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Fables, parables,
and allegories are forms of
imaginative literature or spoken utterance constructed in such a way that their
readers or listeners are encouraged to look for meanings hidden beneath the
literal surface of the fiction. A story is told or perhaps enacted whose
details--when interpreted--are found to correspond to the details of some other
system of relations (its hidden, allegorical sense). The poet, for example, may
describe the ascent of a hill in such a way that each physical step corresponds
to a new stage in the soul's progress toward a higher level of existence. (see
also rhetoric)
Many forms of literature elicit this
kind of searching interpretation, and the generic term for the cluster is
allegory; under it may be grouped fables, parables, and other symbolic shapings.
Allegory may involve either a creative or an interpretive process: either the
act of building up the allegorical structure and giving "body" to the
surface narrative or the act of breaking down this structure to see what themes
or ideas run parallel to it.
The fate of allegory, in all its many
variations, is tied to the development of myth and mythology.
Every culture embodies its basic assumptions in stories whose mythic structures
reflect the society's prevailing attitudes toward life. If the attitudes are
disengaged from the structure, then the allegorical meaning implicit in the
structure is revealed. The systematic discipline of interpreting the real
meaning of a text (called the hermeneutic process) plays a major role in the
teaching and defense of sacred wisdom, since religions have traditionally
preserved and handed down the old beliefs by telling exemplary stories; these
sometimes appear to conflict with a system of morality that has in the meantime
developed, and so their "correct" meaning can only be something other
than the literal narration of events. Every culture puts pressure on its authors
to assert its central beliefs, which are often reflected in literature without
the author's necessarily being aware that he is an allegorist. Equally,
determined critics may sometimes find allegorical meaning in texts with less
than total justification--instances might include the Hebraic-Christian mystical
interpretation of the Old Testament's Song
of Solomon, an erotic marriage poem, or the frequent allegorizing of
classical and modern literature in the light of Freud's psychoanalytic
discoveries. Some awareness of the author's intention seems necessary in order
to curb unduly fanciful commentary. (see also symbolism, exegesis)
The range of allegorical literature is
so wide that to consider allegory as a fixed literary genre is less useful than
to regard it as a dimension, or mode, of controlled indirectness and double
meaning (which, in fact, all literature possesses to some degree). Critics
usually reserve the term allegory itself for works of considerable length,
complexity, or unique shape. Thus, the following varied works might be called
allegories: the biblical parable of the sower; Everyman, the medieval morality play; The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan; Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's
Travels; The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; William Wordsworth's
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality"; Nikolay Gogol's Dead
Souls; The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde; and the plays Six
Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello; Waiting
for Godot, by Samuel Beckett; and Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee. No one genre can take in such
modal range. (see also literary
criticism)
Limestone ostracon with a drawing of a cat bringing a boy before a mouse
magistrate, New Kingdom. . .
By
courtesy of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago
Fable and parable are short, simple
forms of naïve allegory. The fable is usually a tale about animals
who are personified and behave as though they were humans (see photograph).
The device of personification
is also extended to trees, winds, streams, stones, and other natural objects.
The earliest of these tales also included humans and gods as characters, but
fable tends to concentrate on animating the inanimate. A feature that isolates
fable from the ordinary folktale, which it resembles, is that a moral--a rule of
behaviour--is woven into the story. (see also plant, didactic
literature)
Like fable, the parable also tells a
simple story. But, whereas fables tend to personify animal characters--often
giving the same impression as does an animated cartoon--the typical parable uses
human agents. Parables generally show less interest in the storytelling and more
in the analogy they draw between a particular instance of human behaviour (the
true neighbourly kindness shown by the good Samaritan in the Bible story, for
example) and human behaviour at large. Parable and fable have their roots in
preliterate oral cultures, and both are means of handing down traditional folk
wisdom. Their styles differ, however. Fables tend toward detailed, sharply
observed social realism (which eventually leads to satire), while the simpler
narrative surface of parables gives them a mysterious tone and makes them
especially useful for teaching spiritual values. (see also oral literature)
The original meanings of these critical
terms themselves suggest the direction of their development. Fable (from the
Latin fabula, "a telling")
puts the emphasis on narrative (and in the medieval and Renaissance periods was
often used when speaking of "the plot" of a narrative). Parable (from
Greek parabole, a "setting
beside") suggests a juxtaposition that compares and contrasts this story
with that idea. Allegory (from Greek allos
and agoreuein, an
"other-speaking") suggests a more expanded use of deceptive and
oblique language. (In early Greek, though, the term allegory itself was not
used. Instead, the idea of a hidden, underlying meaning is indicated by the word
hyponoia--literally,
"underthought"--and this term is used of the allegorical
interpretation of the Greek poet Homer.)
Fables teach a general principle of
conduct by presenting a specific example of behaviour. Thus, to define the moral
that "People who rush into things without using judgment run into strange
and unexpected dangers," Aesop--the
traditional "father" of the fable form--told the following story:
There was a dog who was fond of eating
eggs. Mistaking a shell-fish for an egg one day, he opened his mouth wide and
swallowed it down in one gulp. The weight of it in his stomach caused him
intense pain. "Serve me right," he said, "for thinking that
anything round must be an egg."
By a slight change of emphasis, the
fabulist could have been able to draw a moral about the dangerous effects of
gluttony.
Because the moral is embodied in the
plot of the fable, an explicit statement of the moral need not be given, though
it usually is. Many of these moral tag lines have taken on the status of proverb
because they so clearly express commonly held social attitudes.
