ABSTRACT
This last chapter looks at allegory in some twentieth-century versions, and follows on from insights discussed in chapters 5 and 6. It concludes with discussion of the idea of allegory, but we cannot hope to arrive at any finality here; we can only think of further questions which need consideration. Modern criticism and practice has extended the arguments of
Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, developing the concept of allegory as part of a critical vocabulary throughout literary and cultural studies. Some critics, such as James Paxson, have used de Man to reread texts of traditional allegory to show how these new insights have the potential to disturb earlier ways of reading them (Paxson, 1994). While some approaches have concentrated on allegory as an element in the content of fiction, others have argued that all writing is allegorical, or that no text is free of it (Fletcher, 1964: 8). This has been a division which this study has tried to bring out. In his book Metahistory (1973), the historian Hayden White
argues that the consciousness of nineteenth-century historians was informed by four strategies, of thinking through the four tropes: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy and irony. No narrative of history
could be empirical, or non-figurative; to write history in narrative form entails working with one of these modes, which in turn structures both thought and narrative. These four terms imply allegory since each literary mode implies others; the narrative means what it says and is overcoded with another narrative that is dependent upon the choice of trope. White would not, of course, go so far as de Man in the claim that tropes undo narrative. In later writings, White returns to the theme, quoting the philosopher Louis Mink that ‘narratives contain indefinitely many ordering relations, and indefinitely many ways of combining those relations. … a historical narrative claims truth not merely for each of its individual statements taken distributively, but for the complex form of the narrative itself ’. White adds that to put those individual statements together is allegoresis: allegorical interpretation. ‘What else’ he asks, quoting Marx’s opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), ‘could be involved in the representation of a set of real events as, for example, a tragedy … or farce?’ (White, 1987: 45-46). Perceiving the events of 1848-51 in France to be a farce, in contrast to the tragedy of the earlier French Revolution (1789), Marx deliberately articulates them in farcical, excessive language: the work is an allegory of what it describes and what it has allegorized. White’s argument implies that to go from listing historical events to seeing them as having generically specific forms – first as tragedy, then as farce, as Marx says – is a move from literality to ‘a figural account, an allegory’. White’s thinking silently alludes to Auerbach, but engages in
dialogue with Paul Ricoeur, who believes that it is temporality which enables ‘narrativity’; while narrativity is ‘the language structure that has temporality as its ultimate referent’ (Ricoeur, quoted in White, 1987: 52). The knowledge and experience of time constrains narrative, which is therefore a figure, an allegory, expressing a relationship towards temporality. It emphasizes that the narrative exists in time. If it did not, then there could be a complete plot, but because a narrative refers back, ultimately, to time as the referent, and is structured by that time, which, of course, has not finished, then it contains within it the allegory of its own incompleteness. A narrative is an allegorization of being within time.
