Steve Hayes
2016-05-17 08:35:37 UTC
Save the Allegory!
An entire literary tradition is being forgotten because writers use
the term allegory to mean, like, whatever they want.
By Laura Miller
I’m not much of a language stickler. I roll my eyes when people argue
over the Oxford comma, and I couldn’t care less when someone says they
“could care less.” As a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist),
I’m mostly OK with seeing the meaning of words evolve and transform
over time, because that’s what a living language does.
Laura Miller is a books and culture columnist for Slate and the author
of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.
But we all have our weaknesses. There’s one particular error I see
over and over, often in criticism, that sets my teeth on edge. That’s
because it flies beyond being a simple misnomer and instead
misunderstands and erases an entire literary tradition, a rich and
wonderful one that flowered most gloriously in the 13th century. My
gripe isn’t totally arcane, I promise! Just bear with me for a moment
while I get medieval on those who abuse the word allegory.
What people usually mean when they call something an allegory today is
that the fictional work in question can function as a metaphor for
some real-world situation or event. This is a common arts journalist’s
device: finding a political parallel to whatever you happen to be
reviewing is a handy way to make it appear worth writing about in the
first place. Calling that parallel an allegory serves to make the
comparison more forceful. Fusion says that Batman v Superman is a
“none-too-subtle allegory for the fight between Republican
presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.” (It is not.) The
Hollywood Reporter calls Zootopia an “accidental anti-Trump
allegory”—this despite the fact that there is no literary form less
accidental than allegory. The meaning of the word has drifted so far
that even works that aren’t especially metaphorical get labeled as
allegory: A film about artistic repression in Iran is a “clunky
allegory” for ... artistic repression in Iran.
Allegory or metaphor: The distinction might seem obscure and academic
to many readers. Shouldn’t allegory be grateful to get any attention
at all? Isn’t it just an archaic literary mode that nobody uses
anymore? Yes and no. About the only people creating true allegories
today are political cartoonists. But a culture never entirely discards
its roots, and allegory, which first appeared in the waning years of
the Roman Empire, is one of the foundations of Western literature.
Maybe if we understood it better, we’d realize how much we owe to it.
Besides, the allegorical imagination lives on, just not in the places
where critics think they see it.
An allegory, in short, is not just another word for a metaphor. In
essence, it’s a form of fiction that represents immaterial things as
images. It calls attention to what it’s doing, typically by giving
those images overtly thematic labels, like presenting the Seven Deadly
Sins as a procession of people named Lust, Sloth, Pride, and the rest.
The most famous allegory ever written, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress, was published in 1678, making it a holdover; allegory saw
its artistic heyday in the Middle Ages. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress was
a colossal hit; for two centuries, it was the second book purchased by
any Protestant household affluent and literate enough to own its own
Bible. Everyone read about the narrator who falls asleep and dreams of
a man named Christian fleeing the City of Destruction while bearing a
heavy burden (representing the knowledge of his own sins) on his back.
A figure named Evangelist instructs Christian on how to reach the
Celestial City, a long journey past such perils as the Slough (swamp)
of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty, where people with names like
Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Hypocrisy attempt to lead him astray.
The low opinion in which allegory is now widely held can be blamed on
The Pilgrim’s Progress. The book is pious and manifestly didactic,
although I can testify from experience that a young-enough reader can
still find it an entertaining adventure yarn. Adults, apart from some
very devout Protestants, tend to experience its sermonizing as
oppressive. When critics call a work of art an allegory today, and
especially when they use adjectives like clunky and none-too-subtle,
they invoke this aspect of The Pilgrim’s Progress; they mean a story
that imposes a single, conspicuous interpretation on a reader or
viewer. Allegory lectures. As the critic Northrop Frye wrote, “The
commenting critic is often prejudiced against allegory without knowing
the real reason, which is that continuous allegory prescribes the
direction of his commentary, and so restricts its freedom.”
Perhaps Frye was right, and what we resent about allegory is the way
it makes thematic analysis superfluous. You can’t really congratulate
yourself for ferreting out the moral of Christian fighting his way
through the fancy city of Vanity Fair or the mining town named Lucre.
Should a book or a film present its argument so simply that even a
child can discern it, what’s left to talk about? Merely language,
story, and imagery—all the pleasures that art is made of.
