Dante and Blake: Allegorizing the Event

Abstract

I believe Alan Charity at one point wanted to research on Blake. He certainly used to quote Keats s axiom on allegory. Following his title, Events and their Afterlife, we can say allegory sets up an ‘afterlife’ of interpretation or translation following it — but Keats implies that events are allegorical already: which means that events are figural because they are figured: they cannot be thought of outside a prior textualization. Allegory can be a writing that binds the reader to a this-equals-that interpretation, but in another defini-tion, allegory is simply implidt in writing anyway, since all writing involves difference from an immanent meaning. The literal meaning in Dante is already allegorical (there is no mere literal reality to the events of Dante’s journey whose afterlife is allegorical); rather, allegory builds on allegory. Allegorical meanings may be ‘different (diversi) from the literal or historical; for the word “allegory” is derived from the Greek alleon which in Latin is alienum (“strange”) or diversum (“different”)’³, but it is difference based on prior difference, and allegory rather than subtending, supporting a structure, I would argue from Walter Benjamin’s work on allegory, betrays it⁴ showing that a textual event is capable of infinite re-reading or re-shaping.

A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory — and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life — a life like the scriptures, figurative — which such people can no more make out than they can the hebrew Bible. Lord Byron cuts a figure — but he is not figurative — Shakespeare led a life of Allegory: his works are the comments on it.¹ Allegory address’d to the Intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden from the Corporeal Understanding, is My Definition of the Most Sublime Poetry. ²