December 23, 1999

Allegory

An allegory is a narrative in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting, are contrived not only to make sense in themselves, but also to signify a second, correlated order of persons, things, concepts, or events.

There are two main types:

1. Historical and political allegory, in which the characters and the action represent, or “allegorize,” historical personages and events. So in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681) King David represents Charles II, Absalom represents his natural son the Duke of Monmouth, and the biblical plot allegorizes a political crisis in contemporary England.
2. The allegory of ideas, in which the characters represent abstract concepts and the plot serves to communicate a doctrine or thesis. Both types of allegory may either be sustained throughout a work, as in Absalom and Achitophel and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), or exist merely as an episode in a non-allegorical work. One example of episodic allegory is the encounter of Satan with his daughter Sin, as well as with Death—the son born of their incestuous relationship—in Paradise Lost (Book II).

Pauwels Franck, Allegory of Earth

Another example, so brief that it is tableau rather than a developed narrative, is the passage in Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”:

Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flatt’ry sooth the dull cold ear of Death?

The central device in the typical allegory of ideas is the personification of abstract entities such as virtues, vices, states of mind, and types of character; in the more explicit allegories, such reference is specified by the character’s name. Thus Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress allegorizes the doctrines of Christian salvation by telling how Christian, warned by Evangelist, flees the City of Destruction and makes his way laboriously to the Celestial City; enroute he encounters such characters as Faithful, Hopeful, and the Giant Despair, and passes through places like the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and Vanity Fair. A passage indicates the nature of a clear-cut allegorical process:

Now as Christian was walking solitary by himself, he espied one afar off come crossing over the field to meet him; and their hap was to meet just as they were crossing the way of each other. The Gentleman’s name was Mr. Worldly-Wiseman; he dwelt in the Town of Carnal-Policy, a very great Town, and also hard by from whence Christian came.

Allegory is a strategy which may be employed in any literary form or genre. The Pilgrim’s Progress is a moral and religious allegory in a prose narrative; Spenser’s Faerie Queene fuses moral, religious, historical, and political allegory in a verse romance; the third book of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (the voyage to Laputa and Lagado) is an allegorical satire directed primarily against philosophical and scientific pedantry; and William Collins’ “Ode on the Poetical Character” is a formal lyric poem which allegorizes a topic in literary criticism—the nature, dignity, and power of the poet’s creative imagination.

Various literary forms may be regarded as special types of allegory, in that they narrate one coherent set of circumstances which signify a second order of correlated meanings. A fable is a short story that exemplifies a moral thesis or a principle of human behavior; usually in its conclusion either the narrator or one of the characters states the moral in the form of an epigram. Most common is the beast fable, in which animals talk and act like the human types they represent. In the familiar fable of the fox and the grapes, the fox—after vainly exerting all his wiles to get the grapes hanging beyond his reach—concludes that they are probably sour anyway; the express moral is that men belittle what they cannot get. An early set of beast fables attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave of the sixth century B.C.; in the seventeenth century a Frenchman, Jean de la Fontaine, wrote a set of witty fables in verse which are the classics of this literary kind, Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the story of the cock and fox, is a beast fable; John Gay wrote a collection of fables in the eighteenth century; James Thurber’s Fables Our Time (1940) is a recent set of short fables; and in Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell expands the beast fable into a sustained satire on the political and social conditions of his age.

A parable is a short narrative presented so as to stress the implicit but detailed analogy between its component parts and a thesis or lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to us. The parable was one of Jesus’ favorite devices as a teacher; examples are his parables of the good Samaritan and of the prodigal son. Here is his parable of the fig tree in Luke 13:6-9:

A certain man has a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came and looked for fruit, but found none. Then said he to the keeper of the vineyard, “For three years I came seeking fruit on this fig tree, and find none: cut it down; why encumber the ground any further?” The keeper answered: “Lord, let it alone this year also, until I fertilize it to see if that helps. If not, then we will cut it down.”

An exemplum is a story told as a particular instance of the general text of a sermon. The device was extremely popular in the Middle Ages. In Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale, the Pardoner preaches on the thesis “Greed is the root of all evil” and incorporates as exemplum the tale of the three revelers who set out to find Death, but find a heap of gold instead, then kill one another in the attempt to gain sole possession of the treasure. By extension the term, exemplum is also applied to tales used in a formal, though nonreligious, exhortation. Thus Chaucer’s Chantecleer borrows the preacher’s technique in the ten exampla he tells in a vain effort to persuade his skeptical wife, Dame Pertelote the hen, that bad dreams forebode disaster.

