Allegory and Ideology

Allegory and Ideology

Allegory and Ideology

Fredric Jameson

This paperback edition first published by Verso 2020

First published by Verso 2019

© Fredric Jameson 2019, 2020

Map in Chapter 3 reprinted with permission of Financial Policy Magazine, March 2, 2016.

The figures in Chapter 4 are reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press through PLSclear from Seth Monahan, Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas, 2015.

Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, part of Chapter 5, was published originally in Social Text, no. 15 (Autumn 1986).

Appendix A reproduced with permission of the University of Minnesota Press from the author’s foreword to Algirdas Julien Greimas, On Meaning, 1970.

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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To

Phillip Wegner

and

Kim Stanley Robinson

for mounting the stallion of reading

and

in memory of

Masao Miyoshi and Hayden White

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

5. Political: National Allegory

A. Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

B. 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

Appendices

A. The Greimas Square

B. Consciousness Explained Allegorically

C. Culture and Group Libido

Notes

Index

Preface: Allegory and Ideology

Some topics need no introduction inasmuch as they are already everywhere the object of dispute or simply because their relevance becomes obvious as soon as they are identified. Others, like this one, require some preliminary account of their significance in the scheme of things, as well as an indication of how they can best be presented. Sometimes an author does this by describing his personal discovery of the subject and its importance: I will not do that here.

But as my starting point in the ideological will seem partisan for some, idiosyncratic for others, and for still others simply old-fashioned, I will need to say why Ideology is none of these things and why it subsumes everything else in culture and the superstructures, assuming the position that religion once held for the first historians and cultural theoreticians of the West. And this will initially require us to identify one of the fundamental obstacles to grasping the centrality of Ideology, namely the conviction that there are areas of life, areas of activity as well as of thought, which are nonideological.

It is an illusion most easily entertained in moments of historical stasis, or at least in places in which ideological or class struggle seems to have been contained and reduced to manageable proportions. There is a certain parallel here with the history of linguistics and in particular with that of the tropes and figures. The study of these linguistic deviations was first made possible by the seemingly obvious (and logical) fact of the existence of a literal language the distortions of which could easily be identified. As tropology advanced, however, and became more secure in the possession of its instruments and analyses, the conviction that there was such a thing as a literal language became shaken and at length disappeared, leaving in its place a more generalized conception of Representation as such which is still with us and which remains the central mystery of this field or problematic. Is it possible, then, that naïve realism should find itself confronting the same fate?

As for what will come to be recognized as ideology, the exploration of non-Western social formations produced an explanatory concept, that of Culture, generally identified with Religion, in terms of which the deviations from the norm of Western society could be described, if not exactly explained. But in the course of modernization and secularization, when the variety of social mechanisms became comprehensible in economic terms as modes of production (historical materialism), and when religions themselves became the object of secular analysis as cultural or superstructural formations, then it became possible to grasp the relationship of culture or religion with their economic context, by way of the concept of Ideology—as what the Marxist tradition called base and superstructure (terms whose relevance is not particularly affected by their overfamiliarity or their frequent misuse either).

The usefulness, then, of a generalized notion of Ideology lies in its dual capacity to combine, I will not say the dilemmas of subject and object, or soul and body, but at least the controversies between materialism and idealism that turn on the objective functioning and history of the socioeconomic mechanism on the one hand and the construction of subjectivity on the other. We must credit Louis Althusser for having made an extraordinary beginning on healing this rift, this incommensurability of explanatory codes, with his notion of ideology as a mechanism whereby the conscious (and unconscious) individual biological subject situates himself or herself within the collective social structure: ideology as a kind of unconscious cognitive mapping.¹

He did not, however, pursue this investigation into the historical realm, that is to say, into the processes where the transformations of subjectivity can be seen to accompany those economic changes in the history of the modes of production; he did not, in other words, inquire into the dynamics of what we may call cultural revolution, having been chastened, perhaps, by Marx’s own explicit warning that ideology … has no history.² But this famous remark, read in its original contort, can be seen to apply specifically to what we would today call the history of ideas—that is to say, a history of ideologies or other cultural symptoms studied in their own right as autonomous phenomena. Just as today we would not study capitalism without taking commodity reification and its attendant subjectivities into account, so also—except for the area of religions as such—few would undertake an examination of what we still call non-Western cultures without any consideration of the mode of production of which they are both symptomatic and constitutive at one and the same time. Ideology, however, is the watchword for resistance to such disciplinary reifications, and it stands for the unification of objective and subjective fields into a single project, which, from that standpoint of the humanistic disciplines which is ours here, can perhaps best be defined as the examination of the construction and constitution of individual subjectivities and their susceptibility to revolutionary change.

