Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964).

Introduction: Allegory from allos + agoreuein (other + speak openly, speak in the assembly or market). Agoreuein connotes public, open, declarative speech. This sense is inverted by the prefix allos. Thus allegory is often called inversion. Plutarch the first critic to use the word allegory instead of its older Greek equivalent hyponoia, also the first to use the verb to allegorize. The political overtones of the verb agoreuein need always to be emphasized, insofar as censorship may produce devious, ironical ways of speaking (2n1). Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence: Aenigma: a kind of Allegorie, differing only in obscuritie, for Aenigma is a sentence or forme of speech, which for the darknesse, the sense may hardly be gathered; see Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, for riddle: We dissemble againe under covert and dark speaches, when we speake by way of riddle (Enigma) of which the sence can hardly be picked out, but by the parties owne assoile (8n1). See Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955). Theodore Spencers new critical reading of Thirty Days Hath September, New Republic, Dec. 6, 1943. Edwin Honigs pioneering study: Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959). Erich Auerbach, Figura, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature; Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery (on Emblems, ch. i, and appendix). Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (1948). Panofsky on emblems; Albrecht Durer (1948); Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, II, i, The Totem as Name and as Emblem, and ch. vii, The Origin of the Notion of Emblem. F.R. Johnson, Astronomical Thought in Renaissance England (1937). The whole point of allegory is that it does not NEED to be read exegetically; it often has a literal level that makes

good enough sense all by itself; what counts in our discussion is a structure that lends itself to a secondary reading, or rather, one that becomes stronger when given a secondary meaning as well as a primary meaning (7). Empson places allegory in his third type of ambiguity; KBs discussion deals mainly with its political uses, e.g. Part III of A Rhetoric of Motives, entitled Order. Like Empson, KB is interested in symbolic action as a means of coping with social and political tensions (11n18). Goethes distinction between allegory and symbol; true symbolism is a living momentary revelation of the Inscrutable; see Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism I, 200. An unhappy controversy, says Fletcher (13). 1: The Daemonic Agent Poet makes what Spenser called a pleasing analysis of all (Letter to Ralegh) and in the course of this analysis an action unfurls, with agents to carry it. Personification and topical allusion: either represent abstract ideas or actual, historical persons. See, for example, the grand pageants of virtues and vices in the Renaissance (see Burckhardt for a description) (26). The typical personified agent can only act in consort with other personified agents (32). The conceptual hero: his generation of subcharacters: A systematically complicated character will generate a large number of other protagonists who react against or with him in a syllogistic manner; sort of like people in real life who project, ascribing fictitious personalities to those whom they meet and live with. What, for example, are Redcrosses projections? (35). C.S. Lewis: Allegorys natural theme is temptation (cited 36n20). A natural hero for allegory is the traveler, because on his journey he is plausibly led into numerous fresh situations, where it seems likely that new aspects of himself may be turned up (36-37). Daemonic constriction in thematic actions: daemons compartmentalize functions, they are obsessed with only one idea, driven by

one private force (if we met one in real life) (40). Daemons: good and evil agency: it may help, in the case of moral allegory, to think of each virtue, acquired or lacking, as a kind of moral energy, not a state of being as in Aristotle, but an equivalent in the moral world of a tuned-up muscle in the physical world (47). Example: association of rhetorical technique with daemonic power; Hercules as defender of the 7 Liberal Arts (Martianus Capella) (48). Gothic novel abounds in daemonic agencies: statues bleeding or sweating, talismans, doubles, etc. (51n52). Daemonic mechanism and allegorical machines: robotsserves a prescientific function (as astrology leads to astronomy) (59). Cosmic systems governing personal fate: heroes do not choose; they act on compulsion (64). Typical reward for a victory in one battle or progress in Spensers FQ is always a new challenge. There is no such thing as perfection in this world; daemonic agency implies a manie de perfection, an impossible desire to become one with an image of unchanging purity. The agent seeks to become isolated within himself, frozen into an eternally fixed form, an idea in the Platonic sense of the term (65). From agent to image: static agency. The logic is for agents to become emblems, visual icons (66). Conclusion: the pilgrims progress as a ind of research project, taking life for its boundaries; with all the irrationality of daemonic energy per se, this is the very kind of agency necessary to discover a cosmic order (69). 2: The Cosmic Image Traditional rhetorical view of allegory: a sequence of submetaphors amounting to an extended metaphor; also Tuve, 105-106. Fletcher rejects this, although Im not quite clear why; psychological rather than logical? (75). Most striking sensuous quality of images in allegory is their isolation from each other: lack of depth, violation of perspectiveresults from need to maintain daemonic efficacy (87). The type of allegorical imagery is an isolated