The Aesopian fables emphasize the social
interactions of human beings, and the morals they draw tend to embody advice on
the best way to deal with the competitive realities of life. With some irony,
fables view the world in terms of its power structures. One of the shortest
Aesopian fables says: "A vixen sneered at a lioness because she never bore
more than one cub. 'Only one,' she replied, 'but a lion.' " Foxes and
wolves, which the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "Everyman's
metaphor" for cunning and cruelty, appear often as characters in fables
chiefly because, in the human world, such predatory cunning and cruelty are able
to get around restraints of justice and authority. The mere fact that fables
unmask the "beast in me," as James Thurber, the 20th-century American
humorist and fabulist, put it, suggests their satirical force. Subversive
topical satire in tsarist and
Soviet Russia is often called "Aesopism"; all comic
strips that project a message (such as the Charles Schulz creation
"Peanuts" and Walt Kelly's "Pogo") have affinities with
Aesop's method.
Parables do not analyze social systems
so much as they remind the listener of his beliefs. The moral and spiritual
stress of the form falls upon memory rather than on the critical faculty. The
audience hearing the parable is assumed to share a communal truth but perhaps to
have set it aside or forgotten it. The rhetorical appeal of a parable is
directed primarily toward an elite, in that a final core of its truth is known
only to an inner circle, however simple its narrative may appear on the surface
(a number of the parables that Christ used for teaching, for example, conveyed
figuratively the meaning of the elusive concept Kingdom of Heaven). (see also
Christianity)
Allegory, as the basic process of
arousing in the reader or listener a response to levels of meaning, provides
writers with the structure of fables, parables, and other related forms. By
awakening the impulse to question appearances and by bringing order to
mythological interpretation, allegory imparts cultural values. A measure of
allegory is present in literature whenever it emphasizes thematic content, ideas
rather than events. Generally, the allegorical mode flourishes under
authoritarian conditions. Thus it found sustenance during the age of medieval
Christendom, when Christian dogma sought universal sway over the mind of Western
man. As such, allegory was a means of freedom under conditions of strong
restraint. In general, realism, mimetic playfulness, and the resistance to
authority tend to counteract the allegorical process, by loosening its
stratified forms. This unbinding of symbolic hierarchies has forced allegory to
seek new structures in the modern period. Nevertheless, through allegorical
understanding, the great myths continue to be reread and reinterpreted, as the
human significance of the new interpretations is passed down from one generation
to the next. The abiding impression left by the allegorical mode is one of
indirect, ambiguous, even enigmatic symbolism, which inevitably calls for
interpretation.
Since an allegorical purpose can inform
works of literature in a wide range of genres, it is not surprising to find that
the largest allegories are epic
in scope. A quest forms the narrative thread of both the Greek epic Odyssey
and the Latin, Aeneid, and it is
an allegory of the quest for heroic perfection; thus, allegory is aligned with
the epic form. Romances, both prose and verse, are inevitably allegorical,
although their forms vary in detail with the prevailing cultural ideals of the
age. By comparison, the forms of fable and parable are relatively stable--yet
even they may play down the moral idea or the mysterious element and emphasize
instead the narrative interest, which then results in an elaboration of the
form. (Such an elaboration may be seen in a given tale, as told by successive
fabulists, such as a fable of the town mouse and the country mouse; with each
retelling, the story is absorbed into a new matrix of interpretation.)
Shifts from naïve to sophisticated
intent are accompanied by shifts in form. The early authors of fable, following
Aesop, wrote in verse; but in the 10th century there appeared collected fables,
entitled Romulus, written in prose
(and books such as this brought down into the medieval and modern era a rich
tradition of prose fables). This collection in turn was converted back into
elegiac verse. Later masters of fable wrote in verse, but modern
favourites--such as Joel Chandler Harris, author of "Uncle Remus"
stories, Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit, or James Thurber in Fables
for Our Time --employ their own distinctive prose. Again, while for parables
prose narrative may be the norm, they have also been told in verse (as in the
emblematic poetry of the 17th-century English Metaphysical
poets such as George Herbert, Francis Quarles, and Henry Vaughan).
Loosening the allegorical forms further,
some authors have combined prose with verse. Boethius' Consolation
of Philosophy(c.
AD 524) and Dante's The
New Life(c.
1293) interrupt the prose discourse with short poems. Verse and prose then
interact to give a new thematic perspective. A related mixing of elements
appears in Menippean satire
(those writings deriving from the 3rd-century-BC Cynic philosopher Menippus of
Gadara), as exemplified in Swift's Tale
of a TubThere a relatively simple allegory of Reformation history (the Tale
proper) is interrupted by a series of digressions that comment allegorically
on the story into which they break.
Even the lyric poem can be adapted to
yield allegorical themes and was made to do so, for example, in the visionary
and rhapsodic odes written during the high Romantic period after the late 18th
century throughout Europe.
The lesson seems to be that every
literary genre is adaptable to the allegorical search for multiplicity of
meaning.
In the broadest sense, allegorical
procedures are linguistic. Allegory is a manipulation of the language of
symbols. Verbally, this mode underwent a major shift in medium along with the
shift from oral to written literature: allegories that had initially been
delivered in oral form (Christ's parables, for example) were written down by
scribes and then transcribed by subsequent generations. Much more remarkable
transformations, however, take place when the verbal medium is replaced by
nonverbal or partially verbal media.
The drama is the chief of such
replacements. The enactment of myth in the beginning had close ties with
religious ritual, and in the drama of classical Greece both comedy
and tragedy, by preserving
ritual forms, lean toward allegory. Old
Comedy, as represented by the majority of plays by Aristophanes,
contains a curious blending of elements--allusions to men of the day, stories
suggesting ideas other than the obvious literal sense, religious ceremony,
parodies of the graver mysteries, personified abstractions, and stock types of
character. Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound uses
allegory for tragic ends, while Euripides'
tragedies make a continuous interpretive commentary on the hidden meaning of the
basic myths. Allegory is simplified in Roman drama, submitting heroic deeds to
the control of the fickle, often malignant goddess Fortuna.