Do we even know how to read such a book anymore? C.S. Lewis thought
not. He wrote the definitive treatise on the form in 1936: The
Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. We know Lewis today
as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and as a writer of Christian
apologetics, but before all that he was a sensational literary
critic—and I mean sensational literally. Perceptive, erudite, and
witty, he also wrote with an infectious vividness about the experience
of reading, of mingling with an author’s mind and imagination. Here’s
how he described the allegories of Martianus Capella, an influential
writer of the early fifth century:
The philosophies of others, the religions of others—back even to
the twilight of pre-Republican Rome—have all gone into the curiosity
shop of his mind. It is not his business to believe or disbelieve
them; the wicked old pedant knows a trick worth two of that. He piles
them up all around him until there is hardly room for him to sit among
them in the middle darkness of the shop; and there he gloats and
catalogues, but never dusts them, for even their dust is precious in
his eyes.
Lewis’ apologetics can be parochial, but his criticism flings open its
doors and windows to welcome in any writer with even a wisp of
distinction. Most remarkable of all, his scholarly works are never,
ever incomprehensible or boring, even when they concern the most
tedious literature. (Lewis’ biographer, A.N. Wilson, wrote that his
one great fault as a critic was his “enthusiastic generosity” toward
authors “who are not really as interesting as he makes them sound.”)
A medievalist, Lewis was forever defending the Middle Ages from the
glib notion that they constituted an intellectual and artistic fallow
period between the classical world and the Renaissance. (He is
completely convincing on this point.) We often fail to understand the
beauty of medieval art, he argued, because we experience the world and
our place in it so differently from the people of that time. We can’t
appreciate medieval allegory until we make a concerted effort to
imagine what it was like to inhabit the world as they saw it, as a
divinely ordered universe in which “certain sympathies, antipathies,
and strivings [are] inherent in matter itself. Everything has its
right place, its home, the region that suits it.”
Lewis traces the origins of allegory to a period in late antiquity
when, for undetermined reasons, the Western concept of a virtuous life
changed profoundly. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described
virtue as a skill to be learned by practice, until it becomes not just
second nature, but an end in itself. “The man who does not enjoy doing
noble actions is not a good man at all,” he wrote. You don’t become a
good cook by conquering your desire to cook badly; similarly, you
become a good man by simultaneously acquiring the expertise and
reaping its rewards.
The emerging idea that virtue instead results from an ongoing inner
battle against our own worst impulses was not exclusively Christian,
but it fit perfectly with the Christian belief in humanity’s fallen
nature. We’re so familiar with this concept of the psyche as a theater
of struggle between opposing forces that it’s difficult to conceive of
a time when it was relatively new, the time when allegory was born.
“To fight against ‘temptation,’ ” Lewis writes, “is also to explore
the inner world; and it is scarcely less plain that to do so is to be
already on the verge of allegory.”
Yet today we associate allegory with a lack of the “round” fictional
characters we value most, characters whose believability resides at
least partly in their internal conflicts. This is a standard set by
the novel, a relatively recent literary form that (for the most part)
aims to produce a naturalistic depiction of the world. Allegory
doesn’t work that way. The characters in allegories like the
13th-century poem Roman de la Rose, or Edmund Spenser’s 16th-century
masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, are “flat” by contemporary standards,
possessed of only a few traits and behaving with inhuman consistency.
But, as Lewis demonstrates in a long, virtuosic reading of Roman de la
Rose, this is because they aren’t actually meant to be characters.
Instead these people, the objects they handle, and the spaces they
occupy all represent aspects of the self. Roman de la Rose describes
the courtship of a noble maiden by a courtier. Like many allegories it
is framed as a dream, a sign that we’ve entered into a psychological
interior. The lover seeks the Garden of Love, where he meets such
clashing figures as Mirth, Companionship, Pride, and Shame. The lady
herself seems strangely dematerialized because, as Lewis observes,
“her character is distributed among personifications.”
But, Lewis hastens to add, an allegory is not merely an equation to be
solved, leaving you free to “throw aside the allegorical imagery as
something which has now done its work.” Allegorical reading requires
sustaining both image and meaning in the reader’s mind, as equally
valued components of the work. “It is not enough,” Lewis writes, “to
see that the dreamer gazing into the fountain signifies the lover
first looking into the lady’s eyes. We must feel that the scene by the
fountain is an imaginative likeness of the lover’s experience.” We
must be able to see the sparkling water and the shining eyes at the
same time and recognize them to be facets of a singular, layered
understanding that includes the recognition of other, abstract
qualities as well, such as the purity of her spirit.