emblem; 3 examples: a) an astrological sign; b) a banner carried in war; c) a signet ring that has authority, e.g. the power to command obedience from a total stranger. Each image tends toward a kratophany, a revelation of a hidden power (88). Surrealist art is surreal precisely because its images are isolated (100). Lautreamonts classic definition of lhumour noir: the chance meeting of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on an operating table? FQ the most remarkable sustained mastery of verbal opsis in English; we have to read with a special kind of attention, the ability to catch visualization through sound (Frye, AC, 259). Kosmos: oldest term for ornamental diction; Latinate derivatives are ornatus and decoratio. A Kosmos signifies a universe and a symbol that implies a rank in that hierarchy (109). Implies propriety and decorum: kosmiotes (112). E.g. the animal imagery in Coriolanus: imagery provides a level corresponding to the main symbolic level of the play, Menenius Agrippas fable of the body politic; but that imagery in turn is based on two more levels, the levels implied by the microcosmic and the macrocosmic body (114). At an early stage of science we expect allegory; allegories are often simulacra of scientific theories (116). Allegory belongs ultimately in the area of epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and ceremony; the rhetorician must calculate the emotive effect of a language of kosmos when he seeks to sway a particular kind of reader (121). Uses a stock of kosmoi, typifying images associated with the highest motives (122). Propriety is always what the most powerful people want you to do, as a result of their representing the established order (129). Ayn Rand and Upton Sinclair; a tendency to overdo the detail, to exaggerate the proofs of social depravity, and most of all to exaggerate the influence of social system on human

existence; a governing authority on top of the symbolic ladder (136). Frye: a steady trend downward in Western literature; kosmos now leads toward the side of debasement (142). 3: Symbolic Action: Progress and Battle Allegory is structured according to ritualistic necessity, as opposed to probability (150). The tendency is for allegories to resolve themselves into either of two basic forms: battle and progress. Progress: a questing journey (151). In Zolas sequence of novels about the family of the RougonMacquart, a complex destiny of a crowd of people is played out in almost predestined form. Also the degradation of characters in much naturalist fiction: the hero is bound on no less a quest if he be searching for his own ruin (157). Debate poems: Owl and the Nightingale; Lydgates Reson and Sensualitie; Marvells Dialogue between the Soul and the Body and A dialogue between the resolved soul and created pleasure. Also Prometheus Bound. See M.C. Waites, Some aspects of the ancient allegorical debate, in studies in English and comparative literature (Radcliffe College monographs, no 15, 1910). Also important to examine the particular syntax in which the action is expressed: parataxis-a strucuring of sentences such that they do not convey any distinctions of higher or lower order. Where subordinating devices such as relative clauses, subordinating conjunctions, prhases in apposition, etc., are used, we have hypotaxis, of which the style of Henry James would be an extreme example (162). Thomas Wilson calls anaphora the marcher. An allegorical style: the emblematic, isolated, mosaic imagery; the paratactic order; the ritual that accompanies religious observance; the lack of that perspective which would create a mimetic world; the microcosmic character of