Christian symbolism is responsible for the structure of the medieval morality plays, in which human dilemmas are
presented through the conflicts of personified abstractions such as the
"Virtues" and their "Vice" opponents. The allegory in
Renaissance drama is often more atmospheric than structural--though even Shakespeare
writes allegorical romances, such as Cymbeline,
Pericles, and The Winter's Tale (and
allowed his tragedy of Coriolanusto grow out of the "fable of the belly," which embodies a
commonplace of Renaissance political wisdom and is recounted by one of the
characters in the play). In 1598 Ben
Jonson introduced the comedy of humours, which was dependent on the
biological theory that the humours of the body (blood, phlegm, black bile,
yellow bile) affect personality: in Jonson's play Epicoene, or The Silent Woman(1609), the character Morose is possessed by the demon of ill humour. Comic
allegory of this kind evolved into the Restoration comedy
of manners, and through that channel entered modern drama, with Wilde,
Shaw, and Pirandello. Ibsen, the master of realistic drama, himself used a
free-style allegory in Peer Gynt, while
the surrealism of modern dramatists such as Ionesco, Genet, and Beckett serves
to reinforce the real meaning of their plays. (see also Ancient Greek literature,
humours, comedy of, rhetoric)
The degree to which the cinema
has been allegorical in its methods has never been surveyed in detail. Any such
survey would certainly reveal that a number of basic techniques in film montage
builds up multiple layers of meaning. (Animated cartoons, too, continue the
tradition of Aesopian fable.)
From time immemorial men have carved
religious monuments and have drawn and painted sacred icons. Triumphal arches
and chariots have symbolized glory and victory. Religious art makes wide use of
allegory, both in its subject matter and in its imagery (such as the cross, the
fish, the lamb). Even in poetry there can be an interaction of visual and verbal
levels, sometimes achieved by patterning the stanza form. George
Herbert's "Easter Wings," for instance, has two stanzas set out
by the typographer to resemble the shape of a dove's wings. Such devices belong
to the Renaissance tradition of the "emblem," which combines a motto
with a simple symbolic picture (often a woodcut or engraving) and a concise
explanation of the picture motto. (see also religious literature, pattern
poetry, emblem book)
While allegory thrives on the visual, it
has also been well able to embrace the empty form of pure mathematics. Number
symbolism is very old: early Christian systems of cosmology were often based on
the number three, referring to the doctrine of the Trinity (and in fact
recalling earlier Hebraic and even Hellenic numerology).
Musical symbolism has been discovered in the compositions of the 18th-century
Baroque composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach. The most evanescent form of
allegory, musical imagery and patterns, is also the closest to pure religious
vision, since it merges the physical aspects of harmony (based on number) with
the sublime and metaphysical effect on its hearers. The final extension of media
occurs in the combination of spectacle, drama, dance, and music that is achieved
by grand opera, which is at
its most allegorical in the total artwork of Richard
Wagner in the second half of the 19th century. His Ring
cycle of operas is a complete mythography and allegory, with words and music
making two levels of meaning and the whole unified by a type of musical emblem,
which Wagner called the leitmotif.
(see also music
theory, musical composition,
"Ring of the Nibelung,
The," )
The allegorical mode has been of major
importance in representing the cosmos: the earliest Greek philosophers, for
example, speculated on the nature of the universe in allegorical terms; in the
Old Testament's oblique interpretation of the universe, too, the world is seen
as a symbolic system. The symbolic stories that explain the cosmos are
ritualized to ensure that they encode a message. Held together by a system of
magical causality, events in allegories are often surrounded by an occult
atmosphere of charms, spells, talismans, genies, and magic rites. Science
becomes science fiction or a fantastic setting blurs reality so that objects and
events become metamorphically unstable. Allegorical fictions are often
psychological dramas whose scene is the mind; then their protagonists are
personified mental drives. Symbolic climate is most prominent in romance, whose
heroic quests project an aura of erotic mysticism, perfect courtesy, and moral
fervour that creates a sublime heightening of tone and a picturesque sense of
good order. (see also psychological
novel)
The cosmic and demonic character of
allegorical thinking is most fully reflected in the period of its greatest
vogue, the High Middle Ages.
During this period poets and priests alike were able to read with increasingly
elaborate allegorical technique until their methods perhaps overgrew themselves.
A belief had been inherited in the "Great
Chain of Being," the Platonic principle of cosmic unity and
fullness, according to which the lowest forms of being were linked with the
highest in an ascending order. On the basis of this ladderlike conception were
built systems of rising transcendency, starting from a material basis and rising
to a spiritual pinnacle. The early Church Fathers sometimes used a threefold
method of interpreting texts, encompassing literal, moral, and spiritual
meanings. This was refined and commonly believed to have achieved its final form
in the medieval allegorist's "fourfold theory of interpretation." This
method also began every reading with a search for the literal sense of the
passage. It moved up to a level of ideal interpretation in general, which was
the allegorical level proper. (This was an affirmation that the true Christian
believer was right to go beyond literal truth.) Still higher above the literal
and the allegorical levels, the reader came to the tropological level, which
told him where his moral duty lay. Finally, since Christian thought was
apocalyptic and visionary, the fourfold method reached its apogee at the
anagogic level, at which the reader was led to meditate on the final cosmic
destiny of all Christians and of himself as a Christian hoping for eternal
salvation.