The literate people of the Middle Ages were experts at comprehending
art in this way. They routinely compounded vast amounts of meaning
into certain ideas or motifs, partly because they were always
attempting to integrate the cultural legacy of classical paganism into
Christian theology. For them, “Venus” signified multiple things
simultaneously: a planet, a Roman goddess with a set of stories
attached to her, a literary figure, the image of feminine beauty, the
force of erotic love, God’s will manifested in the fruitful union of a
man and a woman, and so on. Christianity formed a bedrock for this way
of thinking, but no one of these is the “true” meaning of Venus to
which all others can be reduced. Their characters may seem “thin” when
compared with those in a great novel, but their images are much fuller
and richer.
Slate Academy: A Year of Great Books
Rediscover the joys and surprises of great literature! Spend 2016
reading and discussing six great novels alongside Slate's books and
culture columnist Laura Miller and her fellow Slatesters. Join us
today.
Lewis would surely argue that it is the modern reader who, viewing
allegory as reductive, shows a lack of subtlety. In a great allegory,
the imagery is not a code for the underlying theme; it is every bit as
important as theme. Perhaps the greatest allegory, Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene, offers a case in point. Lewis was Spenser’s
foremost champion, rescuing the Elizabethan poet from near-obscurity
and restoring The Faerie Queene to the canon—to the dismay of many
undergraduates but to the delight of others. Lewis first read the epic
poem as a boy, devouring it as a tale of brave knights battling
dragons, giants, and wicked enchanters against a sylvan landscape
splashed with gore. A grasp of the religious and political
implications of such figures as the beautiful but nefarious lady
Duessa (an allegory for the Catholic Church) or the Redcross Knight
(who embodies the spirit of England) would come later, but many
generations of readers have been well-satisfied with the surface
alone.
The Faerie Queene is a vast, ravishing spectacle—one that contemporary
readers can find pretty inaccessible due to Spenser’s use of language
and diction that is deliberately archaic, even for his own time. (Ben
Jonson, a near contemporary, complained that “in affecting the
ancients Spenser writ no language.”) Fortunately, an unabridged
audiobook, masterfully narrated by David Timson, released late last
year makes the poem much more readily intelligible for a new or
returning reader. The Faerie Queene is a pageant of one gorgeous,
trippy vision after another, from the Garden of Proserpina, the queen
of the underworld, (every blossom, leaf, and fruit in it is coal
black) to the adventures of “the famous Britomart,” a female knight
every bit as valiant as our beloved Brienne of Tarth. And while many
of Spenser’s allegorical concerns have become obsolete, it only takes
a scene like the Redcross Knight’s encounter with shaggy, gaunt
Despair as he crouches in his cave, surrounded by the knights he has
persuaded to kill themselves, to remind a reader of the form’s
potency.
Spenser’s Despair calls to mind the dementors, the most terrifying
monsters in the Harry Potter series, although J.K. Rowling’s specters
are not so much personifications of depression as allegorical
deployments of it. This is where the spirit of allegory lives on, in
novels and films when the action feels as if it is taking place inside
one person’s head. Sometimes a superhero comic or film slips into an
allegorical mode, less by mimicking some timely political situation
than by creating an antagonist like the Penguin, who resembles an
updating of the medieval allegory for greed. The Hero’s Journey, a
staple of screenwriting courses and, alas, the model for so many
mediocre films, is really just an allegorical narrative slapped with
the more palatable label of “myth.” Yet the contemporary artworks most
redolent of allegory’s heady psychic atmosphere are both archetypal
and dreamlike: the novels of Haruki Murakami and the films of David
Lynch, to name two examples. These stories partake of what Lewis
describes as “the perennial strangeness, the adventurousness, and the
sinuous forward movement of the inner life.” They are more enigmatic
and chaotic than medieval allegory, but ours is a more confusing and
disordered world.
See it here:
https://t.co/kVOkvPEMhH
An entire literary tradition is being forgotten because writers use
the term allegory to mean, like, whatever they want.