This is then the larger context in which I propose to explore allegory as a fundamental mechanism in that process, in a project that on the one hand deals with representation as such, and on the other with History. But from both these perspectives a new problem emerges, which is that of narrative (and with it, the question of literature itself).

I have elsewhere proposed that we think of the ideologeme—the elementary cell or smallest possible intelligible unit of ideology—as a dual structure that can be approached from either side with quite different analytic equipment.³ On the one hand, the ideologeme is an opinion (doxa is a favorite theoretical term for this cognitive or pseudocognitive version), while on the other hand it can be articulated as a narrative. Racisms are the crudest and most accessible examples of this duality: opinions about the races being thinly disguised fantasies that express the fears and envies of individual and collective subjects in narrative form. Political psychologists have never really been able to disentangle these twin dimensions of ideology by demonstrating the primacy of the one over the other; meanwhile, Enlightenment (insofar as one is permitted to evoke it historically as a tradition of some kind) has always presupposed the power of rational persuasion as a therapy for doxa in their cognitive forms. The roots of the narrative ideologemes in the form of this or that psychoanalytic primal fantasy have seemed a good deal less accessible, or at best, have seemed to take on purely personal and contingent forms. Althusserian analysis, however, drawing no doubt on Nietzsche fully as much as on Lacan, assumes a constitutive and well-nigh indissoluble link between the subject and narrative as such. The subject is somehow defined by its narratives of itself; and narrative in turn seems always to be wedded in one way or another to the presence of the subject, even when it is a question of the succession of mere objective facts.

This is where we find ourselves obliged to remember the classical opposite of the concept of doxa, namely episteme. To translate this second term simply as knowledge is to evade the whole confused and immemorial debate about science as such (its other possible translation). Marxism is certainly not the only philosophical system to have consecrated science as the way out of opinion, ideology, purely individual or idiosyncratic thinking, and the like. But I do like Althusser’s definition of science as writing that omits the place of the subject;⁴ and I appreciate the new representational problems to which this paradoxical formulation must inevitably give rise. Its great advantage is, of course, to have bypassed the question of truth (scientific or otherwise), or better still, to have delegated it to the existential realm, where it becomes a concept that can fight it out with older notions of belief.

The Althusserian formula has yet another advantage, which we can dramatize by returning to Freud’s notorious essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming, an essay that most literary theorists deplore as the vulgar low point of psychoanalysis (literature as wish fulfillment) on a par with the most vulgar class-oriented Marxist criticism.

We can leave the matter of wish fulfillment, however, to the specialists in desire: what is most interesting in Freud’s thinking here is his astute observation that the writer’s fundamental problem lies not in his own wish-fulfilling fantasies, but rather in the reader’s reactions to those fantasies.⁵ Not only are we not interested in the wish fulfillments of other people, he tells us; the latter can strike us as positively repellent. (The relationship of this principle to political puritanism and the so-called social issues in American politics should be apparent.)

The author must therefore disguise his own wish fulfillments, his own personal stake in the story he is unfolding: and such mechanisms of disguise and concealment, of indirect forms of satisfaction, are at the very heart of the literary art, where they are generally obfuscated by questions of universalism, the human condition, the eternal story, and the like. The fact is, however, that this principle that Freud felt able to enunciate for literature is exactly the same as what Althusser formulated for science: the omission of the subject, the disconnecting of the individual subject from the narrative or the scientific–structural material.

Ideology is thus at the heart of all these issues: ideology not as the individual ideologeme or opinion, but rather as that intersection between the biological individual and the collective which is at stake in thinking, in literary expression, and of course in language itself (where the subject leaves its most visible mark in the shifter—the blank pronoun—that does double duty for both).⁶

Narrative analysis turns on the way in which ideology finds its fulfillment in temporal enactments of this dual subjectivity; what is called Ideologiekritik has for the most part concerned itself with the class content of its cognitive forms (as for example in Barthes’s classic Mythologies). But insofar as class becomes visible and is affirmed in a self-conscious way (as a class-for-itself), it is perhaps as repellent for other people (other classes) as the individual wish fulfillment was on the personal level. Both involve exclusions: the individual, by way of that brand he leaves on his psychological private property, on his ideational cattle (as William James famously put it),⁷ excludes everyone else by definition; collective self-definition (by gender and race as well as by social class) excludes the other collectivities. In much the same way, then, the secret of class or group identification must be concealed; and, finally (coming around to our central topic here), it is allegory that often achieves this concealment most effectively, for allegory delivers its message by way of concealing it.