While modern scholars have shown that
such thinking played its part in the poetry of the Middle Ages and while the
Italian poet Dante himself discussed the theological relations between his poems
and such a method of exegesis, the main arena for the extreme elaboration of
this allegory was in the discussion and the teaching of sacred Scriptures. As
such, the fourfold method is of highest import, and it should be observed that
it did not need to be applied in a rigid four-stage way. It could be reduced,
and commonly was reduced, to a two-stage method of interpretation. Then the
reader sought simply a literal and a spiritual meaning. But it could also be
expanded. The passion for numerology, combined with the inner drive of allegory
toward infinite extension, led to a proliferation of levels. If four levels were
good, then five or eight or nine might be better.
The origins of fable are lost in the
mists of time. Fables appear independently in ancient Indian and Mediterranean
cultures. The Western tradition begins effectively with Aesop
(6th century BC), of whom little or nothing is known for certain; but before him
the Greek poet Hesiod (8th
century BC) recounts the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, while fragments
of similar tales survive in Archilochus, the 7th-century-BC warrior-poet. Within
100 years of the first Aesopian inventions the name of Aesop was firmly
identified with the genre, as if he, not a collective folk, were its originator.
Like the Greek philosopher Socrates, Aesop was reputed to have been ugly but
wise. Legend connected him with the island of Samos; the historian Herodotus
believed him to have been a slave.
Modern editions list approximately 200
"Aesop" fables, but there is no way of knowing who invented which
tales or what their original occasions might have been. Aesop had already
receded into legend when Demetrius of Phaleron, a rhetorician, compiled an
edition of Aesop's fables in the 4th century BC. The poetic resources of the
form developed slowly. A versified Latin collection made by Phaedrus,
a freed slave in the house of the Roman emperor Augustus, included fables
invented by the poet, along with the traditional favourites, which he retold
with many elaborations and considerable grace. (Phaedrus may also have been the
first to write topically allusive fables, satirizing Roman politics.) A similar
extension of range marks the work of the Hellenized Roman Babrius,
writing in the 2nd century AD. Among the classical authors who advanced upon
Aesopian formulas may be named the Roman poet Horace, the Greek biographer
Plutarch, and the great satirist Lucian of Samosata.
In the Middle Ages, along with every
other type of allegory, fable flourished. Toward the end of the 12th century, Marie
de France made a collection of over 100 tales, mingling beast fables with
stories of Greek and Roman worthies. In another compilation, Christine
de Pisan's Othéa manuscript illuminations provide keys to the
interpretation of the stories and support the appended moral tag line. Expanded,
the form of the fable could grow into what is called the beast epic, a lengthy,
episodic animal story, replete with hero, villain, victim, and endless epic
endeavour. (One motive for thus enlarging upon fable was the desire to parody
epic grandeur: the beast epic mocks its own genre.) Most famous of these works
is a 12th-century collection of related satirical tales called Roman de Renartwhose hero is a fox, symbolizing cunning man. The Roman
includes the story of the fox and Chantecler (Chanticleer), a cock, a tale
soon afterward told in German, Dutch, and English versions (in The
Canterbury TalesGeoffrey
Chaucer took it as the basis for his "Nun's Priest's Tale"). Soon the Roman
had achieved universal favour throughout Europe. The Renaissance poet Edmund
Spenser also made use of this kind of material; in his "Mother
Hubberd's Tale," published in 1591, a fox and an ape go off to visit the
court, only to discover that life is no better there than in the provinces. More
sage and serious, John Dryden's
poem of The
Hind and Panther(1687)
revived the beast epic as a framework for theological debate. Bernard
de Mandeville's Fable
of the Bees(first
published 1705 as The Grumbling Hive, or
Knaves Turn'd Honest) illustrated the rapacious nature of humans in society
through the age-old metaphor of the kingdom of the bees. In modern times,
children's literature has made use of animal fable but often trivialized it. But
the form has been taken seriously, as, for example, by the political satirist
George Orwell, who, in his novel Animal
Farm(1945), used it to attack Stalinist Communism. (see also French literature, Reynard
the Fox)
The fable has normally been of limited
length, however, and the form reached its zenith in 17th-century France, at the
court of Louis XIV, especially in the work of Jean de La Fontaine. He published
his Fablesin two segments: the first, his initial volume of 1668, and the second, an
accretion of "Books" of fables appearing over the next 25 years. The
1668 Fables follow the Aesopian
pattern, but the later ones branch out to satirize the court, the bureaucrats
attending it, the church, the rising bourgeoisie--indeed the whole human scene.
La Fontaine's great theme was the folly of human vanity. He was a skeptic, not
unkind but full of the sense of human frailty and ambition. His satiric themes
permitted him an enlargement of poetic diction; he could be eloquent in mocking
eloquence or in contrast use a severely simple style. (His range of tone and
style has been admirably reflected in a version of his works made by a
20th-century American poet, Marianne
Moore.) La Fontaine's example gave new impetus to the genre throughout
Europe, and during the Romantic period a vogue for Aesopian fable spread to
Russia, where its great practitioner was Ivan Andreyevich Krylov. The 19th
century saw the rise of literature written specifically for children, in whom
fable found a new audience. Among the most celebrated authors who wrote for them
are Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Hilaire
Belloc, and Beatrix Potter. There is no clear division between such authors and
the "adult" fabulist, such as Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll,
Oscar Wilde, Saint-Exupéry, or J.R.R. Tolkien. In the 20th century there
are the outstanding Fables for Our Time, written
by James Thurber and apparently directed toward an adult audience (although a
sardonic parent might well read the Fables
to his children). (see also children's
literature)
In the West, the conventions of parable
were largely established by the teachings of Christ.
