XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis, rec.arts.books, alt.usage.english   
   XPost: alt.english.usage, alt.religion.christianity   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Save the Allegory!   
      
   An entire literary tradition is being forgotten because writers use   
   the term allegory to mean, like, whatever they want.   
      
   By Laura Miller   
      
   I’m not much of a language stickler. I roll my eyes when people argue   
   over the Oxford comma, and I couldn’t care less when someone says they   
   “could care less.” As a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist),   
   I’m mostly OK with seeing the meaning of words evolve and transform   
   over time, because that’s what a living language does.   
      
   Laura Miller is a books and culture columnist for Slate and the author   
   of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.   
      
   But we all have our weaknesses. There’s one particular error I see   
   over and over, often in criticism, that sets my teeth on edge. That’s   
   because it flies beyond being a simple misnomer and instead   
   misunderstands and erases an entire literary tradition, a rich and   
   wonderful one that flowered most gloriously in the 13th century. My   
   gripe isn’t totally arcane, I promise! Just bear with me for a moment   
   while I get medieval on those who abuse the word allegory.   
      
   What people usually mean when they call something an allegory today is   
   that the fictional work in question can function as a metaphor for   
   some real-world situation or event. This is a common arts journalist’s   
   device: finding a political parallel to whatever you happen to be   
   reviewing is a handy way to make it appear worth writing about in the   
   first place. Calling that parallel an allegory serves to make the   
   comparison more forceful. Fusion says that Batman v Superman is a   
   “none-too-subtle allegory for the fight between Republican   
   presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.” (It is not.) The   
   Hollywood Reporter calls Zootopia an “accidental anti-Trump   
   allegory”—this despite the fact that there is no literary form less   
   accidental than allegory. The meaning of the word has drifted so far   
   that even works that aren’t especially metaphorical get labeled as   
   allegory: A film about artistic repression in Iran is a “clunky   
   allegory” for ... artistic repression in Iran.   
      
   Allegory or metaphor: The distinction might seem obscure and academic   
   to many readers. Shouldn’t allegory be grateful to get any attention   
   at all? Isn’t it just an archaic literary mode that nobody uses   
   anymore? Yes and no. About the only people creating true allegories   
   today are political cartoonists. But a culture never entirely discards   
   its roots, and allegory, which first appeared in the waning years of   
   the Roman Empire, is one of the foundations of Western literature.   
   Maybe if we understood it better, we’d realize how much we owe to it.   
   Besides, the allegorical imagination lives on, just not in the places   
   where critics think they see it.   
      
   An allegory, in short, is not just another word for a metaphor. In   
   essence, it’s a form of fiction that represents immaterial things as   
   images. It calls attention to what it’s doing, typically by giving   
   those images overtly thematic labels, like presenting the Seven Deadly   
   Sins as a procession of people named Lust, Sloth, Pride, and the rest.   
   The most famous allegory ever written, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s   
   Progress, was published in 1678, making it a holdover; allegory saw   
   its artistic heyday in the Middle Ages. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress was   
   a colossal hit; for two centuries, it was the second book purchased by   
   any Protestant household affluent and literate enough to own its own   
   Bible. Everyone read about the narrator who falls asleep and dreams of   
   a man named Christian fleeing the City of Destruction while bearing a   
   heavy burden (representing the knowledge of his own sins) on his back.   
   A figure named Evangelist instructs Christian on how to reach the   
   Celestial City, a long journey past such perils as the Slough (swamp)   
   of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty, where people with names like   
   Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Hypocrisy attempt to lead him astray.   
      
   The low opinion in which allegory is now widely held can be blamed on   
   The Pilgrim’s Progress. The book is pious and manifestly didactic,   
   although I can testify from experience that a young-enough reader can   
   still find it an entertaining adventure yarn. Adults, apart from some   
   very devout Protestants, tend to experience its sermonizing as   
   oppressive. When critics call a work of art an allegory today, and   
   especially when they use adjectives like clunky and none-too-subtle,   
   they invoke this aspect of The Pilgrim’s Progress; they mean a story   
   that imposes a single, conspicuous interpretation on a reader or   
   viewer. Allegory lectures. As the critic Northrop Frye wrote, “The   
   commenting critic is often prejudiced against allegory without knowing   
   the real reason, which is that continuous allegory prescribes the   
   direction of his commentary, and so restricts its freedom.”   
      
   Perhaps Frye was right, and what we resent about allegory is the way   
   it makes thematic analysis superfluous. You can’t really congratulate   
   yourself for ferreting out the moral of Christian fighting his way   
   through the fancy city of Vanity Fair or the mining town named Lucre.   
   Should a book or a film present its argument so simply that even a   
   child can discern it, what’s left to talk about? Merely language,   
   story, and imagery—all the pleasures that art is made of.   
      
   Do we even know how to read such a book anymore? C.S. Lewis thought   
   not. He wrote the definitive treatise on the form in 1936: The   
   Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. We know Lewis today   
   as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and as a writer of Christian   
   apologetics, but before all that he was a sensational literary   
   critic—and I mean sensational literally. Perceptive, erudite, and   
   witty, he also wrote with an infectious vividness about the experience   
   of reading, of mingling with an author’s mind and imagination. Here’s   
   how he described the allegories of Martianus Capella, an influential   
   writer of the early fifth century:   
      
       The philosophies of others, the religions of others—back even to   
   the twilight of pre-Republican Rome—have all gone into the curiosity   
   shop of his mind. It is not his business to believe or disbelieve   
   them; the wicked old pedant knows a trick worth two of that. He piles   
   them up all around him until there is hardly room for him to sit among   
   them in the middle darkness of the shop; and there he gloats and   
   catalogues, but never dusts them, for even their dust is precious in   
   his eyes.   
      
      
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