                    

Allegory may be defined in several ways: from the general and somewhat cryptic view that it is a story that represents another story, to allegory as a “vexatious bitch.” Despite this ostensibly flippant definition, this view of allegory is generally accurate in that a solid definition is difficult to tie down. Allegory is taken from the Greek word allegoria, meaning to “speak otherwise.” Allegory is generally an extended metaphor in the form of a story or poem that has a literal meaning and a meaning that is derived from outside the narrative itself. Allegory will often employ symbolism, personification, and typical characters. Characters in allegory usually represent abstract qualities or virtues whose actions convey a significance often unrelated to the literal narrative. These allegorical meanings may represent political, personal, or satiric ideas, but mostly the religious relating to the Scriptures within medieval allegory.

Medieval allegory should be regarded as a habit of mind than as any rigid system of artistic composition. When discussing medieval allegory, most critics concur that a firm understanding of the audience is necessary to comprehend the significance of allegorical tropes, or it sentence. The sentence is what the text implies, not what it literally says. That is, the sentence is the “fruit,” or the significance of the literary work beyond its literal interpretation.

This sentence, or pith of the allegorical matter, can, in most cases, be viewed in four ways: literally, allegorically, tropologically, or anagogically. The literal reading addresses facts or history — things which actually occur; the allegorical refers to the church and its relationship to people generally; the tropological is concerned with the spiritual constitution of the individual, sometimes called the moral; and the anagogical pertains to the universal, unchanging soul and heaven. Dante, in Convivio, calls such an interpretation a polysemous meaning: a multiple meaning that can be derived form a single text. (This is not to say that every poem deemed “allegory” will contain all of these polysemous levels; not everything in an allegorical poem needs to be an allegory.) Seemingly, only Dante in the Divine Comedy, was successful (or cared about being so) in incorporating all of the levels of allegory. The medieval mind moves freely and easily between these realms of allegory as they pertain to the Scriptures.

However, the act of allegorical interpretation is not limited to the Scriptures in the Middle Ages: creation itself is an allegorical book as well as things created in it. A language of clerkly authority developed to help in the analysis of the Book of Nature and the pagan classics as well as the Scriptures. Since God created nature, and through direct revelation He transmitted the words of the Bible to His scribes, both the Bible and Nature offer humanity a guide to charity and salvation if it can interpret the signs correctly. The language of clerkly authority, then, attempts to order and understand these tropes of the physical world that represent the ineffable word of God that is beyond human comprehension.

So, according to Isidore of Seville, the Christian poet draws upon established tropes for his alieniloquium, seven of which are the most important: irony (deriding through praise), antiphrasis, aenigma, charientismos, paroemia (proverbial expression), sarcasm, and astysmos (sarcasm without bitterness). These figures were understood by the medieval audience, but, states Robertson, are almost unknown to even sophisticated audiences today.

Allegory attempts to make sense out of the world of individual human experience and how it relates to the “more real” world of universal human experience; the literal sense is an imperfect world of human action compared to the figurative sense of an idealized, perfected humanity.

While some critics suggest that the effectiveness and appropriateness of allegory within a particular work falls within the purview of the critic, others posit that allegory is only present within literature when the author or narrator explicitly states that he/she intends a meaning other than the literal, exemplified by Chaucer’s Clerk:

This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde
Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee,
For it were inportable, though they wolde,
But for that every wight, in his degree,
Sholde be constant in adversitee
As was Grisilde; therefore Petrak writeth
This storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth. (CT 1142-8)

Finally, the literal level of a work is just as important as an allegorical level. Without the literal level of language, there can be no interpretation, and no art. The greatness of all art lies in its literal sense as well—not just what it says, but what it is. While medieval allegory may instruct its listeners, it is the literal level that delights them and makes the interpretation possible.

Citations

Works Cited

• Leonard, Frances McNeely (1981). Laughter in the Courts of Love: Comedy in Allegory, from Chaucer to Spencer. Norman, OK: Pilgrim Books, Inc. Leonard offers an amusing and jocund look at Chaucer's use of humorous allegory in several of his works, including briefly The Canterbury Tales. Leonard's succinct survey of allegory from many works is well-written and informative for a general definition of allegory based on several scholarly attempts to define such a broad idea. A bibliography is provided.