The New Testament records a
sufficient number of his parables, with their occasions, to show that to some
extent his disciples were chosen as his initiates and followers because they
"had ears to hear" the true meaning of his parables. (It has already
been noted that the parable can be fully understood only by an elite, made up of
those who can decipher its inner core of truth.) Despite a bias toward
simplicity and away from rhetorical elaboration, the parable loses little in the
way of allegorical richness: the speaker can exploit an enigmatic brevity that
is akin to the style of presenting a complex riddle. Parable is thus an
immensely useful preaching device: while theologians in the period of the early
Christian Church were developing glosses on Christ's enigmatic stories,
preachers were inventing their own to drive home straightforward lessons in good
Christian conduct. For centuries, therefore, the model of parable that had been
laid down by Christ flourished on Sundays in churches all over the Western
world. Pious tales were collected in handbooks: the Gesta
Romanorum, the Alphabet of Thales, the
Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, and
many more. Infinitely varied in subject matter, these exemplary
tales used a plain but lively style,
presenting stories of magicians, necromancers, prophets, chivalrous knights and
ladies, great emperors--a combination bound to appeal to congregations, if not
to theologians. An important offshoot of the parable and exemplary tale was the
saint's life. Here, too, massive compilations were possible; the most celebrated
was The Golden
Legend of the 15th century, which included approximately 200 stories
of saintly virtue and martyrdom. (see also homily, hagiography)
As long as preaching remained a major
religious activity, the tradition of parable preserved its strong didactic
strain. Its more paradoxical aspect gained renewed lustre in theological and
literary spheres when the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard began to use parables in his treatises on Christian faith and
action. In Fear and Trembling he
retold the story of Abraham and Isaac; in Repetition
he treated episodes in his own life in the manner of parable. Such usage led
to strange new literary forms of discourse, and his writing influenced, among
others, the Austro-Czech novelist Franz Kafka and the French "absurdist"
philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus. Kafka's parables, full of
doubt and anxiety, mediate on the infinite chasm between man and God and on the
intermediate role played by the law. His vision, powerfully expressed in
parables of novel length (The Castle, The
Trial, Amerika), is one of the most enigmatic in modern literature.
The early history of Western allegory is
intricate and encompasses an interplay between the two prevailing world
views--the Hellenic and the Hebraic-Christian--as theologians and philosophers
attempted to extract a higher meaning from these two bodies of traditional myth.
(see also Christianity,
Judaism)
In terms of allegory, the Greco-Roman
and Hebraic-Christian cultures both have a common starting point: a creation
myth. The Old Testament's
book of Genesis roughly
parallels the story of the creation as told by the Greek poet Hesiod in his Theogony(and the later Roman version of the same event given in Ovid's Metamorphoses).
The two traditions thus start with an adequate source of cosmic imagery, and
both envisage a universe full of mysterious signs and symbolic strata. But
thereafter the two cultures diverge. This is most apparent in the way that the
style of the body of poetry attributed to Homer--the
ancient Greek "Bible"--differs from the Old Testament narrative. The
Greek poet presented his heroes against an articulated narrative scene, a
context full enough for the listener (and, later, the reader) to ignore
secondary levels of significance. By contrast, the Jewish authors of the Old
Testament generally emptied the narrative foreground, leaving the reader to fill
the scenic vacuum with a deepening, thickening allegorical interpretation. (see
also "Metamorphoses")
The Old Testament, including its
prophetic books, has a core of historical record focussing on the trials of the
tribes of Israel. In their own view an elect nation, the Israelites believe
their history spells out a providential
design. The prophets understand the earliest texts, Genesis and Exodus, in terms
of this providential scheme. Hebraic texts are interpreted as typological: that
is, they view serious myth as a theoretical history in which all events are
types--portents, foreshadowing the destiny of the chosen people. Christian
exegesis (the critical interpretation of Scripture) inherits the same approach.
(see also history,
philosophy of, typological
interpretation)
Typological allegory looks for hidden
meaning in the lives of actual men who, as types or figures of later historical
persons, serve a prophetic function by prefiguring those later persons. Adam,
for example (regarded as a historical person), is thought to prefigure Christ in
his human aspect, Joshua to
prefigure the victorious militant Christ. This critical approach to Scripture is
helped by the fact of monotheism, which makes it easier to detect the workings
of a divine plan. The splendours of nature hymned in the Psalms provide a gloss
upon the "glory of God." The Law (the Torah) structures the social
aspect of sacred history and, as reformulated by Christ, provides the chief link
between Old and New Testaments. Christ appeals to the authority of "the Law
and the Prophets" but assumes the ultimate prophetic role himself, creating
the New Law and the New Covenant--or Testament--with the same one God of old.
(see also Adam and Eve)
Hellenic tradition after Homer stands in
sharp contrast to this concentration on the fulfilling of a divine plan. The
analytic, essentially scientific histories of Herodotus and Thucydides precluded
much confident belief in visionary providence. The Greeks rather believed
history to be structured in cycles, as distinct from the more purposive
linearity of Hebraic historicism. (see also Ancient Greek
literature)
Nevertheless, allegory did find a place
in the Hellenic world. Its main arena was in philosophic speculation, centring
on the interpretation of Homer. Some philosophers attacked and others defended
the Homeric mythology. A pious defense argued that the stories--about the
monstrous love affairs of the supreme god Zeus, quarrels of the other Olympian
gods, scurrility of the heroes, and the like--implied something beyond their
literal sense. The defense sometimes took a scientific, physical form; in this
case, Homeric turmoil was seen as reflecting the conflict between the elements.
Or Homer was moralized; the goddess Pallas
Athene, for example, who in physical allegory stood for the ether, in moral
allegory was taken to represent reflective wisdom because she was born out of
the forehead of her father, Zeus. Moral and physical interpretation is often
intermingled.
