Allegory and Ideology

Fredric Jameson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781788730433
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788730440
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Works do not have meanings, they soak up meanings: a work is a machine for libidinal investments (including the political kind). It is a process that sorts incommensurabilities and registers contradictions (which is not the same as solving them!) The inevitable and welcome conflict of interpretations - a discursive, ideological struggle - therefore needs to be supplemented by an account of this simultaneous processing of multiple meanings, rather than an abandonment to liberal pluralisms and tolerant (or intolerant) relativisms. This is not a book about "method", but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third-World: about which a notorious essay on National Allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary; and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context.

1

Historical: The Ladder of Allegory

It does not seem wise to begin our presentation with the secret that allegory is itself allegorical: an interpretive virus that, spreading by way of its own propagations, proliferates and perpetuates itself until, in a kind of incurable interpretive frenzy, it becomes indistinguishable from the text and no longer visible to the naked eye. Yet allegory is also a surgical instrument and a diagnostic tool, by way of which the atomic particles of a sentence or a narrative, the most minute meanings and secondary connotations, are registered on the X-ray plate in all their guilty absence, in all their toxic participation. Freud showed us that our very dreams are allegories,¹ while the theologians of all the religions—great and small—read reality itself as an inescapable swarm of allegories with all the exegetical obsession of any garden-variety paranoiac. So we had better not begin by admitting that there is an allegory of allegory itself; that the allegorist, like the politician, is always corrupted by the power of his or her monopoly of interpretation; that allegory turns all books into a single central text; and finally that allegory goes hand in hand with secrecy, just as Umberto Eco showed that the whole point of language as such was not truth, but lying.²

It is always better, when confronted with so multifarious a term, to begin by identifying its various enemies, which is to say, its opposites. Maybe we can reduce them to two: the first condemns the multiplicity and dispersal of allegory with the unity of the living symbol. The second denounces everything cut-and-dried, abstract, desiccated in the allegorical narrative, with the concreteness of reality itself and the perceptual three-dimensionality of realism. (Erich Auerbach’s figura was an ingenious strategy for combining both these onslaughts.)³ Meanwhile, and characteristically, allegory turns against itself and indicts itself by way of a generic and pragmatic distinction between outright allegorical structures which have the objectivity of fixed forms and a multiple collection of seemingly random interpretations or readings now consigned to some general (and generally pejorative) category called allegoresis.

This final form of the dismissal of allegory as a dangerous contagion will be acknowledged in the last chapter of this book. The argument from realism, however, can be better undermined by history: for it presupposes a radical distance between meaning and empirical reality, and attributes to allegory a failed attempt to produce an impossible unification of these dimensions (which are ultimately those of thought and experience, or better still, of soul and body). But in an age that prizes difference and differentiation, heterogeneity, incommensurability, a resistance to unification, this failure cannot continue to be a reproach; and it is our fault then, as readers—perhaps as old-fashioned readers—that we fail to acknowledge the reality of the literal level of the allegorical text: this was not the error of the first allegorists, for whom that literal level was historical fact, to be respected in all its bloody triumphs and failures.

As for the symbol, however, it generated a historical debate in its own right in the Romantic period, on which it is perhaps useful to pause. Not that the Romantics themselves—whether German or English—were any too reliable in their promiscuous use of these seemingly contradictory terms. Nor was Wordsworth philosophically aware of the distinction between just that realism we have been evoking and the Nature of which his new style wished to be the symbol. But it was precisely that symbolism of nature and the natural which was itself profoundly allegorical. The bourgeois revolution—supreme event of the age and even, for Immanuel Kant, of History itself, the seizure by a people of its own destiny⁴ (and, for the bourgeoisie, the setting of limits for itself in the form of a written constitution)—finds its literary expression in the denunciation of the allegorical decoration and rhetorical embellishments of the poetry of the ancien régime, with its call for that plain style of American revolutionary clothing (Benjamin Franklin and the Quakers). That symbolic fashion, however, turned out to be not merely an epochal change in taste, but also yet another allegory for class: for democratic equality, without the flourishes or the rhetoric.

