Abstract
Recent reactions against American formalism (New Criticism) have shown a preference for summarizing their departure by speaking of literature as a signifying system rather than an embodiment of signified meanings. One commentator observes that in the ideal text, “the networks are many and interact... this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds... there is never a whole of the text (which would by reversion form an internal order, a reconciliation of complementary parts).”1 Another theorist in this vein speaks of literature as an “organization of signifiers which do not designate a signified object, but instead designate instructions for the production of the signified.”2 These views of fictional discourse as a configuration of signs for producing meaning have become commonplace since the impact of semiology on literary studies. But what has not been considered sufficiently is that they were commonplace long before the structuralist activity of the last few decades.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), pp. 5–6.
Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Reality of Fiction: a Functionalist Approach to Literature,’ New Literary History 7 (1975):18.
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). See also his seminal essay, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality,’ in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).
The Statesman’s Manual, cited in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 468.
Shakespeare’s Judgement Equal to His Genius, cited in Critical Theory, p. 462.
See Shakespeare’s Genius in Critical Theory, p. 462. For the distinction of fancy from imagination, see Biographia Literaria, chap. 13, in Critical Theory, p. 470.
René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1942; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), pts. 3–4.
See also W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy,’ in The Verbal Icon (New York: Noonday Press, 1965), pp. 3–18; essay originally published in 1946.
For a rehearsal of recent positions about allegory, see Morton Bloomfield, ‘Allegory as Interpretation,’ New Literary History 3 (1972):301–17. Convenient bibliographies on allegory may be found in Allegories of History, Allegories of Love, by Stephen A. Barney (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979).
Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1711), 1.297, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (1963; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), p. 153.
Allegory: The Theory of A Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964).
Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Fletcher makes his debt to Frye explicit throughout.
At the beginning of the Middle Ages, these commonplaces are discussed by Augustine in De doctrina Christiana, III, 12, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1841), 34:72–73; late in the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer alludes to such figures for allegory, for example, at the end of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (1.3443) in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 205.
These figures from John’s Gospel (6:9) are glossed elaborately by St. Jerome in the Epistola Adversus Jovinianum (I, 7) and incorporated by Chaucer into the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (11.143–46) in Robinson, p. 77 and n.; see D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 328–29.
The definitive study of the several senses of medieval exegesis is by Henri de Lubac, S.J., Exégèse médiévale, les quatre sens de L ’Ecriture, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959–64).
Glossa ordinaria, PL 113, 139.
A thorough scholarly investigation of this claim has not yet, to my knowledge, been published.
A phrase that occurs frequently in Scripture, for example, in Exodus 31:18.
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1913; reprint, New York: New American Library, 1961).
William Wordsworth, ‘Preface’ to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads in Critical Theory, pp. 433–43.
Wolfgang Iser, ‘The Current Situation of Literary Theory: Key Concepts and the Imaginary,’ New Literary History 11 (1979):17, Cf. the arguments about écriture by Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les editions de minuit, 1967), pt. 1 — “writing before the letter.”
Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 39–40, 43, 45.
‘Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,’ in Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 20–35. De Man’s use of “intentionality” relies, of course, not on scholastic philosophy, but on phenomenology, and particularly on Edmund Husserl’s use of the term throughout his works as a modification of “acts.”
De Man: “What happened in American criticism could then be explained as follows: because such patient and delicate attention was paid to the reading of forms, the critics pragmatically entered into the hermeneutic circle of interpretation, mistaking it for the organic circularity of natural processes” (p. 29). But, he continues, “the completed form never exists as a concrete aspect of the work that could coincide with a sensorial or semantic dimension of the language. It is constituted in the mind of the interpreter as the work discloses itself in response to his questioning. But this dialogue between work and interpreter is endless. The hermeneutic understanding is always, by its very nature, lagging behind” (p. 32).
Charles S. Singleton, Dante Studies I: Commedia, Elements of Structure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 15;
see Singleton’s ‘In Exitu Israel de Aegypto,’ Dante Studies 78 (1960):1–24; and Robert Hollander, Allegory in Dante’s Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 9–70.