Plato,
the Idealist philosopher, occupies a central position with regard to Greek
allegory. His own myths imply that our world is a mere shadow of the ideal and
eternal world of forms (the Platonic ideas), which has real, independent
existence, and that the true philosopher must therefore be an allegorist in
reverse. He must regard phenomena--things and events--as a text to be
interpreted upward, giving them final value only insofar as they reveal, however
obscurely, their ideal reality in the world of forms. Using this inverted
allegorical mode, Plato attacked Homeric narrative, whose beauty beguiles men
into looking away from the truly philosophic life. Plato went further. He
attacked other fashionable philosophic allegorists because they did not lead up
to the reality but limited speculation to the sphere of moral and physical
necessity. Platonic allegory envisaged the system of the universe as an
ascending ladder of forms, a "Great Chain of Being," and was summed up
in terms of myth in his TimaeusPlato and Platonic thought became, through the influence of this
and other texts on Plotinus
(died 269/270) and through him on Porphyry (died c.
304), a pagan mainstay of later Christian allegory. Medieval translations of
Dionysius the Areopagite
(before 6th century AD) were equally influential descendants of Platonic vision.
A second and equally influential
Hellenic tradition of allegory was created by the Stoic philosophers, who held
that the local gods of the Mediterranean peoples were signs of a divinely
ordered natural destiny. Stoic allegory thus emphasized the role of fate, which,
because all men were subject to it, could become a common bond between peoples
of different nations. A later aspect of moral exegesis in the Stoic manner was
the notion that myths of the gods really represent, in elevated form, the
actions of great men. In the 2nd century BC, under Stoic influence, the Sicilian
writer Euhemerus argued that
theology had an earthly source. His allegory of history was the converse of
Hebraic typology--which found the origin of the divine in the omnipotence of the
One God--for Euhemerus found the origin of mythological gods in human kings and
heroes, divinized by their peoples. His theories enjoyed at least an aesthetic
revival during the Renaissance. (see also Stoicism)
At the time of the birth of Christ,
ideological conditions within the Mediterranean world accelerated the mingling
of Hellenic and Hebraic traditions. Philo Judaeus laid the groundwork; Clement
of Alexandria and Origen followed him. The craft of allegorical syncretism--that
is, making rival systems accommodate one another through the transformation of
their disparate elements--was already a developed art by the time St. Paul and
the author of the Gospel According to St. John wove the complex strands of the
Hebraic-Christian synthesis. Over centuries of quarrelling, the timeless
philosophy of the Greek allegorists was accommodated to the time-laden typology
of the Hebrew prophets and their Christian successors and at length achieved a
hybrid unity that permitted great allegories of Western Christendom to be
written.
As a hybrid method, allegory could draw
on two archetypal story lines: the war and the quest of Homer's Iliadand Odysseywhich was paralleled by the struggles and wanderings of the children of
Israel. Throughout the Middle Ages the figure of the wandering Aeneas
(who, in the second half of Virgil's
Latin epic, Aeneidfought bloody battles) was seen as a type in a system of hidden
Christianity. Virgil's fourth Ecloguea prophetic vision of the birth of a child who would usher in the
"golden age," was read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Seen by
many Christian commentators as the ideal allegorist, Virgil himself was hailed
as a proto-Christian prophet. The blending of rival systems of allegory from
widely assorted cultures became the rule for later allegory. Adapting the Latin
writer Apuleius' fable of Cupid and Psyche,
Edmund Spenser combined its
elements with ancient Middle Eastern lore, Egyptian wisdom, and dashes of Old
Testament critical interpretation to convert the enclosed garden of the biblical
Song of Solomon into the
gardens of Adonis in The
Faerie QueeneBook III. The pagan gods survived unharmed throughout the Middle
Ages if wearing Christian costumes, because Christians were taught that pagan
worthies could be read as figures of Christian rulers. The labours of Hercules,
for instance, stood for the wanderings and trials of all Christian men; the
Hellenic theme of heroic warfare took a Christianized form, available to
allegory, when in the 4th century the poet and hymn writer Prudentius
internalized war as the inner struggle of Christian man, suspended between
virtue and vice. For complete triumph in explaining the significance of the
world, Christianity needed one further element: a world-historical theory large
enough to contain all other theories of meaning. This it found in the belief
that God was the author of the world. His creation wrote the world. The world,
read as a text, provided a platform for transforming the piecemeal,
postclassical syncretism into some semblance of order. Firmly established in the
West, Christianity, for all its strains of discord, slowly achieved a measure of
coherence. St. Thomas Aquinas could write its Summa.
Theocentric, authoritarian, spiritualist, and word oriented, the medieval
model of allegory lent itself to the creation of the most wonderful of all
allegorical poems, Dante's Divine Comedy, completed
shortly before his death in 1321.
Before this could happen, however, the
Christian world view had been subjected to an important pressure during the 12th
century. It may be called the pressure to externalize. Alanus de Insulis (Alain
de Lille), Bernard of Sylvestris, John of Salisbury, and other forerunners of
the movement known as European Humanism
"discovered" nature. Delighting in the wonders of God's cosmic text,
they brought theological speculation down to earth. Romances
of love and chivalry placed heroes and heroines against the freshness of spring.
Everywhere nature shone, sparkling with the beauty of earthly life. The
externalization and naturalizing of Christian belief flowers most obviously in The
Romance of the Rose, begun
in the 13th century by Guillaume de Lorris and completed, in vastly complicated
form, by Jean de Meung. The Romance personifies
the experiences of courtly love, recounting the pursuit of an ideal lady by an
ideal knight, set in an enclosed garden and castle, which permits Guillaume to
dwell on the beauty of nature. With Jean de Meung the interest in nature is made
explicit, and the poem ends in a series of lengthy digressive discourses,
several of them spoken by Dame Nature herself. In medieval English poetry this
same love of spring and seasonal pleasures is apparent everywhere--certainly in
the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer,
who, besides creating several allegories of his own, translated The
Romance of the Rose into English.
