Allegory and Literary Form

Extract

The trouble with allegory is that it has become a fashionable current preoccupation and people like to be for it or against it. Polemics always tend to vulgarize issues, critical problems get lost among the involvements with “positions,” scholarship becomes a device for finding proofs in history for tightly held hypotheses, and argument becomes a form of rhetoric. But an even worse consequence of such controversial constriction is that it puts literary studies in a straightjacket. There is an important truth in that account of Western literary criticism in the Middle Ages which sees it primarily as a working out and extension of Augustinian doctrine, with the problems of Christian allegory at its center, and there is sufficient evidence in history to support and enlighten that view. Those, on the other hand, who are uncomfortable with allegory and find this view somehow less than satisfactory for the reading of certain texts may accept the allegorists' description of the tradition generally but at the same time justify their dissidence by pointing out (1) that there were other forms of allegory in the Middle Ages, which such a statement of tradition does not adequately consider, (2) that not all literary pieces were formed by their authors under the influence of that tradition, whatever interpreters afterwards may have done in reading them, and (3) that, in any case, even the Christian doctors most learned in the allegorical art did not claim that it could operate uniformly in all its variety everywhere or in every piece. On the contrary, they were the first to warn against such an assumption. Yes, say the proponents of allegory in response, but we don't make so rigid a claim as you imply; we are aware that not every medieval poem can be read by all the kinds of interpretation at once; some pieces obviously intend no more than the simplest sort of old-fashioned moralizing. And so it goes, pro and con, in secula seculorum.