‘Letter to Can Grande,’ trans. P. H. Wicksteed, in Critical Theory, p. 122.
See Helmut Hatzfield, ‘Modern Literary Scholarship as Reflected in Dante Criticism,’ Comparative Literature 3 (1951):296.
Sce de Lubac, Exégèse 4 (1964), chap. 8, pp. 125–49.
Dante Studies, 1 :62.
Dante Studies, 1:77–81. See the critique of Singleton’s position by Richard Hamilton Green, ‘Dante’s “Allegory of the Poets” and the Mediaeval Theory of Poetic Fiction,’ Comparative Literature 9 (1957):118–28; Singleton’s rebuttal is in 9:129–35.
Auerbach, Mimesis, The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), trans. Willard Trask (New York: Doubleday, 1957): “Yet never before has this realism been carried so far; never before... has so much art and so much expressive power been employed to produce an almost painfully immediate impression of the earthly reality of human beings” (p. 174).
Charles S. Singleton, trans., The Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75), Inferno, canto 10, pp. 101–3.
Auerbach: “Figure surpasses fulfillment.... We cannot but admire Farinata and weep with Cavalcante. What actually moves us is not that God has damned them, but that the one is unbroken and the other mourns so heart-rendingly for his son” (pp. 174–75).
Auerbach: “And by virtue of this immediate and admiring sympathy with man, the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it. The image of man eclipses the image of God. Dante’s work made man’s Christianfigural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it” (p. 176).
John Freccero has stressed this distinction on several occasions; see: ‘Dante’s Novel of the Self,’ Christian Century 82 (1965):216–18; Introduction to Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. J. Freccero (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), pp. 3–4.
Giuseppe Mazzotta has argued a related point in stressing the “allegory of reading” in the Comedy; see Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the ‘Divine Comedy’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
My translation: “quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante”; Singleton, Inferno, V, 138 (p. 54).
For example, see René Girard, ‘From “The Divine Comedy” to the Sociology of the Novel,’ trans. Petra Morrison, Sociology of Literature and Drama, ed. Elizabeth and Thomas Barns (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973);
and Renato Poggioli, ‘Paolo and Francesca,’ Dante: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Freccero, pp. 61–77 (originally published, PMLA 72 [1957]).
‘Galeotto fu ’1 libro e chi lo scrisse’; Singleton, Inferno, V, 137 (p. 54).
‘E caddi come corpo morto cade’: Singleton, Inferno, V, 142 (pp. 56–57).
Singleton, Inferno, XXXII, 73–106 (pp. 343–45).
A provocative assessment of the allegory of this passage in relation to satire has been made by Gerald L. Bruns, ‘Allegory and Satire: A Rhetorical Meditation,’ New Literary History 11 (1979):121–32.
Cf. de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’: “the meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition... of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority” (p. 190); “in the world of allegory, time is the originary constitutive category” (p. 190). Freccero has suggested the relevance of de Man’s insights to the structure of allegory in Inferno, IX; see ‘Dante’s Medusa: Allegory and Autobiography,’ in By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1979), pp. 33–46.
Cf. the penetrating approach to allegory through the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan argued recently by Joel Fineman: “Distanced at the beginning from its source, allegory will set out on an increasingly futile search for a signifier with which to recuperate the fracture of and at its source, and with each successive signifier the fracture and the search begin again: a structure of continual yearning, the insatiable desire of allegory”; ‘The Structure of Allegorical Desire,’ in Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 45.
It may very well be that Derrida’s approach to structure has been much exaggerated by his critics; my view of allegorical structure in the Comedy is not unlike Derrida’s position in an early essay, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,’ in The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1984 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gellrich, J. (1984). The Structure of Allegory. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic — Epic — Tragic. Analecta Husserliana, vol 18. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6315-3_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6315-3_37
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-011-7987-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-009-6315-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive