“A Symbol is felt to be such before any possible meaning is consciously recognised; i.e., an object or event which is felt to be more important than reason can immediately explain” (Coleridge)
D.H. Lawrence on Moby Dick: “Of course he is a symbol. Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly”.
So, we can respond to the 'being symbolic' before we recognise a symbolised content. And any 'symbolised content' (eg Lawrence goes on to say that Moby Dick "is the deepest blood-being of the white race"!) leaves a remainder, a kind of object a which it further charges with 'significance' in failing to name.
Thus, the quality of ‘being symbolic’ and the quality symbolised are not only separable and non-dependent (i.e. something does not have the quality of being symbolic by virtue of what it symbolises), but there seems to be a sense in which we respond to the former, with the latter as (sometimes) a kind of pretext.
But my question is a point of information. Isn't there a name for this quality of 'being symbolic'. It's related to Eric Santner's distinction between seeing that something has significance (eg hieroglyphs) and the 'what' of signification. I'm sure, though, there's some specific term for this symbolic charge that things have before we know or are able to guess what is meant?
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