So we have here a first example of how allegory itself can be allegorical, when it is symbolic of an ancien régime and its class hierarchies. Its much-touted opposite number in characteristically Romantic symbols—Novalis’s “blue flower,” the simple-mindedness of Wordsworth’s peasants, Schelling’s call for a new mythology—when interpreted either historically, or in terms of literary history, in fact unmask themselves as so many allegories. However, the symbol as such—even when disguised under Hegelian trappings as “the concrete universal”—always marks the attempt at a flight from interpretation, from theoretical and historical understanding. It has at least that much in common with religion; and the conjunction of both in the person of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is no accident (although one would want to add that this personage—like Walter Benjamin in a later period—is an immense continent whose exploration is always rewarding, and whose flora and fauna are often in rich, genetically productive conflict with one another).

Meanwhile, if the revulsion from allegory has its historical determinants and its often-political meaning, it is well to remember that its revivals do as well. For the West, at least, the first allegorical stirrings are to be found around the emergence of sacred texts, or at least—in the case of Homer—culturally central ones, each one of which will in the modern period come to be identified as the Book of the World. We will examine Homeric allegory in a moment; but far more dramatic is the flurry of allegorization that accompanies the Pentateuch or the Torah down through the ages, in Jewish and Christian commentary alike.

As it is the latter, and the evolution of its doctrine of the four meanings or levels of scripture, that constitutes the axis of this book, it will be worth recalling the dual function of allegorical interpretation in those initial centuries in which Christianity, following the strategic lead of St. Paul, prepares to become the universal religion of the archetypal Western world empire. On the one hand, a small Jewish sect needs to legitimize itself in the eyes of the non-Christian Jewish population by demonstrating the myriad and covert ways in which the Hebrew Bible announces the coming of Christ as its fulfillment—a word that plays a significant role in the allegorical theory elaborated in this process. Thus, to draw on a well-worn illustration, the historical (literal) fact of the descent of the Hebrews into Egypt and their subsequent liberation will stand as a figure for the death and the resurrection of Christ, an interpretation that by no means excludes other meanings and other kinds of allegorical interpretations of the same event.

Meanwhile, the new religion must also, at one and the same time, cleanse itself of any narrow ethnic or regional identifications and translate its foundational texts into messages that address the Greek-speaking Gentiles of the eastern Mediterranean. This is also achieved allegorically by sublimating and spiritualizing Jewish Law; to use its most famous problem as an example, the requirement for circumcision is transformed into a “circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11). The physical act of circumcision is thereby figurally transformed and translated into a spiritual “circumcision of the heart.”

Both of these aspects of allegorization—the typological one (proposing a fulfillment alongside its literal and prophetic enunciation) and the figural one (which seems to suggest a sublimation of the physical act into a ritual or in other words a symbolic and spiritual event)—can still be detected in the ideological function of modern allegory, where they can be identified as the revelation of a Utopian narrative of history on the one hand, and a construction of subjectivity on the other.

But at this point it will be desirable to return to origins in the elaboration of the ultimate fourfold system of allegorical meanings, considered as a ladder to be climbed rung by rung beginning with its simplest elements or forms.

The term allegory is most often applied to what may be called a one-to-one narrative in which features of a primary narrative are selected (in the process rhetoric calls amplificatio) and correlated with features of a second one that then becomes the “meaning” of the first. The point-to-point allegory is then something of a reversal of the heroic simile, in which the epic poet (Homer, and following him Virgil and the whole epic tradition) embellishes a given action with a large-scale comparison:

Now when the men of both sides were set in order by their leaders,
The Trojans came on with clamor and shouting, like wildfowl,
as when the clamor of cranes goes high to the heavens,
when the cranes escape the winter time and the rains unceasing
and clamorously wing their way to the streaming Ocean,
bringing the Pygmaian men bloodshed and destruction:
at daybreak they bring on the baleful battle against them. (Book III, 1–7)⁵