It is a process that can initially be dramatized by the way in which synonymy, homophony, ambiguity, polysemy, association, puns, faux amis, and the like—a whole materialist zone of that nonmaterialist collective dimension called language—offer the hinge on which local signifying systems (or ideologemes) are constructed.⁸ For just as words are not the basic units of meaning, but rather syntax and sentences, so also there are no such things as ideas, if one understands by that word distinct and unrelated ideational entities: ideas are rather always elements in more complex signifying systems, whose most obvious mechanism—the binary opposition—is only one of the relationships that organize that cluster of themes we call a meaning. We have become accustomed to the notion that definition is negation, that identity is called into being by difference (and vice versa), and that what looks like an individual or autonomous meaning or idea always somehow includes its opposite. But as the Greimas square teaches us, a term has two opposites: its most vital and antagonistic polar opposition, and then that more passive and all-encompassing, uninteresting opposite or negation which is simply everything it is not. But these two very different kinds of oppositional terms then return on their starting point to transform it in its turn into two distinct meanings; and with that the whole complex dynamic of an ideologeme or signifying system is set in motion.

Yet it remains a static and unproductive motion, turning on itself very much like the rotation of the Greimas square, producing its various terms and identities in a revolving sequence, which marches in place without moving. It is at this point that the other face of ideology demands attention, the narrative one, in which the ideologeme in question is pressed into service of a properly ideological narrative. Which comes first, the narrative or the ideological concept? It is a very ancient question, if not an unresolvable one: thus, the Talmudic alternation between Halakhah and Haggadah (the Law and the Example) distantly reproduces this opposition,⁹ as does the classic anthropological debate about the relative priority of myth or ritual; or indeed the more contemporary structural distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic. It is, however, a tension far more central to theology than to philosophy, insofar as the traditional vocation of the latter lies in the production of concepts as such, consigning narrative to such incidental uses as the Platonic myth or the contemporary ethical example or casus.

In theology, however, there is always a story to be dealt with—if nothing else, the story of Creation itself. The negotiation between this or that fundamental narrative or mythic history and its meaning of doctrinal content becomes therefore a far more significant field of debate and argumentation. This is why the allegorical process, which is in question here, receives its first impetus and its methodological development from the Talmudic tradition, and later on the Church Fathers, rather than from the philosophical schools that preceded them and on which they drew. My own use of the patristic and medieval system of the four levels¹⁰ (explained in more detail in Chapter 1) can therefore be justified by this Benjaminian priority of theology over philosophy in narrative matters; and it is a scheme that will serve us well in ideological analysis as well. For the four levels essentially exhaust the various terrains on which ideology must perform its work. The first, literal or historical, level stands as the matter at hand, the thing demanding analysis—whether historical event (as in the Scriptures), text, idea, political debate, personality, ethical problem—whatever draws us up short as individuals and demands reflection and commentary.

The second allegorical or mystical level is then the secret or hidden meaning of that initial text, and this meaning is at one with the allegorical method deployed in order to reveal it (in much the same way as for Ibn Khaldun the other religions have separated revelation and miracle; only in Islam is the revelation—the Quran—itself the miracle).¹¹ We need not shy away from the use of the word mystical in this respect, for it can serve to remind us that Ideologiekritik is positive as well as negative and draws on a whole doctrine of group consciousness (asabiyya),¹² which is as restorative and ontological as the practice of suspicion and deconstruction with which Paul Ricoeur originally associated it.¹³ The Marxist practice of ideological analysis is in other words also Utopian and draws up into the light not only all those features of class consciousness we wish to avoid thinking about, but also the thoughts and visions (wish fulfillments) that are designed to replace or displace them; it is a practice of allegorical enlargement rather than one of reduction, as its less consequential critics have always liked to maintain.

That enlargement will then, in the fourfold scheme of things, deploy the two prolongations of the initial interpretation, the two successive and related levels of individual and collective experience and history. What the medieval thinkers considered the moral level, or that of conversion and the salvation of the individual soul, we might well wish to interpret in terms of existential experience, the construction of subjectivity or the psychoanalytic. But just as in theology individual salvation is ultimately inseparable from collective salvation, so also for us today, and despite the distortions inevitably developed by an individualist consumer-oriented society, the very thought of the destiny of a biological individual is inseparable from that of the future of the species, in whatever collective form one chooses to imagine that. The final or anagogical level, therefore, classically reserved for the Last Judgment, is that of a kind of political unconscious, that is, an often unconscious or merely implicit narrative of History as such, a collective and political narrative always latent in conceptions of our own personal destinies.

