ALL LEG GORY

[taimatsu]

I may be mildly sleep-deprived. I have acquired further supplies of chocolate/juice/pasta/cocktail sausages om yom yom.

I am working on an essay analysing George Hebert's poem The Pilgrimage. I'm looking at the image of the pilgrim/life's journey in this and other lyric poems dated 1340-1650.

I do know what an allegory is. The problem I'm having is the difference between an allegory like one of Jesus' parables (A woman loses a coin in a dark part of her house...) and an allegory like this poem or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. In the first one, the story itself is self-contained and may seem a bit pointless, until Jesus/whoever says 'Aha! The woman is like... and the coin is like... and...' and gives the key to the symbols. In Bunyan or here in Herbert at least half the symbol-keys are right out there in the open - "the Slough of Despond," "the rock of Pride," "Fancy's meadow." If they were saying 'Chappie goes on a trip, leaves city, climbs hills, gets held up in a pretty meadow, meets a man who gives bad advice, eventually reached beautiful city,' I'd get my head round this easily, but I'm confused as to whether it really counts if you put a whole lot of EVERYMAN! PRIDE! WORLDLY WISEMAN! ANGEL! in there.

Talk to me, Englishy people! (note I haven't actually read the Bunyan so don't refer too closely to it in explaining things!)

Comments

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

There's definitely a difference. My third form RE exam revolved largely around a list of bible passages, and saying which ones were parables and which ones were allegories. I think an allegory is likely to be shorter, and more likely to be outright symbolic rather than directly illustrative. This is, however, a not very useful answer to a question which only tangentially resembles the one you asked.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I'm not sure that's right. I think parable is a sub-division of allegory, not a separate mode. (Or maybe RE usage differs functionally from English usage!)

Allegory in general just means that the text is to be read at some symbolic level rather than literally. So a parable is an allegorical story representing a religious or moral lesson.

As for taimatsu's question though, my feeling is that they are just different styles of allegorizing. There are probably different technical terms applicable to the styles, and if so, unhelpfully I don't know them.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Deeply unhelpful suggestion of the difference here
http://www.bible.ca/d-parables-of-jesus.htm

There's some content at wikipedia also.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

"An allegory transfers the properties of one thing to another: Parables compare two separate things to one another."

Heh, that may go down a storm in Canadian Bible studies, but I don't think it's going to cut much ice with taimatsu's tutors!

[thinkstoomuch.livejournal.com]

Might that mean that an allegory is a metaphor, while parables are similes?

[taimatsu]

Further thoughts: according to Cuddon (Penguin dic. of Literary Terms) allegorical signs =/= symbols. Symbols are real things: scales (justice), rose (beauty). Allegorical signs are arbitrary: some rocky outcrop (pride), a marsh (despondance). I will avoid the term 'symbol' in the essay but otherwise I don't think this is terribly helpful.

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

I'm not entirely convinced - using a marsh to represent depression doesn't seem arbitrary at all.

[glittertigger]

Not quite what you asked but I would recommend reading the Bunyan. Its power is in the way it grips you as a story and I didn't feel hit-over-the-head by the allegorical aspects. I think it often comes over as cruder than it is when you read criticism or analysis of it.

[taimatsu]

I really should, and I will, but not before the deadline tomorrow lunchtime ;)

[smhwpf.livejournal.com]

Ah, now as I understand it, most of Jesus' parables (or other parables and fables) are not allegories, in that there are not usually direct correspondences between the elements of the story and the spiritual meaning. There's some correspondence in the widow and the coin one, widow = God, coin = sinner, but it's rather inexact, in that the coin is an inanimate object which doesn't choose to get lost. Also the house and the neighbours invited to celebrate don't have a particular equivalent. In the case of the Good Samaritan, some Christian writers tried to allegorise it, like saying that the man going from Jerusalem to Jericho is Adam, Jerusalem and Jericho mean something, the robbers are the devil, they beat him up and leave him in a state of sin, the Priest and Levite are the Mosaic Law which is unable to save the sinner, the Good Samaritan is Jesus, the money he pays to the inkeeper is his death on the cross for our sin, etc. etc. Which is totally missing the point and making things far too complicated, in that the story has a simple point, that to be a neighbour to someone is to act with compassion towards them, not to be a member of the same group. Likewise with the rather simpler coin parable, it is still not the details that are important, but the overall point of illustrating a God who will go to any lengths to search for and save the lost soul. (Can't remember who I read talking about this. I think actually might have been C.H. Dodd, who was arguing that "Jesus's interpretation" of the parable of the sower (the path means this, the thorns mean that, etc.) was likely a later allegorical accretion to the original parable as told by Jesus.)

On the other hand, Pilgrim's Progress definitely is an allegory, in that the various places and people encountered by the Pilgrim are intended to represent specific challenges and experiences in the life of a Christian.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Does this definition (http://web.uvic.ca/wguide/Pages/LTAllegory.html) help at all?

[taimatsu]

oooh, yes, it does. The didactic purpose bit is handy, that's a thing I can hang some comparisons on with the other poems I'm looking at, and the idea of medieval morality plays helps too - Lady Vanity and so on. Thank you :)

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I'm disqualified what with never having done an English degree but I wouldn't describe something as an allegory if it was embedding these broad hints into the story. It's like the difference between a simile and a metaphor - once you have something called "the rock of Pride" then there's no longer a mapping from your story-space to some distinct concept-space, you are instead leaving concept-space post-it notes all over your actual story.

Sadly I don't know what the correct term is for this (if one even exists). (Being ignorant of such things myself I'd likely use the word "metaphor" in some overloaded way, but that's almost certainly wrong.)

[taimatsu]

This is exactly why I posted. Sadly, Pilgrim's Progress really is considered by Those Who Should Know (ie. people who write Penguin's literary dictionaries, among many many others) to be an allegory, so it must be me who is wrong.

I wonder if you took the post-it notes out, would you have a roman a clef? You would, I think, unless you made your signifying things, the things which stand for something else, so obvious that they are universally understood symbols. In which case it would probably just be boring. I don't know.

[taimatsu]

The Herbert poem is interesting, though, because there are little things which are not signalled ih capital letters but still fit into both the literal and allegorical senses of the story. The stinging swarming fears, for example, are, well, fears, because the pilgrim is afraid all his trouble was for nothing, but they fit the literal interpretation too, as you do find stinging insects around pools of standing water.

I think the point is in the end that Herbert, towards the end of the poem, is not trying to keep the reader in one frame of reference; it is clear the thing is supposed to be read on the 'higher' level so there are places he does not bother sustaining the lower level at all. But it's unobtrusive. I think.