The comparison unifies the overall action of the multitudinous Trojan army charging forward, reducing it to a single sensuous feature, namely the war cries, before developing under its own momentum into a fulldress autonomous action in its own right: as though the very mention of the cranes evoked a whole dimension of being—their southern migration when winter comes, the perils of the journey, and the final murderous arrival, when the ferocious birds attack the Pygmies in their homeland on the other side of the world—a myth attested to in many different cultures. The simile, therefore, with a mind of its own, hones in on the bloody climax of a noisy and disordered clash, which it has first organized and aestheticized into the graceful figure of a single flight of birds. This parallel development cannot be said to produce a structure in which the meaning of one narrative is revealed in the form of a second one: at this stage, the movement is reversible, and the legendary story of the cranes can be said to be fully as much illuminated by its reversal of the Greek’s invasion of Troy as in the standard reading, which, however, it revises into the inevitability of a natural and indeed instinctual impulse. The defending Trojans hate the Greek invaders as viscerally as the invading cranes hate the defending Pygmies; meanwhile, the stops and starts of the Greek invasion (assembling the allies, becalmed without wind in port, dissensions, leadership quarrels, and so on) are somehow themselves effaced by the identification with a well-nigh unconscious will to battle.

This two-level heroic simile must not, however, be confused (as it so often tends to be) with metaphor, with which it has only this in common: that when the latter is inspected in detail and considered to have distinct and separate parts and features—my love is like a red, red rose: what are its petals, its stamen, why red, what about its scent, and so on—metaphor tends to become simile in its own right. But the effect of metaphor, in a narrative, amounts to the latter’s denarrativization: the horizontal momentum is disrupted, we pause on a vertical association and linger in some metaphorical perpetual present (or eternal present, out of time), which brings to a halt that onward rushing temporal momentum that the simile only tends to accentuate. Simile redoubles the power of narrative, while metaphor arrests it, transforming epic back into a lyric stasis.

In the structuralist period, such parallel structures began to be studied under the more neutral and technical term of homologies; and it was with the work of Lucien Goldmann⁶ that this term at length achieved a general methodological acceptance, designating the search for some one-to-one correspondence between structures. In his most famous work (The Hidden God), Goldmann tried to establish a wide-ranging correspondence between the literary structures of Jansenist tragedy (particularly in Racine) and the social situation of the noblesse de robe as a class fraction doomed in its rivalry for class dominance with the “rising” bourgeoisie. The sociological diagnosis seemed original and profound, the method doubtful and unconvincing.

The conclusion to be drawn here is that an appeal to homology must always be a warning signal. The two-level system is the mark of bad allegory, insofar as it disperses the elements of each narrative line without reuniting them, at the same time opening a reversible correspondence between the two levels. Tragedy is Jansenist, but Jansenism is also tragic; meanwhile the component parts of each system tend toward autonomy and their own independent interpretations: Pascal’s bet can be seen as a reflection on the future of his class but also as part of the development of probability theory in this period. Pity and fear are traditional tragic categories; but melancholy, when attributed to a whole social class and period, is a concept with rather more clinical and psychic connotations.

We may draw on a well-known modern example of this kind of two-level allegory for further demonstration of the limits that mar its form as well as its content—“defective content resulting in defective form,” as Hegel famously put it. Albert Camus’s The Plague has traditionally been read as an allegory of the German occupation of France during World War II, what Jean-Paul Sartre called “the republic of silence”; and much ink has been spilled in arguments about the adequacy of its representation of a complex human enemy as a nonhuman plague virus. In Camus’s defense we may cite André Malraux’s representational strategy of excluding from your cast of characters figures who, like the fascists standing in for evil, repel any form of empathy or novelistic understanding. (In his case, the figure of Ferral in La condition humaine then becomes an interesting problem.) But Camus’s own work suggests a reading of The Plague as a more interesting experimental departure.