By Laura Miller
I’m not much of a language stickler. I roll my eyes when people argue
over the Oxford comma, and I couldn’t care less when someone says they
“could care less.” As a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist),
I’m mostly OK with seeing the meaning of words evolve and transform
over time, because that’s what a living language does.
Laura Miller is a books and culture columnist for Slate and the author
of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.
But we all have our weaknesses. There’s one particular error I see
over and over, often in criticism, that sets my teeth on edge. That’s
because it flies beyond being a simple misnomer and instead
misunderstands and erases an entire literary tradition, a rich and
wonderful one that flowered most gloriously in the 13th century. My
gripe isn’t totally arcane, I promise! Just bear with me for a moment
while I get medieval on those who abuse the word allegory.
What people usually mean when they call something an allegory today is
that the fictional work in question can function as a metaphor for
some real-world situation or event. This is a common arts journalist’s
device: finding a political parallel to whatever you happen to be
reviewing is a handy way to make it appear worth writing about in the
first place. Calling that parallel an allegory serves to make the
comparison more forceful. Fusion says that Batman v Superman is a
“none-too-subtle allegory for the fight between Republican
presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.” (It is not.) The
Hollywood Reporter calls Zootopia an “accidental anti-Trump
allegory”—this despite the fact that there is no literary form less
accidental than allegory. The meaning of the word has drifted so far
that even works that aren’t especially metaphorical get labeled as
allegory: A film about artistic repression in Iran is a “clunky
allegory” for ... artistic repression in Iran.
Allegory or metaphor: The distinction might seem obscure and academic
to many readers. Shouldn’t allegory be grateful to get any attention
at all? Isn’t it just an archaic literary mode that nobody uses
anymore? Yes and no. About the only people creating true allegories
today are political cartoonists. But a culture never entirely discards
its roots, and allegory, which first appeared in the waning years of
the Roman Empire, is one of the foundations of Western literature.
Maybe if we understood it better, we’d realize how much we owe to it.
Besides, the allegorical imagination lives on, just not in the places
where critics think they see it.
An allegory, in short, is not just another word for a metaphor. In
essence, it’s a form of fiction that represents immaterial things as
images. It calls attention to what it’s doing, typically by giving
those images overtly thematic labels, like presenting the Seven Deadly
Sins as a procession of people named Lust, Sloth, Pride, and the rest.
The most famous allegory ever written, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s
Progress, was published in 1678, making it a holdover; allegory saw
its artistic heyday in the Middle Ages. Yet The Pilgrim’s Progress was
a colossal hit; for two centuries, it was the second book purchased by
any Protestant household affluent and literate enough to own its own
Bible. Everyone read about the narrator who falls asleep and dreams of
a man named Christian fleeing the City of Destruction while bearing a
heavy burden (representing the knowledge of his own sins) on his back.
A figure named Evangelist instructs Christian on how to reach the
Celestial City, a long journey past such perils as the Slough (swamp)
of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty, where people with names like
Mr. Worldly Wiseman and Hypocrisy attempt to lead him astray.
The low opinion in which allegory is now widely held can be blamed on
The Pilgrim’s Progress. The book is pious and manifestly didactic,
although I can testify from experience that a young-enough reader can
still find it an entertaining adventure yarn. Adults, apart from some
very devout Protestants, tend to experience its sermonizing as
oppressive. When critics call a work of art an allegory today, and
especially when they use adjectives like clunky and none-too-subtle,
they invoke this aspect of The Pilgrim’s Progress; they mean a story
that imposes a single, conspicuous interpretation on a reader or
viewer. Allegory lectures. As the critic Northrop Frye wrote, “The
commenting critic is often prejudiced against allegory without knowing
the real reason, which is that continuous allegory prescribes the
direction of his commentary, and so restricts its freedom.”
Perhaps Frye was right, and what we resent about allegory is the way
it makes thematic analysis superfluous. You can’t really congratulate
yourself for ferreting out the moral of Christian fighting his way
through the fancy city of Vanity Fair or the mining town named Lucre.
Should a book or a film present its argument so simply that even a
child can discern it, what’s left to talk about? Merely language,
story, and imagery—all the pleasures that art is made of.
