘beats’ of a ‘fatalistic drum’. Although, Eliot now places us as readers in the frame. We are chased into ‘the crowd’ of individuals, now trapped with Prufrock in a cyclical modernity. The fear for future violence is clear, with the cities industrial ‘spluttering’ slowly surfacing. As The Waste Land, states, natures ‘dull roots’ will no longer grow with the ‘spring rain’; natural development has been eliminated, everything’s mechanised.  

What’s the overwhelming question?

Eliot questions the modern pace through debates surrounding Existentialism. He’s a ghostly observer to the city, unable to reside within it, wanting to stay culturally connected but not turn into a lonely mechanical robot. His poems symbolise the journey into new cultures which he believes will fail, using urgency to symbolise the new technological barrier between humanity and the natural world.

Photo by Barthelemy de Mazenod on Unsplash

In our technological age, should we take this warning serious? I mean, technology is cool, but maybe Eliot is right. How come modernity promotes individualism, yet we’re slowly turning into an army of collective industrial robots?  

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White Pages ~ The Mechanisms of the Modern Woman

Read Time: 2 mins

Who knew a white page could be so colorful? This canvas was blank until Mina Loy painted her perspective on the ‘modern woman’, using symbolism as her paintbrush! In Songs to Joannes her symbols surrounding love and sex confront taboo topics, straying from fairytale love to instead seeking liberation. 

After reading this as a young woman, no net could ever ensnare me again… Loy gave me wings.

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‘Mina Loy develops her portrait of the person who is both outsider and artist’

So, are women ‘the cause of modernism’? Let’s find out.

Poem ‘II’ explores objectification, reducing the male to a ‘Skin sack’. This de-maculates his once heroic influence through objectifiable phallicism. Everyone’s essentially made of skin, right? She’s forcing equality from the offset.

We encounter a ‘duality’, doubling the biological with the technological through the futurist motif. The lover mirrors a ‘clock- work mechanism’, a human machine symbolically deteriorating with time; a machine Loy isn’t ‘paced’ to. She presents their intimacy as a force of physics, exposing the realities of one-sided sexual pleasure. Moreover, her parodic symbol of the lover as a ‘door mat’ flips domestic typicality’s, challenging traditionalist gender ideologies. He’s there for Loy and her futuristic vision to leave her print. This strays from Marinetti’s masculinity; instead, symbolising women as the ones hurtling towards societal dominance.

Loy turns the male gaze into a female vision. Sound’s a lot like she’s even mocking John Donne’s metaphysical sexism to me!

Interestingly, her polysyllabic, scientific vocabulary mocks traditional romantic poetic motifs. This isn’t a Love Song for him, it’s a love song for women, using contemporary discourse to show off advanced, often repressed feminine intellect. Certainly a-typical, but rules were made to be broken … even in the literary world!

Now we know what was meant when Ariana said God is a Woman!

Let’s go back to the future with Poem XII, explaining feminine creation. Loy opens with a voice failing to articulate, presenting ‘passion’ as confining and vocally oppressing. Women were always symbolically connected to the male ‘rib’,‘formed In two parts’, necessary for life’s ‘delights’. However, this ‘flesh from flesh’ is physically oppressing. Why was Eve born from man and not created independently?

Loy takes on Eve’s role, refusing to ‘share’ ‘flesh’, making her first stroke on this ‘white’ canvas in her own modernist Eden. Her typographic layout introduces us to this new and ‘suspicious’ literary world created for us. Explaining through her Feminist Manifesto to ‘leave off looking to men to find out what you are’, instead, ‘seek within yourselves’. As an individual!

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Eve, the first woman is reborn. Her new name is Mina. The Modern Woman.

In poem XIV, this power continues, firstly through exposing her ‘nascent’ newborn virginity’, illustrating her ‘imperceptible’ bodily control. There’s ‘no love’ involved, juxtaposed through ‘impact’ and ‘lighted bodies’ to symbolize the labor of sex rather than the ‘delights. Instead, two bodies become gears working together, ‘knocking sparks off each other in chaos’ to signify the ideal pace when men and women work together, equally. There, through reducing ‘sex or so-called love’ to its ‘initial element’, stresses sex as something that requires dynamic equality for it to work.  

‘Woman must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved’

Woman should desire to love themselves!

Overall, Loy expresses ‘there are no restrictions’ for women, de-maculating male misogyny through symbolizing them as weaker objects, flipping traditional literature on its head. The masculine mind is not the only mind to conceive great ideas. So, to answer your question from above, yes. Women are the cause of modernism- in literature and in life.  

Loy didn’t need to write or live like others. Not only was she ‘determined to reinvent herself as an artist’, she wanted to repaint her portraits of the outsider, to the insider.