The undoubted distinction of the earlier works (L’Étranger, Le mythe de Sisyphe, Caligula)—Camus viewed them as a trilogy, all staging “the absurd” in different ways and from different generic angles—turned on a unique thematic contradiction between the meaninglessness of a life destined for death (what the existential philosophers called “finitude”) and the experience of bonheur (a word a little stronger than the English happiness, I think).⁷ The point is that the latter is not some pious hope or longing, but a real experience: yet it is an experience that can only be fulfilled in an absolute present, as in Camus’ ecstatic evocation of the sun at Tipasa; while on the other end of the spectrum, absurdity is also a concrete experience, but it must be felt in that different temporal continuum of a past–present–future, what Sartre will call “the project,” a life in time. The greatness of the early “trilogy” lay in its resolute option for bonheur, for the temporality of the pure or living present: The Myth of Sisyphus offers a handbook in achieving what its memorable last sentence invited: “Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux.” Meanwhile, neither Caligula nor the Meursault of L’Étranger are adepts of the absurd, they are both in fact happy, in the peculiar sense with which Camus endows this word. Caligula has taken on himself the pedagogical task of imposing the lesson of the absurd on his subjects (by way of arbitrary death sentences) in order to teach them the experience of bonheur whether they like it or not; and as for Meursault, it has not sufficiently been observed that like some successful Sisyphus he is also happy and that the absurd must be imposed on him from the outside, by a death sentence passed on him for the wrong reasons by people who do not understand his life in the present, in other words by Caligula’s subjects as it were, and as though on their emperor himself.

The extraordinary quality of L’Étranger, to be sure, lay in a uniquely mechanical decision, namely to have Meursault tell his nonstory in a nonnarrative tense, the passé composé, which, as with that “style indirect libre” which Ann Banfield memorably termed “unspeakable sentences,”⁸ is never otherwise used in this narrative way. By way of language itself, Meursault becomes a strange kind of alien, catapulted into a prosaic world of humans living another temporality altogether: it is as it were a kind of science fictional estrangement effect, which can only be categorized in normal literary terms as a form of Asperger’s syndrome, of an absolute absence in Meursault of anything like empathy with other (“normal”) human beings. In that sense, indeed, the book’s title, which has been variously translated into English as “The Stranger” or “The Outsider,” might better have been simply rendered “The Alien”; and what happens to Meursault at the hands of the inhabitants of the planet on which he is condemned to live is not unpredictable.

But none of these remarkable formal solutions is appealed to in The Plague, in which Caligula’s lessons are administered to the inhabitants of Oran in an already contingent, accidental, and indeed meaningless way: the epidemic is itself absurd avant la lettre and in advance, and fragile and ephemeral moments of bonheur reduced to mere psychological experiences. This is, if you like, an experiment in projecting Camus’s unique temporal contradiction onto a realistic representation, which one must also call political insofar as its framework is essentially that of a collectivity.

This is why what in the trilogy had all the formal freshness of a genuine crux has here evaporated into sheer moralizing; the paradoxes of the great moralistes, from Pascal to Machiavelli, from La Rochefoucauld to Gracián, have here been drained of their savor and flattened out into academic philosophizing. The dualism of the allegory conceals a false premise, that the politics of World War II has something in common with epidemiology and quarantine: this may well have been the way the inhabitants of Algeria lived it. But the outcome, for us as readers, is a liberal humanism in which the two incommensurable dimensions of history and the body are illicitly identified. This is bad allegory at its most consummate. (Indeed, if one wanted to indulge the interpretive faculty by transforming this reading into the more complete fourfold system, it might not be too far-fetched to assign the medical diagnosis to our third, or “moral,” level, while the fourth collective one could translate it precisely into that story of an alien lynched by a mob of incomprehensible humans hypothesized above. As for the text, perhaps the chronicler Rieux simply translates Caligula’s unique charac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Allegory and Ideology
• 1. Historical: The Ladder of Allegory
• 2. Psychological: Emotional Infrastructures
• 3. Psychoanalytic: Hamlet with Lacan
• 4. Musical: An Allegorical Symphony? Mahler’s Sixth
• 5A. Political: National Allegory: Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism
• 5B. Political: National Allegory: Commentary
• 6. Poetic: Spenser and the Crisis of Personification
• 7. Epic: Dante and Space
• 8. Dramatic: Faust and the Messages of Historicism
• 9. Literary: Allegoresis in Postmodernity
• Appendix A: The Greimas Square
• Appendix B: Consciousness Explained Allegorically
• Appendix C: Culture and Group Libido
• Notes
• Index