Do we even know how to read such a book anymore? C.S. Lewis thought
not. He wrote the definitive treatise on the form in 1936: The
Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. We know Lewis today
as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and as a writer of Christian
apologetics, but before all that he was a sensational literary
critic—and I mean sensational literally. Perceptive, erudite, and
witty, he also wrote with an infectious vividness about the experience
of reading, of mingling with an author’s mind and imagination. Here’s
how he described the allegories of Martianus Capella, an influential
writer of the early fifth century:
The philosophies of others, the religions of others—back even to
the twilight of pre-Republican Rome—have all gone into the curiosity
shop of his mind. It is not his business to believe or disbelieve
them; the wicked old pedant knows a trick worth two of that. He piles
them up all around him until there is hardly room for him to sit among
them in the middle darkness of the shop; and there he gloats and
catalogues, but never dusts them, for even their dust is precious in
his eyes.
Lewis’ apologetics can be parochial, but his criticism flings open its
doors and windows to welcome in any writer with even a wisp of
distinction. Most remarkable of all, his scholarly works are never,
ever incomprehensible or boring, even when they concern the most
tedious literature. (Lewis’ biographer, A.N. Wilson, wrote that his
one great fault as a critic was his “enthusiastic generosity” toward
authors “who are not really as interesting as he makes them sound.”)
A medievalist, Lewis was forever defending the Middle Ages from the
glib notion that they constituted an intellectual and artistic fallow
period between the classical world and the Renaissance. (He is
completely convincing on this point.) We often fail to understand the
beauty of medieval art, he argued, because we experience the world and
our place in it so differently from the people of that time. We can’t
appreciate medieval allegory until we make a concerted effort to
imagine what it was like to inhabit the world as they saw it, as a
divinely ordered universe in which “certain sympathies, antipathies,
and strivings [are] inherent in matter itself. Everything has its
right place, its home, the region that suits it.”
Lewis traces the origins of allegory to a period in late antiquity
when, for undetermined reasons, the Western concept of a virtuous life
changed profoundly. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described
virtue as a skill to be learned by practice, until it becomes not just
second nature, but an end in itself. “The man who does not enjoy doing
noble actions is not a good man at all,” he wrote. You don’t become a
good cook by conquering your desire to cook badly; similarly, you
become a good man by simultaneously acquiring the expertise and
reaping its rewards.
The emerging idea that virtue instead results from an ongoing inner
battle against our own worst impulses was not exclusively Christian,
but it fit perfectly with the Christian belief in humanity’s fallen
nature. We’re so familiar with this concept of the psyche as a theater
of struggle between opposing forces that it’s difficult to conceive of
a time when it was relatively new, the time when allegory was born.
“To fight against ‘temptation,’ ” Lewis writes, “is also to explore
the inner world; and it is scarcely less plain that to do so is to be
already on the verge of allegory.”
Yet today we associate allegory with a lack of the “round” fictional
characters we value most, characters whose believability resides at
least partly in their internal conflicts. This is a standard set by
the novel, a relatively recent literary form that (for the most part)
aims to produce a naturalistic depiction of the world. Allegory
doesn’t work that way. The characters in allegories like the
13th-century poem Roman de la Rose, or Edmund Spenser’s 16th-century
masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, are “flat” by contemporary standards,
possessed of only a few traits and behaving with inhuman consistency.
But, as Lewis demonstrates in a long, virtuosic reading of Roman de la
Rose, this is because they aren’t actually meant to be characters.
Instead these people, the objects they handle, and the spaces they
occupy all represent aspects of the self. Roman de la Rose describes
the courtship of a noble maiden by a courtier. Like many allegories it
is framed as a dream, a sign that we’ve entered into a psychological
interior. The lover seeks the Garden of Love, where he meets such
clashing figures as Mirth, Companionship, Pride, and Shame. The lady
herself seems strangely dematerialized because, as Lewis observes,
“her character is distributed among personifications.”
But, Lewis hastens to add, an allegory is not merely an equation to be
solved, leaving you free to “throw aside the allegorical imagery as
something which has now done its work.” Allegorical reading requires
sustaining both image and meaning in the reader’s mind, as equally
valued components of the work. “It is not enough,” Lewis writes, “to
see that the dreamer gazing into the fountain signifies the lover
first looking into the lady’s eyes. We must feel that the scene by the
fountain is an imaginative likeness of the lover’s experience.” We
must be able to see the sparkling water and the shining eyes at the
same time and recognize them to be facets of a singular, layered
understanding that includes the recognition of other, abstract
qualities as well, such as the purity of her spirit.