the imagery, where every single word must contain in itself the entire concept (171). A strong tendency for any ritual to be left unfinished, and a tendency to increase in length and elaboration. Hence unfinished character of FQ(175). 4: Allegorical Causation: Magic and Ritual Forms Forms of magical, allegorical causation: doubling (magical relationship between two levels of plot). See Empson on proletarian lit as pastoralalso division of a major character into two antithetical aspects. For battle and progress two aspects of magical causation are relevant: homeopathic, or imitative, magic, the basis of causality in allegory where symmetry predominates; contagious magic, or metonymic magic, the basis for ritualized forms (188). Spensers doubling effect: Fair and False Florimell; Duessa, Archimago (195). Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational a major text for the study of origins of allegorical literature (199). Contagious magic: a number of allegories are topographically based on the idea that the hero must be kept away from any contact with evil, or else he will catch it. So, sacred places free of contagion, e.g. the House of Holiness, the House of Temperance, in Spenser, even Arlo Hill in the Mutabilitie Cantos (210-211). Also sacred, isolated loci can take the place of consecrated talismanic objects, or consecrated moments of time. Best example: Book XVIII of the Iliad, the shield of Achilles (214-215). The curious fact is that the best instances of kosmoi are all objects toward which a degree of ambivalence is felt; they are both good and bad at once(219). 5: Thematic Effects: Ambivalence, the Sublime, and the Picturesque

Dualism in allegory: the radical opposition of two independent, mutually irreducible, mutually antagonistic substances (222). Grandest example of an ambivalent mythos: Prometheus Bound (228). Ironies as condensed or collapsed allegories; show no diminishing, only a confusing, of the semantic and syntactic processes of double or multiple-leveled polysemy. Where they do differ from the allegorical norm is in the degree of emotive tension they manifest; anxiety increases in European literary works as they approach what Frye calls their ironic phase (230). If allegory is epideictic in mode of address, irony is the converse: praise by blame. Irony allows us to live with the discrepancy between appearances and truth (232). Praises Draytons Polyolbion as one of the most comprehensive and powerful of English sublime poems (236n). Allusion in Milton: transumptive style (241). See Paul Goodman on the Sublime, in Structure of Literature. Charles P. Segal, Hypsos and the Problem of Cultural Decline in the De Sublimitate, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 64 (1959): 121-146. Picturesque is inverse or microscopic sublimity; sublime aims at great size and grandeur, while the picturesque aims at littleness and a sort of modesty; sublime produces terror or awed anxiety, while picturesque produces an almost excessive feeling of comfort; with all the other aspects of the one there will be found inversions of the other (253). Grotesquerie; chinoiserie (exotic objects): confront the spectator with dead, dying, decaying objects (262).

Why sublime and picturesque have psychic kinship with allegory: their moralizing tendency and in their emotive ambivalence (267). Spenserian ambivalence: Book I, the ambivalence resulting from the sense of sin, the archetypal Christian taboo; Book II, the ambivalence of appetite and will; Book III, the ambivalence of the fear of sexual impurity; Book IV, continuation of III, centering officially on conflict of loyalties or conflicted friendships; V, ambivalence between idea and law; VI, least openly ambivalent; Mutabilitie Cantos contain in essence the problems of the other books (269). 3 kinds of taboo in Freuds Totem and Taboo: of enemies, of rulers, of the dead; all in FQ, especially of the ruler, Gloriana (272). Reading FQ: On our first encounter the figures are miniature, like the knights Proust imagined on his bed, jousting in the playful light of a magic lantern. But as we read our way into Spenser, his figures grow large with another size, of dull reverberations, by alluding to other cultures, other religions, other philosophies than our own (273). 6: Psychoanalytic Analogues: Obsession and Compulsion While Freud and his followers may have failed to construct an adequate behavioral theory that can be empirically tested, and have failed to meet epistemological criticism from philosophy, they have not failed in their description of symbolic action (280). Totem and Taboo: 3 kinds of neurosis and 3 kinds of nonneurotic activity: obsessions and religious ritual; paranoia and philosophy; hysteria and mimetic art (282). Proper analogue to allegory is the compulsive syndrome: 1) agency: obsessional anxiety; 2) image: the idee fixe; 3) action: compulsive rituals; 4) causality: magical practices magic of names especially; 5) theme: ambivalence in antithetical primal wordsin treating compulsive neurotics the psychoanalyst is concerned chiefly with the therapeutic

transference of a dangerous authoritarianism; must destroy hold of some authoritarian figure (299); hero is constantly ruminating about his own desires, suffering extreme temptation (301). Great summary: Allegory as a kind of communication is like a kind of essential behavior, the compulsive ritual. Compulsive behavior is not just physical actionbut even more profoundly a form of symbolic action, and can therefore be compared to the symbolic action known as allegory. 1) in both cases we find an authoritarian sort of behavior: rigid, anxious, fatalistic; the hero of an allegorical epic will be presented to us doing things the way a compulsive person does things, regularly, meticulously, blindly. 2) in both cases there is great play for magical influence, psychic possession, taboo restrictions; 3) events are isolated from each other into highly episodic forms, thereby encapsulating particular moments of contagion or beatitude; 4) the compulsive pattern of behavior often shows a use of oracular omens, which are felt to be binding, and this provides the overall sublime pattern for a prophetic literature, where the hero is compelled ever onward and is held on his path by these predestinating omens and oracles; 5) in both cases we meet a language of taboo, of antithetical primal words, in which the single term contains diametrically opposed meanings, allowing for paradoxes and ironies at the heart of allegories. The paradoxes of taboo combine with other traits of compulsive behavior to give allegory a function in the rendering of a large part of our psychic life. Should be of wide interest, since we are, after all, all of us compulsive in some way or other (303). 7: Value and Intention: The Limits of Allegory Value of allegory was called into question by Goethe and his Romantic followers, and by the New Critics (see esp. Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry, rev. ed. 274-278).

Step from compulsive to compulsory is short; since allegorical works present an aesthetic surface which implies an authoritative, thematic, correct reading, and which attempts to eliminate other possible readings, they deliberately restrict the freedom of the reader. They raise the question of value directly, asserting certain propositions as good and others as bad; a work like the FQ violates the Kantian rule of disinterestedness (306). see trobar clus, Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love: on deliberate obscurity of troubadour poetry. Fourfold scheme of interpretive levels parallels the Aristotelian four causes: literal/material; allegorical/formal; tropological/efficient; anagogical/final (313n11). Anatomy of Melancholy an allegory in which Democritus is the hero (319-320). Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589): allegory the chief ringleader and captain of all other figures, either in the poetic or oratory science; the deceptive, subversive figure of false semblaunt, especially needed by the courtier, who must learn to speak deceptively and equivocallyallegorically (328-329). Psychoanalysis, especially popular form; science fiction both modern forms of allegory (336). More allegory is actually being produced now than ever, but the difference is that the work produced takes a negative view of its precepts (340). Naive allegory flourishes where pioneer, or highly competitive, social conditions pertain, and those are conditions where sheer survival is at stake, and there is no place for dialectical subtleties (342). Allegory a ritual for carrying off the threat of ambivalent feelings (343). Myth=dream; allegory=rationalization and compulsive thinking (355n61).

Afterword Allegories are monuments to our ideals (360). See Paul Goodman on Emersons Concord Hymn, in Notes on a Remark of Seami, in Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, 130-137. Films especially need the emblematic/allegorical mode: De Sicas Miracle in Milan; Clements Forbidden Games, Gervaise; Bergmans The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, The Magician; Fellinis La Strada, La Dolce Vita, The Temptation of Dr. Antonio; Bunuels Viridiana; Antonionis LAvventura and La Notte, Alain Resnaiss Last Year at Marienbad; Hiroshima Mon Amour, Une Aussi Longe Absence (365-366). Potential weakness of the mode: anesthesia, diffusion of inner coherence, as it threatens never to end (367). The strengths of the mode are equally clear. It allows for instruction, for rationalizing, for categorizing and codifying, for casting spells and expressing unbidden compulsions, for Spensers pleasing analysis, and, since aesthetic pleasure is a virtue also, for romantic storytelling, for satirical complications, and for sheer ornamental display. To conclude, allegories are the natural mirrors of ideology (368).