Dante's Divine
Comedyhas physical
immediacy and contains an immense amount of historical detail. He anchors his
poem in a real world, accepting Christian typology as historical fact and
adopting an ordered system of cosmology (based on the number three, proceeding
from the Trinity). Dante's passion for numerology does not, however, block a
closeness to nature that had perhaps not been equalled in poetry since Homer. He
enfolds classical thought into his epic by making Virgil one of its main
protagonists--again to prefigure Christian heroism. Perhaps only William
Langland, the author of The Vision
of Piers Plowman, could be
said to rival Dante's cosmic range. Piers Plowman is a simpler apocalyptic vision than the Comedy,
but it has an existential immediacy, arising from its concern for the poor,
which gives it great natural power.
Romance and romantic forms provide the
main vehicle for the entrance of allegory into the literature of the Renaissance
period. The old Arthurian legends
carry a new sophistication and polish in the epics of the Italians Boiardo,
Ariosto, and Tasso and in the work of Edmund Spenser. By interlacing several
simultaneous stories in one larger narrative, the literary technique known as entrelacementallowed digression--yet kept an ebbing, flowing kind of
unity--while presenting opportunities for moral and ironic commentary. But
although the forms and themes of romance were medieval in origin, the new age
was forced to accommodate altered values. The Middle Ages had externalized the
Christian model; the Renaissance now internalized it, largely by emphasizing the
centrality of human understanding. This process of internalization had begun
slowly. In rough outline it can be discerned in the belief that biological
humours affected personality, in the adaptations of Platonic Idealism from which
arose a new emphasis on imagination, in the rise of an introspective,
soliloquizing drama in England. It can further be discerned in the gradual
adoption of more self-conscious theories of being: Shakespeare's Hamlet, finding
himself by thinking out his situation, prefigures the first modern philosopher,
René Descartes, whose starting point for argument was "I think,
therefore I am." Christopher Marlowe's characterization of Dr. Faustus
epitomizes the new age. Pursuing power in the form of knowledge, he is led to
discover the demons of allegory within himself. He is an essential figure for
later European literature, archetypal in Germany for both Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe and Thomas Mann and influential everywhere. (see also Renaissance art, Christianity)
With the Baroque and Neoclassical
periods, allegory began to turn away from cosmology and toward rhetorical
ambiguity. John Milton
allegorized sin and death in his epic poem Paradise Lostbut allegory for him seems chiefly to lie in the ambiguous diction and
syntax employed in the poem. Instead of flashing allegorical emblems before the
reader, Milton generates a questioning attitude that searches out allegory more
as a mysterious form than a visible content. His central allegorical theme is
perhaps the analogy he draws between poetry, music, and ideas of cosmic order.
This theme, which generates allegory at once, recurs in later English poetry
right up to modern times with T.S. Eliot's Four
Quartets
The social and religious attitudes of
the 18th-century age of Enlightenment
could be expressed coolly and without ambiguity--and thus there was little need
for spiritual allegory in the period's literature. Oblique symbolism was used
mainly for satirical purposes. John Dryden and Alexander Pope were masters of
verse satire, Jonathan Swift of prose satire. Voltaire and the French writers of
the Enlightenment similarly employed a wit whose aim was to cast doubt on
inherited pieties and attitudes. A new vogue for the encyclopaedia
allowed a close, critical commentary on the ancient myths, but the criticism was
rationalist and opposed to demonology. Under such conditions the allegorical
mode might have dried up entirely. Yet the new Romantic age of the late 18th and
early 19th centuries revived the old cosmologies once more, and poetic forms
quickly reflected the change, with the Romantic poets and their precursors
(Blake, William Collins, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, and others) managing to
reinstate the high destiny of the allegorical imagination. The Romantics went
back to nature. Poets took note of exactly what they saw when they went out
walking, and their awareness of nature and its manifestations found its way into
their poetry. Appropriate poetic forms for expressing this sensibility tended to
be open, rhapsodic, and autobiographical--qualities notably present in William
Wordsworth and in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example. Percy
Bysshe Shelley is the most strikingly allegorical of English Romantics;
he not only followed the Platonic tradition of Spenser and the Renaissance--with
ode, elegy, and brief romance--but he also invented forms of his own, such as Epipsychidiona rhapsodic meditation, and he was working on a great Dantesque
vision, The Triumph of Life, when he
died. Visionary masterpieces came from Germany, where Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin
hymned the powers of nature in odes of mythic overtone and resonance. French Romanticism,
merging gradually with the theory and practice of the Symbolist movement
(dealing in impressions and intuitions rather than in descriptions), in turn
followed the same path. The pantheist cosmology of Victor
Hugo, the central writer of the somewhat delayed French Romantic
movement, created an allegory of occult forces and demonic hero worship. It is
fair to say that, in its most flexible and visionary forms, allegory flourished
throughout the Romantic period. (see also Augustan
Age, German literature)
There also developed a novelistic
mode of allegory by which prose authors brought fate, necessity, the demonic,
and the cosmological into their narratives. Émile
Zola used a theory of genetics, Charles
Dickens the idea of ecological doom, Leo
Tolstoy the belief in historical destiny, and Fyodor
Dostoyevsky the fatalism of madness and neurosis. Nikolay
Gogol revived the art of the grotesque, picturing absurdities in the
scene of tsarist Russia. Even the arch-naturalist playwright, Anton
Chekhov, made an emblem of the cherry orchard and the sea gull in his
plays of those titles. However its dates are established, the modern period is
exceedingly complex in its mythmaking. Psychoanalytic theory has been both a
critical and a creative resource; modern allegory has remained internalized in
the Renaissance tradition. But Marxist social realism has kept to the externals
of dialectical materialism, though without notable aesthetic success. In the
free play of American letters, where Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar
Allen Poe, and Henry James (particularly in his later novels) had essayed an
allegorical mode, the future of its use is uncertain. T.S.