The literate people of the Middle Ages were experts at comprehending
art in this way. They routinely compounded vast amounts of meaning
into certain ideas or motifs, partly because they were always
attempting to integrate the cultural legacy of classical paganism into
Christian theology. For them, “Venus” signified multiple things
simultaneously: a planet, a Roman goddess with a set of stories
attached to her, a literary figure, the image of feminine beauty, the
force of erotic love, God’s will manifested in the fruitful union of a
man and a woman, and so on. Christianity formed a bedrock for this way
of thinking, but no one of these is the “true” meaning of Venus to
which all others can be reduced. Their characters may seem “thin” when
compared with those in a great novel, but their images are much fuller
and richer.
Slate Academy: A Year of Great Books
Rediscover the joys and surprises of great literature! Spend 2016
reading and discussing six great novels alongside Slate's books and
culture columnist Laura Miller and her fellow Slatesters. Join us
today.
Lewis would surely argue that it is the modern reader who, viewing
allegory as reductive, shows a lack of subtlety. In a great allegory,
the imagery is not a code for the underlying theme; it is every bit as
important as theme. Perhaps the greatest allegory, Edmund Spenser’s
The Faerie Queene, offers a case in point. Lewis was Spenser’s
foremost champion, rescuing the Elizabethan poet from near-obscurity
and restoring The Faerie Queene to the canon—to the dismay of many
undergraduates but to the delight of others. Lewis first read the epic
poem as a boy, devouring it as a tale of brave knights battling
dragons, giants, and wicked enchanters against a sylvan landscape
splashed with gore. A grasp of the religious and political
implications of such figures as the beautiful but nefarious lady
Duessa (an allegory for the Catholic Church) or the Redcross Knight
(who embodies the spirit of England) would come later, but many
generations of readers have been well-satisfied with the surface
alone.
The Faerie Queene is a vast, ravishing spectacle—one that contemporary
readers can find pretty inaccessible due to Spenser’s use of language
and diction that is deliberately archaic, even for his own time. (Ben
Jonson, a near contemporary, complained that “in affecting the
ancients Spenser writ no language.”) Fortunately, an unabridged
audiobook, masterfully narrated by David Timson, released late last
year makes the poem much more readily intelligible for a new or
returning reader. The Faerie Queene is a pageant of one gorgeous,
trippy vision after another, from the Garden of Proserpina, the queen
of the underworld, (every blossom, leaf, and fruit in it is coal
black) to the adventures of “the famous Britomart,” a female knight
every bit as valiant as our beloved Brienne of Tarth. And while many
of Spenser’s allegorical concerns have become obsolete, it only takes
a scene like the Redcross Knight’s encounter with shaggy, gaunt
Despair as he crouches in his cave, surrounded by the knights he has
persuaded to kill themselves, to remind a reader of the form’s
potency.
Spenser’s Despair calls to mind the dementors, the most terrifying
monsters in the Harry Potter series, although J.K. Rowling’s specters
are not so much personifications of depression as allegorical
deployments of it. This is where the spirit of allegory lives on, in
novels and films when the action feels as if it is taking place inside
one person’s head. Sometimes a superhero comic or film slips into an
allegorical mode, less by mimicking some timely political situation
than by creating an antagonist like the Penguin, who resembles an
updating of the medieval allegory for greed. The Hero’s Journey, a
staple of screenwriting courses and, alas, the model for so many
mediocre films, is really just an allegorical narrative slapped with
the more palatable label of “myth.” Yet the contemporary artworks most
redolent of allegory’s heady psychic atmosphere are both archetypal
and dreamlike: the novels of Haruki Murakami and the films of David
Lynch, to name two examples. These stories partake of what Lewis
describes as “the perennial strangeness, the adventurousness, and the
sinuous forward movement of the inner life.” They are more enigmatic
and chaotic than medieval allegory, but ours is a more confusing and
disordered world.
See it here:
https://t.co/kVOkvPEMhH
--
Steve Hayes
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius
Steve Hayes
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
http://www.goodreads.com/hayesstw
http://www.bookcrossing.com/mybookshelf/Methodius