The terminology of the levels is useful in more than one way. Its principal convenience lies, of course, in the graphic and well-nigh visual way in which it permits an inventory of possible interpretations and as it were a concentration of a swarm of options into a few basic categories or reference points. The gaps between these zones, however, merit their own philosophical comment, for they constitute the empty spaces across which the attractions and repulsions (or identity and difference) pass. Such gaps thereby offer a convenient figure (in the absence of figuration) for the identification of incommensurables, as well as their differentiation. This is then the place to deploy a terminology I will not use frequently in what follows, but which must always be kept in mind as an interpretive resource and possibilities. For the gaps between the levels are the place in which libidinal investment takes place (to use a term first developed by Jean-François Lyotard): this concept designates a transfer of vital energies and of an almost obsessional attention from its source to another, less richly nourished area; or, if you prefer, and as the case may be, a distraction of one form of libidinal immediacy from its initial object to a less threatening or dangerous one. Such are the strategies and tactics of desire, as it seeks its satisfaction in what Freud might have called indirect means and byways: and interpretation, as the appropriation of an object of desire, quickly relearns the methods of its original nature. For ideology can also without much difficulty be transferred into the currently popular language of desire, these complex interplays and energy exchanges themselves offering an allegorical system of their own:

terminologies of Ideology (the collective)

terminologies of Desire (the individual)

interpretive codes

textual objects

(It will be objected that the very terminology of investment binds this particular model to a distinct historical social system. No doubt: but its displacement from one level to another as greed or social status are systemically transformed into different functions, and as futurity itself is modified, serves to foreground the analytic and historical uses of the allegorical framework.)

That these four allegorical levels can harbor many more implicit narratives—those of the material institutions, for example—is unquestionable, particularly in a highly differentiated society like our own. That the levels interact with one another in what are sometimes surprising and unexpected ways must also be foreseen, and I have borrowed Felix Guattari’s term transversality¹⁴ to designate particular examples of this process. That the levels can change places, and the text shift position into that of its own commentary, while the commentary then becomes a kind of text in its own right—that is also to be expected in a secular society in which nothing is endowed with indisputable centrality, and a multiplicity of interpretive options is virtually guaranteed in advance, depending on what counts as an event, a reality, or a text. With transversality, then, Guattari rewires the loose ends of the Deleuzian rhizome.

(This would be a moment for a digression—which I will only partially resist—on the dependence of the concept of transversality on the Deleuzian notion of the sedimentary levels or rhizomatic strands or lines of flight: these outline the program for a multiple set of parallel histories without any ultimately determining instance and therefore ultimately find their source in that war on Marxism or totality declared by Jean-François Lyotard. The multiple, yet somehow parallel but unevenly dated layer-chapters of Mille plateaux, are an extraordinary exercise in this aesthetic solution, while Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History more openly betrays the parallelism, whose realization could not, however, be completed without the reunifying cross-flashes of transversality and reidentification.)

These allegorical propositions are hard to argue in any systematic way. The first chapter takes on the fundamental alternative to the fourfold system proposed here, namely the system of three allegorical levels that flourished in Alexandria around much the same time. This is not some mere numerological hobbyhorse but allows us to make some basic judgments on concrete interpretations as such, in particular, on those which promote what I would be willing to call the bad allegories of humanism and of the history of ideas (particularly when the latter is based on science). All are tripartite allegorical systems that with a little attention denounce themselves.

There follows a chapter on the historical concepts of the emotions, which are themselves allegorical systems and fundamental mechanisms in the construction of subjectivities: the essential theme here is, however, the relationship of such systems to the dimensions of their respective social formations and in particular to the forms of otherness to which they give demographic access: something particularly relevant in the era of globalization.

At this point, several chapters compare the multiple meanings of nonallegorical works (Hamlet, Mahler’s Sixth Symphony) with the operations of officially allegorical structures (in Spenser, Dante, and Goethe’s Faust). The aim is clearly not one of some liberal coexistence of interpretations but rather the structural mechanisms whereby the works either solicit multiple and incompatible readings or negotiate those already institutionally in place.

This is then the moment to offer a contemporary commentary on an older essay of mine that has raised a good deal of controversy: one dealing with national allegory as a form in which emergent groups find expression at the same time that they promote it.¹⁵ The central category here, and in a good deal of my work generally, is the one already alluded to above: what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyya, or group or collective consciousness. It is to my mind the most basic political concept of all, both theoretically and practically; and allegory is one of the vehicles by which it can be tested and measured.

