Allegorical Living

 I am way past dealing with some items I have collected for this blog, so I apologize for the gap in noting Living Through Allegory by Lauren Collee. I particularly noted these passages:

‘Allegory’ is not an easy word to define, and efforts to do so often reflect much larger debates about the relationship between language, image, and truth. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Goethe – and later, Coleridge – drew a distinction between allegory and the symbol, arguing that only the latter was worthy of serious literary consideration. Where the poetic symbol directly captured an inexpressible truth, they argued, allegory merely attempted to render truth comprehensible, and in doing so, bastardized it. Such was the dominant view of allegory in the West until around the 1920s, when Walter Benjamin began to question the dismissal of allegory on the grounds of its supposed falsity. To think allegorically, for Benjamin, was to recognize that figural expression was not opposed to ‘truth’, but fundamentally constitutive of it.  

As the post-structuralists took up Benjamin’s ideas and developed them, allegory was increasingly embraced for the very reasons it had formerly been dismissed. As an openly ‘deceitful’ mode that was concerned with the deferral of meaning, allegory reflected the inherent instability of not only language, but of ‘reality’ itself. Among these ‘new Allegoricists’ (as the literary theorist Joel Black calls them) was Maureen Quilligan, who in The Language of Allegory (1979) argued that allegory was more than a mere attribute of certain texts, or an interpretive strategy – it was a distinct genre with its own set of literary conventions. For Quilligan, attuning ourselves to these expectations would reveal the function of allegory, which was to ‘manipulate’ the reader into the self-reflexive realisation that they were interpreters of both literature and the world around them. 

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At its most efficacious, allegory functions through deferral and dispersal rather than completion and synthesis. As in a dream, its truth is always just out of arm’s reach. This makes it a genre well suited to the so-called Anthropocene, in which the ‘true meaning’ of every action – buying a coffee, throwing away the cup – is always deferred, always endlessly multiplied on scales far beyond the most immediate frame of reference. ‘Allegory is a genre for the fallen world’, Quilligan points out, referring to John Milton’s reflections on language’s sinful devolution into an elaborate system of deception, ‘but it is a genre self-conscious of its own fallenness’. For McKay, as for Berger, there will be no perfect moment of mutual comprehension between human and non-human worlds; the ‘secret message’ that the animal holds for man will never be truly disclosed. The gulf yawns, it breathes its secrets into the air, it refuses to be stitched up.

Allegory has been on my mind the past few years. What little I knew of literary theory disapproved of allegory. Hawthorne is what I was reading then. I have been playing with realism more inclusive of ideas and memories and daydreams than what I knew from reading Dreiser and Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis. That there are signs that touch off associations that are not quite caught by journalistic realism. Oh, yeah, through John Updike in there, too.

So, why should we look down our noses at allegory? If we look, there are signs with their associations. Associations adding depth to their meaning. In “Road Tripping” I have my narrator comment on the Ohio River as the line between the slave and free states, which brings to his mind to Uncle Tom's Cabin and Toni Morrison's Beloved and George Floyd. Which is about as close as I can get to allegory.

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