Everyday Canvas

Allegory: I think we still use it

Since it is Sunday, a non-prompt day, I’ll write about allegory.

Allegory is defined in very many ways, none of which, to my knowledge, is adequate. Allegory is not a simile, symbolism, or metaphor, although it does use symbols and figures of speech such as metaphors, and by some it is considered to be an extended metaphor.

An allegory is a complete work or volume of a narrative in which events and characters stand for a large, abstract concept or a widespread event. The most famous allegory taught in schools is Plato’s Cave in his Republic.

Here Plato has Socrates talking to Glaucon, instructing him in the nature of knowledge.

Socrates (or rather Plato) likens people to ignorant prisoners chained in a cave, unable to turn their heads. All they can see is the wall of the cave. Behind them burns a fire. Between the fire and the prisoners there is a parapet, along which puppeteers can walk. The puppeteers, who are behind the prisoners, hold up puppets that cast shadows on the wall of the cave. The prisoners are unable to see these puppets, the real objects, passing behind them. What the prisoners only see and hear are shadows and echoes cast by objects.

These prisoners would mistake appearance for reality. They would think the things they see on the wall (the shadows) were real; they would know nothing of the real causes of the shadows. If a book is behind them, and it casts a shadow on the wall, the prisoner says “I see a book.” He thinks he is talking about a book, but he is really talking about a shadow, although he uses the word book.

Should the prisoners be allowed to turn their heads, they would see the real book, and not think the shadow of the book is the book itself. The question is: Are we really seeing what we think we are seeing? This is an example of perception allegory in the nature of knowledge.

As such, John Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” is an example of spiritual allegory, in which the road to Heaven (salvation, moral behavior, glory) is not easy and it is full of obstacles (humanity’s sins and world’s ups and downs).

In the same vein, most religious scriptures are full of allegory. Possibly for that reason, some writers turn their noses on allegory, such as Schopenhauer who said, “Man should (would) grow out of his allegorical primitivism as out of his childhood clothes." Better thinkers and writers do not agree with him. Actions, things, and words may mean more than one thing and cast ambiguity to the meanings in it. I am sure you have heard people say that a religious text, let’s say Bible, is full of contradictions. Allegory clears the meaning in regard to the entire text by compressing many truths into one huge complexity.

Haven’t other writers used allegory, however, in a slightly changed fashion? These works come to mind: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Portrait of Dorian Grey, The War of Worlds, The Sound and the Fury, The Road (Cormac McCarthy), Carrie (Stephen King), and quite a few Sci-fi texts.

Another writer, Edgar Allen Poe, also sneered at allegory, as he criticized Nathaniel Hawthorne severely. “One thing is clear, that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of overturning a fiction.”

But then, he himself wrote The Masque of the Red Death, in which a pestilence (Red Death) is so deadly that the carefree Prince Prospero (from The Tempest?) orders an end-of-the-world masquerade ball within the seven rooms of his abbey, each decorated with a different color. In the midst of their revelry, a mysterious figure disguised as a Red Death victim's corpse enters and makes his way through each of the rooms. Under a gigantic ebony “ticking” clock, Prospero dies after confronting this stranger, whose "costume" proves to have nothing tangible inside it, and his guests also die.

I didn’t mean to write this in too long a detail, but allegory got the better of me.

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For Plato’s Cave:
http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm