Allegory

An allegory (from Greek αλλος, allos, "other", and αγορευειν, agoreuein, "to speak in public") is a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than and in addition to the literal. Through allegory a subject of a higher spiritual order is described in terms of that of a lower which is made out to resemble it in properties and circumstances, the principal subject being so kept out of view that we are left to construe the drift of it from the resemblance of the two subjects.

Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric, but an allegory does not have to be expressed in language: it may be addressed to the eye, and is often found in painting, sculpture or some form of mimetic art. The etymological meaning of the word is wider than that which it bears in actual use. Though it is similar to other rhetorical comparisons, an allegory is sustained longer and more fully in its details than a metaphor, and appeals to imagination where an analogy appeals to reason. The fable or parable is a short allegory with one definite moral.

Northrop Frye discussed the continuum of allegory from what he termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queen to the more private allegories of modern paradox literature. The characters in a "naive" allegory are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or other abstraction. The allegory has been selected first: the details merely flesh it out.

Since meaningful stories are always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the World Wars, an interpretation which the author sharply denied, stating, "I cordially dislike allegory in all of its manifestations."

The allegory has been a favourite form in the literature of nearly every nation. The Hebrew scriptures present frequent instances of it, an example of which is the comparison of the history of Israel to the growth of a vine in Psalm 80:8-17. In the Rabbinic tradition fully-developed allegorical readings were applied to every text, with every detail of the narrative given an emblematic reading. A particularly important case is the Song of Songs, which was accepted as canonical only because of an allegorical reading. This tradition of Biblical interpretation was inherited by Christian writers, for whom allegorical similitudes are the basis of exegesis, the origin of the arts of hermeneutics. The late Jewish and Early Christian visionary Apocalyptic literature, with its base in the Book of Daniel, presents allegorical figures, of which the Whore of Babylon and the Beast of Revelation are the most familiar.

In classical literature two of the best-known allegories are the cave of shadowy representations in Plato's Republic (Book VII) and the story of the stomach and its members in the speech of Menenius Agrippa (Livy ii. 32); and several occur in Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Late Antiquity Martianus Capella organized all the information a 5th-century upper-class male needed to know into an allegory of the wedding of Mercury and Philologia, with the seven liberal arts as guests, an allegory that was widely read through the Middle Ages.

Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as superficial facts. Thus, the bull Unam Sanctam (1302) presents themes of the unity of Christendom with the pope as its head in which the allegorical details of the metaphors are adduced as actual facts which take the place of a logical demonstration, employing the vocabulary of logic: "Therefore of this one and only Church there is one body and one head—not two heads as if it were a monster... If, then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care of Peter and his successors, they necessarily confess that they are not of the sheep of Christ" (complete text).

In the late 15th century, the enigmatic Hypnerotomachia, with its elaborate woodcut illustrations, shows the influence of themed pageants and masques on contemporary allegorical representation, as humanist dialectic conveyed them.

Some elaborate and successful specimens of allegory are to be found in the following works, arranged in approximately chronological order:

Modern allegories in fiction tend to operate under constraints of modern requirements for verisimilitude within conventional expectations of realism. Works of fiction with strong allegorical overtones include:

Where some requirements of "realism", in its flexible meanings, are set aside, allegory can come more strongly to the surface, as in the work of Bertold Brecht or Franz Kafka on one hand, or on the other in science fiction and fantasy, where an element of universal application and allegorical overtones are common, from Dune to The Chronicles of Narnia.

Allegorical films include:

Allegorical artworks include:

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See also

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Further reading