ABSTRACT
Two views of allegory are stated here. Fielding’s joking with allegory illustrates what happens to it in the period of the realist novel, of which Joseph Andrews (1742) offers an early example. He mocks it in the name of common sense, and empirical logic,
leaving open the question whether allegory can exist at all within the age of realism. Realism becomes a dominant nineteenth-century mode of writing, premised on the belief that speech should be direct, capable of being inspected empirically, and written about in language which purports to be a transparent window opening onto its subject matter. Keats, however, uses ‘allegory’ to describe Shakespeare, against
those tendencies in Romanticism which refused the term, and it relates to his conviction that the ‘poetical character’ is ‘not itself – it has no self – it is everything and nothing – It has no character. … It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. … A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no identity’ (letter of 27 October 1818, Keats, 1954: 172). Iago (in Othello) and Imogen (in Cymbeline) are opposites in gender, in good and evil, and in style: all that unites them is the letter ‘I’, which may make them figures of Shakespeare’s autobiography. Raised to the status of being characters, they become allegories. Byron keeps his identity whatever he writes, but a ‘life of allegory’ implies fluidity; there is nothing which the subject adheres to, no ego, ‘no identity’, and the only way to interpret allegory is by more writing. This chapter looks at allegory in three ways. The first deals
with two nineteenth-century American novelists, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and one poet, Emily Dickinson; each of these, inspired by Carlyle, found excitement in the allegory/ symbol distinction. They followed the New England writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), a follower of Carlyle, saying that ‘particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. Nature is the symbol of spirit’ (Matthiessen, 1941: 41-45, 57-58). Hawthorne and Melville show a resistance to realism in their novels, which they called ‘romances’, but unlike Emerson, they are not ready to discard allegory as inferior to the symbol, choosing rather to retain both. The second way will follow Keats’ hint: examining allegorical
writing as contesting the fixing of identity that nineteenth-century modernity was so concerned to uphold. Allegory becomes a way of thinking about resistance to identity, or what remains monstrous. Since a life of allegory can only be explained by further
‘commentary’, it suggests its final uninterpretability. This is an issue which, developed through discussion of Courbet, will lead into the third approach to allegory: seeing it as a mode appropriate to the city, the place which baffles by its plurality of signs. Here I draw on Dickens, Marx and Baudelaire. Allegory, not symbolism, becomes identified with the text that cannot be read singly: like the modern city.