Photo by Lindsey LaMont on Unsplash

In today’s society, events such as International Woman’s Day are dedicated to empowering the feminine mind, where women come together like a mechanical gear working to finish the painting iconic feminists started. Overall, symbolising the importance of women supporting women in order to keep the controls to The Modern Woman in motion, constantly moving towards empowerment.

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From Wine to Water- The Immortal tempest of Saint Antoine ~ Dickens’ variety of symbolic interpretations and motifs of the Parisian crowds in A Tale of Two Cities.

Read Time: 2 Mins

Symbolism is my favourite literary feature, offering us the opportunity to walk our own literary path and stray from the strictures of the narrator. In a Tale of Two Cities, symbols of wine and water act as my personal gateway into identifying the faces of the faceless French revolutionaries, signifying the consequences of social neglection.

It sounds far-fetched, but trust me, it works!

Quick history lesson: It’s 1789, working conditions are horrendous with madness ‘sold at 10 pence’. The living and dead become unrecognizable from one another, turning San Antoine into a scene from the Walking Dead. Already, we’re provided with gothic motifsof strange places and social constraints, where the supernatural environment symbolizes the ‘personality’ of the desperate, inhuman crowds. Orwell demonstrated that Dickens’s novel gave a ‘false impression’ of the Revolution’, however, we must question Dickens’s reluctance to defend ‘accurate “period” records’.

Maybe to open our eyes?

The Walkers are symbolised through the broken wine cask as animalistic, collapsing human boundaries. This is intensified through the ‘hunted air’ transforming them into diseased ‘wild beasts’. The primitive lapping up of wine from the cobbles is somewhat illustrative of Stoker’s vampirism with intense alcoholic cravings, symbolising the blood-thirsty foreshadowing of death on that same street.  

Outwardly this comments on ‘incompetent’ leadership, with workers desperately absorbing such luxuries, mirroring symbolic escapism. However, through Dickens’s exaggerated lens, the crowd purposely feed off oppressors to fuel their thirst for justice. Collectively ingesting this foreign richness connects these individuals, creating one vessel. There’s no longer a faceless ‘Jacques one’, as all have fed from the same puddle, so now share one brewing vision for class mobility.  

Photo by Terry Vlisidis on Unsplash

This gothic motif of ‘violent differences in power’of course symbolizes industrial symbolism, ‘exaggerating’ the ‘terror’ of a newly built mechanized creature called…

The Crowd.

‘People gather and attack the broken cask to relish their thirst’

During the Bastille invasion, this crowd symbolise a storm, fuelled by these wealthy liquids. The Bastille resembles a beach, threatened by the approaching intoxicated tempest of collective violence. Here, all sense of self washes away with the current of ‘drums beating’, illustrating the unification of one metaphysically operating body.

Photo by César Couto on Unsplash

Was freedom won then?

Well, Samuel Smiles thinks not, arguing this ghost crowd become more unknown, trapped within this mass unit. Now subsumed in waves, individuality is unreachable, questioning whether we can actually ‘hear the people sing’or merely hear them vocalize into deeper oppression, obliviously within their own ranks.

‘The living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on depth, and overflowed the city.’ 

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, II.21, pp.223-24.

However, Darwin’s evolution, rescues freedom! The novel symbolizes the strongest prevailing whilst unimproved forms drown (spoiler… the monarchy), suggesting a takeover is inevitable through survival of the fittest. Alongside the ‘echoing footsteps’ of encroaching modernity, we can fossilize Dickens’s history, tracing past progression to the present, alongside foreseeing our future prophecies; exaggerating the importance of looking back in order to move forward.

Was this symbolism a warning for Britain?

Well, if we explore Carlyle and Engel’s works then yes, they were warning our British bourgeoise of imbalanced supremacies. This was through the motif of doubling with France and Britain, with British crowds becoming swarmed by ‘flies’ amongst the ‘loud buzz’ of upheaval.

Sound familiar?

Engels also illustrates the environmental damage of 1844 London, whilst Carlyle see’s the British ‘creature in rage and pain’. Surprisingly, this reminded me of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with France’s primitive past contained in Britain’s present. The novella enhances our doubling motif through a fear of primitive resurfacing. 

Is France Mr. Hyde, the symbolic evil other to Britain’s Dr Jekyll?

So, Dickens symbolizes Victorian working-class discontent through comparison with the French revolution. By noticing the causes that led to revolution we should make some effort to alleviate them, right?

Let’s fast-forward to 2021.

Well, take the Black Lives Matter protests. The crowd doubles those in Dickens’s histories, symbolizing one mass unit coming together, mirroring the uncontrollable tempest aiming to run out old ideologies, paving social equality and freedom … you get the picture now.

Everything’s a symbol for an important message, it depends on the angel you chose to look from.

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