Finally, it becomes appropriate to confront the seemingly opposing realities of allegory as a literary structure (and even, in some cases, a literary genre) and allegoresis, as a conflict of interpretations that has no particular structural basis. The findings of our chapter on emotions will be useful at this point, in mapping an analogous transition from emotion to affect; while postmodernity itself determines a shift from personification to process-oriented allegory, which demands a parallel critical and theoretical reorientation.

But there runs through the following chapters another perhaps less apparent argument, which may also be obscured by their length and their heterogeneous content. That argument follows population as its materialist theme, and can be said to propose a correlation, if not exactly a causal determination, between number and genre or structure. Allegory is not exactly a genre, but its initial existence as a fourfold structure certainly reflects the multiple classes and strata of the Roman empire, just as the Greek system of emotions reflects the far more limited dimensions and class structure of the Greek city-state. One of the stories the second chapter, on named emotions, tells is then the adjustment of a local culture to the dimensions of a universal political form.

The chapter on Hamlet does not reflect that kind of transition, but rather the contradictions of monarchy and of its attempt to resolve the problem of succession, just as the chapter on Spenser suggests the bewildering overlap of different kinds of space in an emergent maritime system of colonial control. Dante’s fundamental structure is shown to project that attempt to think together the moral and spatial systems embodied in the struggle between pope and emperor implicit in that medieval alternative to kingship and the nation-state, which was the idea of empire itself: while Goethe’s work can be grasped as that unsuccessful alternative to a national capitalism that was the enlightened despotism of a disintegrating feudal system. Empire in all these contexts means a political program designed to house enormous and multiple populations. It is then not surprising that its current form, globalization, should have been rebaptized Empire by some of its leading theorists, or that its culture should bear the marks of an increasingly abstract and quasi-statistical exchange system which can only conceptualize according to quantitative categories (in our final chapter, maximalism and minimalism).

This underground theme—the pressure of population on form and thought—might well bear as its motto a remark of Peter Sloterdijk quoted in Chapter 5: people today are not prepared to coexist consciously with a billion other subjects.

I must finally thank Wendy Weiher and Eric Bulson for indispensable help in preparing Allegory and Ideology, which constitutes the second volume of the Poetics of Social Forms.

F. Jameson

Durham, NC

August 2018

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 character into a paradigm of disabused observation and wisdom, if not contemplative science as such while the besieged Oran is the figure of a closed community surrounded by even more incomprehensible adversaries, whether Nazi, Muslim, or toxic parasites one can never quite be sure.)

I will, however, suggest that this dualistic allegory is in fact more easily understood as a regression to mere symbolism; and that it is in fact the logic of the symbol—that Romantic conception which overwhelmed the older allegories at the moment of bourgeois modernity—which has usurped the more complex allegorical structure alone capable of doing justice to Camus’s attempt to expand his insight into absurd experience out beyond its individual boundaries. The Plague offers at least this advantage, of allowing us to diagnose the ideological after-effects of this reduction to symbolism and one-to-one allegory. They are humanism and (as we shall see shortly) the thematization of science. Indeed, I will go even further here and suggest that all such dual allegorical structures are essentially humanist in spirit and assert the meaning of their narratives to be an expression of the human condition. In yet a different perspective, they all affirm the presence of meaning; and meaning always tends to affirm the existence of a human nature as a normative metaphysic (even when the larger nature into which it is inserted carries the meaning of absurdity). Homologies are always what we may term bad allegories, and they reenact those bad readings of Hegel in which opposites are always reunited into this or that synthesis.

We may then also draw the provisional consequence that genuine allegory does not seek the meaning of a work, but rather functions to reveal its structure of multiple meanings, and thereby to modify the very meaning of the word meaning. It is indeed part of the contemporary critique of metaphysics (and of humanism along with it) to denounce the conception of nature as meaningful: an affirmation not merely of a meaningful system at work in the natural world, but also of a human nature as well, one which virtually by definition is normative. It will be clear, then, that this naturalization of both meaning and metaphor alike is the function of the symbol, as opposed to the allegorical structure.

I should add that as it is convenient to continue to use the term symbolic for figural moments in general, here I restrict the identification of such appropriations by the ideology of the symbol to the language of dualistic or two-level, point-to-point allegories, as distinguished from the multileveled systems we are about to confront. Still, confusion may also arise when we attempt to distinguish such complex allegorical systems as those of Bunyan or Kafka from the dual and oversimplified allegorical readings they have so often inspired. (Such readings or interpretations are indeed numerous enough as to seem to demand a fourfold allegorical analysis in their own right: this is then the moment to distinguish allegory from allegoresis and to affirm that the latter can also be allegorical in its own right—a regrettable complication that I return to in the concluding chapter.)

But the case of Kafka does suggest that it might be desirable to make a place for such a concept