The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (review)

Coming up with a comprehensive and yet pithy definition of allegory is notoriously difficult—and, strikingly, in this Companion, Rita Copeland and Peter Struck do not even try. Instead, they offer a history of the ways in which allegory and associated terms such as enigma, symbol, and hyponoia (“under-meaning”) have been used and understood in the West, from the earliest Greek texts to the early twenty-first century. In the process, Copeland and Struck rebut a long-standing devaluation of allegory that condemns it for erasing individual or historical particularity in favor of totalizing and reductively applied doctrine. By drawing productively on philosophy, theology, rhetoric, literature, and the arts, the Companion’s detailed histories reveal that our understanding of allegory, rather than allegory itself, has heretofore been reductive and over-general.

Indeed, one of the distinctive features of Copeland and Struck’s approach is that it defines nearly everybody as in need of the kinds of basic orientation that the Cambridge Companions have traditionally provided to students and beginning teachers. Outside the confines of this volume, few are simultaneously conversant with Stoic allegoresis, eleventh-century Islamic philosophical allegories, Bernard Silvestris, Dante’s Convivio, fourteenth-century poetry, allegorical drama, Protestant exegesis, the differences between late antique and Romantic Neoplatonism, Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man, and late twentieth-century allegorical performance art. For Copeland and Struck, however, these historically disparate test cases are the empirical shoals on which theoretical statements about allegory have repeatedly foundered. Here, instead, they are converted into sites for defining allegory as a series of historically specific “practices” and “habits of thought” to which the volume invites us to awaken (2).

For readers of Studies in the Age of Chaucer, the most valuable chapters are likely to be those that address medieval allegory and its late classical antecedents, as well as—perhaps surprisingly—the essays on the twentieth-century recuperation of allegory at the end of the book. One disadvantage of presenting the volume as a rhetorical history is that the editors forgo the opportunity to define its theoretical affiliations. When the Companion is read backward, however, it becomes clear that Benjamin and de Man, discussed in a pair of lucid essays by Howard Caygill and Steven Mailloux, cast long shadows over the rest of the book. Individual contributions to the Companion follow in de Man’s footsteps by returning to texts long considered to be axiomatically anti-allegorical, discovering in them more interpretive complexity than had previously been allowed, while Denys Turner refreshingly performs this operation in reverse, exposing the anxiety about, and frustration with, prevailing forms of allegorical reading in seemingly standardized thirteenth- and fourteenth-century accounts of the four levels of biblical exegesis. A number of essays likewise follow de Man by defining all nonliteral language or all acts of interpretation as allegory. Others restrict allegory to a mode that foregrounds problems of figuration and interpretation that would otherwise be obfuscated; here we hear echoes of Benjamin’s positive valuation of allegory as the redemption of a historical ruin, as well as de Man’s claim that elevating symbol over allegory constitutes “self-mystification.” In important respects, then, these two chapters define the conditions of possibility for the book as a whole.

This is not to say that the medieval has nothing to teach the modern. One of this book’s major strengths is that it debunks the idea (prevalent among nonmedievalists and even some medievalists) that medieval allegory contains and minimizes disturbing textual possibilities while modern allegory thematizes, and sometimes celebrates, distance, difference, and fracture. Turner acknowledges the existence of stereotypically bad medieval allegory, citing Denis the Carthusian’s “wooden and po-faced” commentary on the Song of Songs, and even recognizes that such foundational thinkers as Origen, Cassian, and Augustine might at first glance seem to use allegory “as a device of Christian tendentiousness, permitting, if not demanding, the evacuation of all literal meaning from...