Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode

by Angus Fletcher

Anyone who has ever said one thing and meant another has spoken in the mode of allegory. The allegorical expression of ideas pervades literature, art, music, religion, politics, business, and advertising. But how does allegory really work and how should we understand it? For more than forty years, Angus Fletcher's classic book has provided an answer that is still unsurpassed for its comprehensiveness, brilliance, and eloquence. With a preface by Harold Bloom and a substantial new afterword by the author, this edition reintroduces this essential text to a new generation of students and scholars of literature and art.

Allegory puts forward a basic theory of allegory as a symbolic mode, shows how it expresses basic emotional and cognitive drives, and relates it to a wide variety of aesthetic devices. Revealing the immense richness of the allegorical tradition, the book demonstrates how allegory works in literature and art, as well as everyday speech, sales pitches, and religious and political appeals.

In his new afterword, Fletcher documents the rise of a disturbing new type of allegory--allegory without ideas.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Literary Criticism, Criticism

464 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1982

About the author

Angus Fletcher was Distinguished Professor Emeritus, City University of New York, and the author of Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Colors of the Mind, and A New Theory for American Poetry, among other books.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really rich book - I was forced to skim it due to time constraints, but I'm definitely planning on going back and reading it in detail at a later date. Essentially an ahistoric, descriptive study of allegory as a "mode" (rather than simply a genre). The range of references is amazing, covering everything from the Western classics to Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Walter Benjamin, and modern advertising. Essentially, allegory is highly determinative, and functions to quash details that don't conform to its higher, abstract narrative. The allegorical figure is like a Freudian obsessive or a paranoid man, for whom everything fits a little too neatly into place.

In lieu of a more detailed, critical review, let me just list the book's contents (chapters and subheadings), to give a sense of its scope:

Introduction

1. The Daemonic Agent
-intro
-The conceptual hero: his generation of subcharacters
-Daemonic constriction in thematic actions
-Daemons: good and evil agency
-Daemonic possession
-Daemonic heroes
-Daemonic mechanism and allegorical "machines"
-Cosmic systems governing personal fate
-From agent to image: static agency
-Conclusion

2. The Cosmic Image
-intro
-Objections to traditional theory
-Metaphor: the criterion of surprise
-The part-whole relationship
-Teleologically controlled tropes
-The isolated image
-The talisman
-The insignia
-Astral symbolism
-Diagrammatic isolation
-Surrealist isolation
-Kosmos: the allegorical image
-The emotive nature of ornament
-The didactic function
-Rhetorical incitement to desire and action
-Generalization of the term
-Cosmogonic ornamentation
-Sources of authority
-Antiauthoritarian shifts in status
-Expanding images of the universe

3. Symbolic Action: Progress and Battle
-intro
-The two fundamental patterns
-Progress, real and ideal
-Battle: the psychomachia and ideological warfare
-Contrasts between progress and battle
-Microscopic effects of syntax
-Rhythmic encoding
-The unfinished allegorical progression
-The "visual" nature of allegorical actions

4. Allegorical Causation: Magic and Ritual Forms
-intro
-Doubling: a magical causation
-Magic, accident, and miracle
-Imitative magic
-Types of doubling
-Contagious magic: a consequence of ritual form
-Contagion in contagious magic
-Contagion as a generalized magical influence
-Contagion: the cure, symbolic isolation
-Microcosmic reduction of the symbolic center

5. Thematic Effects: Ambivalence, the Sublime, and the Picturesque
-intro
-Theological dualism
-Emotive ambivalence
-Philosophic ambivalence
-Irony: the extreme degree of ambivalence
-"Difficult ornament" and the transition to modern allegory
-Allegory and the sublime
-Allegory and the picturesque
-Grotesquerie: ambivalent picturesque
-Spenser's epic: the sublime poem
-Spenserian ambivalence
-Forms of infinite magnitude and detail

6. Psychoanalytic Analogues: Obsession and Compulsion
-intro
-Applications of psychoanalysis
-Psychological analogues
-The analogue to allegory
-Agency: obsessional anxiety
-Image: the idée fixe
-Action: compulsive rituals
-Causality: magical practices
-Theme: ambivalence in "antithetical primal words"
-The use of analogy

7. Value and Intention: The Limits of Allegory
-intro
-Allegory as a violation of the criterion of disinterestedness
-"Poetic justice": the teleological control of intention
-Self-criticism of intention
-Loosening the boundaries of the mode
-Predominance of commentary over literal surface
-Genre and the engulfing of action
-The intentional shift from allegory to myth
-Allegorical simplicity of intention: its purposive drive
-Intentional control in political allegory
-Puttenham: the Elizabethan subversive
-Accomodation and syncretism
-Science fiction: open space for the daemonic intermediary
-The cult of power: a role for daemons
-Magic and the enlargement of thought
-Defensive ritual: the "lower" function
-Visionary ritual: the "higher" function

Afterword
Afterword to the 2012 Edition
-intro
-The Six-Fold
-Dynamics and Form
-The Allegorical Dimension
-Bending the Rails of Authority
-The Numbers
-Critical Styles, Current Codes
-The Crisis of Scale
-Allegory Without Ideas
-Allegory and the Numbers
-Libido Dominandi

[Kristi Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who would think? Not a snappy title about what sounds like a pretty dull topic, yet this book, which I read back in the 1980s was a goldmine. Allegory is more than a literary device, but the way we perceive things, as Paul de Man argues, far more densely, in Blindness and Insight.

I remember this book as being exciting, which either means I'm a nerd, or it was one hell of a good book on theory.

[Katherine Addison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book went back and forth between ideas and articulations that I found useful and thought-provoking, and statements so contrary to my understanding of literature that all I could write in the margin was NO.

It suffers from a tendency toward Causabonism: the desire to make one's theory the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything. In Fletcher's case, this involves asserting that mysteries, westerns, and science fiction are allegories without actually wanting to--you know--go slumming to prove it. Which is a pity, because there are ways in which he's right about science fiction, and ways in which a careful consideration of its tropes would actually have informed his argument helpfully.

And I come away from this book with a theoretical question of my own. I don't agree that science fiction and fantasy are allegories in the way Fletcher wants to claim they are, but I think one way to frame fantasy* is to describe it as an allegorical landscape through which realistic** characters move. Because there's no denying that the landscape of fantasy has a heavy allegorical charge, but the characters who interact with that landscape are not allegorical daemons, to use Fletcher's term. They're mimetic.

And that makes fantasy a rather odd beast. Like a chimera.

---
*I'm less certain that this applies to science fiction. Or, rather, I think it may apply to some works of science fiction, but not others, and that in turn may depend on whether the work in question is rooted in the novel or the romance. Growing Up Weightless, for example, has a distinctly allegorical landscape.
**"Realistic" is an awful word. I mean, in this case, characters who obey the tenets of realism in literature, i.e., they have psychological consistency.

[Aurle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give it four and a half stars if the software let me.

The author tries to get at allegory's essence (as opposed to writing any sort of history) and it makes for a rich discussion. It's maybe more the beginning of a conversation rather than the end, but it's an awesome beginning, with lots to think about and plenty to learn - I think I learned something about everyday communication as well as literature.

That said, I don't agree with everything, and some of it felt dated to me (this book was written long ago). It is still IMO worth reading, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in literature.