Eliot's enigmatic style in a long poem, "Ash
Wednesday," may be related to his search for a Dantesque dramatic
style, for which he also tried in plays, most obviously Murder
in the Cathedral (a morality) and The
Cocktail Party (a philosophic farce). More clearly popular authors such as
George Orwell and William Golding have used the most familiar allegorical
conventions. D.H. Lawrence
shaped novels such as The
Plumed Serpentto project a thematic, cultural polemic. W.H.
Auden's operatic librettos reflect once more the allegorical potential of
this mixture of media. (see also American
literature)
Modern allegory has in fact no set
pattern, or model, although Surrealism has provided a dominant style of
discontinuous fragmentary expression. The only rule seems to be that there is no
rule. Science fiction, an
ancient field dating back at least to the earliest philosophers of Greece, has
set no limits on the speculations it will entertain. The allegorical author now
even questions the allegorical process itself, criticizing the very notions of
cosmos, demon, and magic. It may be that modern allegory has completed a vast
circle begun by the first conflict between ways of interpreting myth, as
revealed in Homer and the Hebraic prophets.
Fables appeared early in India, but it
is impossible to determine whether they are older or later than the Greek.
Undoubtedly there was mutual influence from very early times, for indirect
contacts between Greece and India (by trade routes) had existed long before the
time of Alexander the Great. In the form in which they are now known the Greek
fables are the older, but this may be an accident of transmission. (see also
Indian literature)
The fable was apparently first used in
India as a vehicle of Buddhist
instruction. Some of the Jatakasbirth stories of the Buddha, which relate some of his experiences
in previous animal incarnations, resemble Greek fables and are used to point a
moral. They may date from as far back as the 5th century BC, though the written
records are much later. The most important compilation is the Pañcatantra,
a Sanskrit collection of beast fables. The original has not
survived, but it has been transmitted (via a lost Pahlavi version) as the
mid-8th-century Arabic Kalilah wa DimnahKalilah and Dimnah are two jackals, counselors to the lion king, and the
work is a frame story
containing numerous fables designed to teach political wisdom or cunning. From
the Arabic this was translated into many languages, including Hebrew, which
version John of Capua used to make a Latin version in the 13th century. This,
the Directorium
humanae vitae("Guide
for Human Life"), was the chief means by which oriental fables became
current in Europe. In the fables of Bidpai, animals act as men in animal form,
and little attention is paid to their supposed animal characteristics. It is in
this respect that they differ most from the fables of Aesop, in which animals
behave as animals. (see also Sanskrit
literature, Arabic literature)
Chinese philosophers from the Ch'in
dynasty (221-206 BC) onward often used extended metaphors (from which fable is
the logical development) to make their points. This is believed to reflect the
fact that, as "realistic" thinkers, the Chinese generally did not
favour more abstract argument. Thus simple allegory helped to stimulate audience
interest and to increase the force of an argument. A century earlier, Mencius,
a Confucian philosopher, had used the following little allegory in illustrating
his theory that an effort has to be made if man's natural goodness is to be
recovered: "A man will begin searching when his dog or chicken is missing;
but he does not go searching for the good character he was born with after it is
lost. Is this not regrettable?" The same writer also used a parable to
bring home his point that mental training could not be hurried, but was a
gradual process: "A man in Sung sowed seeds in a field. The seedlings grew
so slowly, however, that one day he took a walk through the field pulling at
each one of the seedlings. On returning home he announced that he was exhausted,
but that he had helped the seedlings' growth. His son, hurrying to the field,
found the seedlings dead." (see also Chinese
literature)
Tales such as this were often borrowed
from folklore, but others were probably original creations, including a striking
story that opens the Chuang-tzua summa of Taoist thought. It makes the point that ordinary people
frequently deplore the actions of a man of genius because they are unable to
understand his vision, which is not answerable to the laws of "common
sense": "A giant fish, living at the northern end of the world,
transformed itself into a bird so that it could make the arduous flight to the
southernmost sea. Smaller birds, measuring his ambition against their own
capabilities, laughed at the impossibility of it."
But the full development of fable, as it
is understood in the West, was hindered by the fact that Chinese ways of
thinking prohibited them from accepting the notion of animals that thought and
behaved as humans. Actual events from the past were thought to be more
instructive than fictitious stories, and this led to the development of a large
body of legendary tales and supernatural stories. Between the 4th and 6th
centuries, however, Chinese Buddhists adapted fables from Buddhist India in a
work known as Po-Yü ching, and
they also began to make use of traditional Chinese stories that could further
understanding of Buddhist doctrines.
In Japan, the Koji-ki(712; "Records of Ancient Matters") and the Nihon-shoki(8th century, "Chronicles of Japan"), both of them official
histories of Japan, were studded with fables, many of them on the theme of a
small intelligent animal getting the better of a large stupid one. The same is
true of the fudoki (local gazetteers dating from 713 and later). The form
reached its height in the Kamakura
period (1192-1333). Toward the end of the Muromachi
period (1338-1573) Jesuit missionaries introduced the fables of Aesop to
Japan, and the influence of these can be traced in stories written between then
and the 19th century. (see also Japanese
literature)
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