Is Allegory Alternative to Symbol? Contribution to the Comprehension of Tropes

Abstract

The use of the terms “allegory” and “symbol2 was constantly changing in the early periods of literary history. These words were often even used synonymously. The oscillation seems to have been the result of terminological undecidability. Later, in the 19^th and 20^th century, their use was becoming less a matter of rhetorical strategies than of the fundamental attitude of poets towards the world and of interpreters towards literary texts. European Romanticism played a vital role in this process, with F. Schlegel and Novalis on the one hand, and Kreuzer, Solger, Schelling, and above all Goethe and Coleridge, on the other. Goethe and Coleridge were the first to introduce antithetic and evaluative statements into discussions of allegory and symbol, since they distinctly privileged symbol over allegory. In their opinion, only symbols had the power to bridge the otherwise unbridgeable gap between language and the world, while allegory was believed to refer to meanings which it was incapable of establishing on its own. Their definition stalled the development of the new perception of rhetorical strategies long into the 20^th century. It had a crucial impact on adherents of the new criticism and their heirs. The theory of post-structualism was the first to shake this antithetical and evaluative definition of the two terms. Hence it seems that, today, these notions must be understood in accordance with their post-structuralist treatment, which could be denotated by renouncing the Romantic and post-Romantic privileging of the symbol. This is why this article presents Paul de Man’s comprehension of allegory in his “Rhetoric of temporality” in detail. He deserves credit for noticing a contradiction in Coleridge’s definition of symbols, and setting up a hypothesis that regards allegorical structures as perceivable in the most exposed passages in early Romantic poetry. This idea was attacked by Murray Krieger in his polemical paper “A Waking Dream: A Symbolic Alternative to Allegory”, where he eagerly produces arguments against post-structuralist, allegorical interpretations of literature, referring to organicistic poetics and the tradition of the aesthetics of the symbol. The article sums up the polemics between the above-mentioned theoreticians, and in the process introduces a third notion: the irony of irony.