MacQueen - Allegory

For HECTOR

This volume is one of a series of short studies, each dealing with a single key item, or a group of two or three key items, in our critical vocabulary. The purpose of the series differs from that served by the standard glossaries of literary terms. Many terms are adequately defined for the needs of students by the brief entries in these glossaries, and such terms will not be the subjects of studies in the present series. But there are other terms which cannot be made familiar by means of compact definitions. Students need to grow accustomed to them through simple and straightforward but reasonably full discussions of them. The purpose of this series is to provide such discussions.

Some of the terms in question refer to literary movements (e.g., Romanticism, Aestheticism, etc.), others to literary kinds (e.g., Comedy, Epic, etc.), and still others to stylistic features (e.g., Irony, The Conceit, etc.). Because of this diversity of subject-matter, no attempt has been made to impose a uniform pattern upon the studies. But all authors have tried to provide as full illustrative quotation as possible, to make reference whenever appropriate to more than one literature, and to compose their studies in such a way as to guide readers towards the short bibliographies in which they have made suggestions for further reading.

John D. Jump

University of Manchester

The origins of allegory are philosophic and theological rather than literary. Most of all perhaps they are religious. From the beginning, however, allegory has been closely associated with narrative. All western and many eastern religions have found their most perfect expression in myth a narrative, that is to say, or series of narratives which serves to explain those universal facts which most intimately affect the believer, facts such as times, seasons, crops, tribes, cities, nations, birth, marriage, death, moral laws, the sense of inadequacy and failure and the sense of potential, both of which characterize the greater part of mankind.

Those myths are transmitted, orally at first or in ritual, eventually sometimes by way of the written word. Often they are mysteries, the interpretation of which is revealed only to a priesthood, or to a larger body of initiates whose understanding is to be obtained by way of elaborate, sometimes dangerous or painful, ceremonial. Sometimes too there are degrees of initiation, with full enlightenment reserved for those who reach the highest level. Yet the myth could not have come into being without some interpretation, and it is reasonable to assume that from prehistoric times onwards myth and interpretation went hand in hand. Provided that a sequence of historical events was felt to have a special relevance to a particular society or group of people within a society, a myth might perfectly well have a basis in historical fact. The more extensive the group, the greater the power of the myth.

Examples are not difficult to find. If for instance we restrict ourselves to the classical world of Greece and Rome, the myth of Ceres and Proserpine (in Greek, Demeter and Persephone), which in the seventeenth century still retained its power over the imagination of Shakespeare (Winters Tale IV iv, 11627) and Milton:

Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpin gathring flowrs

Herself a fairer Flowr by gloomy Dis

Was gatherd, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world

(Paradise Lost IV, 26872)

began as an allegorical explanation of the process of sowing and harvesting corn. By an almost inevitable extension, it became an allegory of human immortality, or perhaps rather rebirth, after death. In a sense, both Ceres and her daughter Proserpine are the corn. This is more obviously true of Proserpine, but in Latin poetry, for instance, the word Ceres is sometimes used simply to mean corn, as by Virgil in Aeneid I, 1779, when he describes the meal prepared by Aeneass companions after the storm which had so nearly shipwrecked them:

tum Cererem corruptam undis Cerialiaque arma

expediunt fessi rerum, frugesque receptas

et torrere parant flammis et frangere saxo.

(Then, weary of life, they fetch out Ceres, spoiled by the waves, and the arms of Ceres [i.e. the implements for grinding and baking] and prepare to bake the recovered grain and to crush it with a grindstone.)

In Greek likewise the word Demeter is used to mean bread. At this level, Dis or Pluto, the god of the underworld who rapes Proserpine, is the earth in which the seed is buried and germinates. At a different level, however, Dis is death, and Proserpine is the human soul, subject to death, but redeemed by the toils of the mother goddess, Ceres. For a Greek, initiation into the mystery of Demeter at Eleusis near Athens probably involved the revelation of just this level of meaning.