Allegorica Mysteria

Allegories I like, allegories I don’t

The Hollow Tale

I’ve always disliked allegories.

For one thing, the concretes of the tale in an allegory thin out, hollow out, and are rendered vapid, because they don’t exist for their own sake. Nothing is real, it merely represents some ideas the talesman has. The characters don’t act out of their own motives, have no personality; they are mere puppets to get the talesman’s point across.

Indeed, I hesitate even to call allegories ‘tales’ — they are rather lectures, sermons, philosophies dressed up to appear like tales, to trick us, like the sugar coating on a bitter medicine pill.

More, when we in the audience know the message the talesman-allegorist has in mind, the tale itself loses all suspense, for we know where everything is going — where it must go to fulfill the message.

The Path of Allegory

There are three stages we in the audience may go through when we hear an allegory:

1. Is it a tale? It is an odd one. Here we, innocent as lambs, hear the tale and are taken in by the allegorist’s trickery. We believe his assertion that he is telling us a tale. We like tales, so we listen. But somewhere in our hearing, we begin to feel that the tale is an odd one, the characters don’t feel like ‘real flesh and blood,’ and are acting rather strangely. Usually in an allegory there are the preacher characters, and the allegorist trots these onto his stage in order to make clear the points of his message. Needless to say, the more such preachers the allegorist resorts to, and the longer-winded their sermons, the worse a talesman he is. The best allegorist will have no preachers, and no sermons in his tale. But then, you see, he must trust his audience to understand the message underlying the tale, and not treat it as a mere tale, but as a message. And most allegorists don’t dare that risk. They must make sure we ‘get it.’ And so even when there are no preacher characters and no sermons, the allegorist will bend and shape his allegory so that at some point along the way (best if it comes at the very last line, or just after the telling is done) we in the audience ‘see through’ the surface of the tale, and understand this has all been but the dress of a deeper message.
2. It is not a tale! He tricked me, it’s only an allegory! Once we do understand that the tale is an allegory, we listen on with a different frame of mind. We may pass through a moment of irritation — ‘It isn’t a real story after all!’ — but then, if we do not cease to listen completely, we will listen and try to grasp the underlying message. At this point the experience is no longer a talesman, his tale, and his audience. It is rather a riddler, and a group of puzzle-solvers, trying to understand the meaning beneath the clues. This is a very different experience from following a tale. We discard the characters, feel nothing for them; they are but the embodiments of traits in the philosophical or moral scheme. Events no longer raise in us any pity, terror, joy, or desire. What happens is no more than the working-out of an argument.
3. I know what this is about! If it should happen that we know already the philosophy, cult, or moral outlook the allegorist espouses, then we can see it through the scheme of his allegory. At this point we know perfectly well what he is saying, and the rest of the tale is as predictable as a ball rolling down a channel in a hill, as well-known as a sequence: A, B, C, D, E… or 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… In truth, this can be quite boring, except in the case where the message that lies under the allegory is one the listener believes in strongly, feels is embattled and beset about by unbelievers, and so he enjoys having his ‘truth’ reaffirmed by the allegorist and his allegory. ‘Right on, brother! Sing it! Tell them all the way it really is!’ would be our feeling. For those of us in this category, the tale that covers the allegory resumes some tissue of substance: that really is the way people act, or should act; the preachers are wise men, we wish we met such men in our lives; the events told of are what would, of course, happen in the real world — or at least in the real world if things went as they should.

An Allegory of Another Kind

Against all this, there is the personal allegory or allegory fraught for the audience with mystery — and so I call it the Allegorica Mysteria.

David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus struck me as a tale of this kind.

The difference between the allegory that cleaves to a doctrine, perhaps unknown, perhaps well known, and the allegory wholly personal in nature, is that the personal allegory refers back to actual events. These events the talesman feels he must conceal, for whatever reason, usually embarrassment or the desire to shelter the feelings of those real persons to whom the tale refers. There is, after all, a tale underneath.

More, the allegorica mysteria, dealing as it does with the talesman’s real life history, or some events of which he knows, does not follow the logical or sequential or schematic progress of the allegory of dogma. This means that the end cannot be ‘solved’ by the audience once they ‘get’ the underlying message.

There is in fact no ‘message’ underlying the allegorica mysteria, only the experiences.

Where the allegorica mysteria tells (obliquely) of the talesman’s own life story, it bears with it a weight of true feeling, and the feeling the talesman brings to the allegorica mysteria is a deep one. If the events of which he tells were light and inconsequential, he would probably not clothe them in allegorical dress. (This does happen, and has: say in the example of a man recounting an amorous conquest of a well-known lady of unimpeachable reputation, or telling about the humorous blunders of departments of the State. In such cases delicacy or the fear of lawsuit or imprisonment might drive the talesman to use allegorical dress. And yet such allegories might fall under a third branch, for here the allegorist does desire for his audience to solve the riddle, and understand just who the lady is, and what ministers are the fools of the tale. He just feels he cannot name names outright.)

The allegorist of the allegorica mysteria is at some pains to relate his experience, out of the need, perhaps, to purge his feelings of loss, disappointment, whatever (they are rarely happy feelings), or perhaps he feels he ought to warn his audience against the fate that ensnared him. Therefore the riddle is hard for us to grasp, and remains to a large extent maddeningly out of reach.

Because it is an allegory, the allegorica mysteria treats its events and characters in ways different from the open, outright tale. When the talesman outfits his own experiences in the garb of the allegory, something is lost in the way of clear understanding of relationships; at the same time something is gained in the way of mystery. He will often place his allegorica mysteria in some foreign land or time, as Lindsay set his romance on the planet of Tormance in the double-sun of Arcturus. He does so maybe out of the desire to set his tale as far as possible from the true setting of the events that inspired it. Or maybe he does so in the hope that we will penetrate the veil of mystery a little bit, only so far as to see that this is not just a bizarre bit of amusement, but that the talesman has a point, a dire warning or deep experience he wishes to share with us.

In the Fog and Liking It

I find I rather like the allegorica mysteria, although I detest the outright allegory. I feel when I am hearing these mysteries that I want to reach through and grasp the underlying event or experience of the talesman, and yet at the same time I am content to drift in the ambiguity of a riddle that I cannot solve, that may be insoluble.

(Composed on keyboard Sunday, June 22, 2008)