Lewis and Allegory
By Diane Speed
In 1936, 70 years ago, Clarendon Press published Lewis's first academic book, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. My paper will be concerned with aspects of this book and its connections with Lewis's fiction.
In my own student days, The Allegory of Love was a major item on our reading lists for medieval literature, and we devoured with wonder the wealth of learning, so integrated and worn so lightly, presented between the covers. In the 21st century, it is still highly recommended reading in certain of my own classes, and not just as a classic reference. Individual points of arguments have been taken up and even refuted with some force. Scholars have, in varying degrees, taken the exegesis of the individual literary texts the book investigates further, and laid the grids of modern textual theories across them. But The Allegory of Love is arguably unmatched in its magisterial treatment of a millennium of texts and their broader intellectual implications, and it certainly cannot remain other than seminal in a major field of scholarly endeavour.
Lewis was writing ahead of his time. It would be many years before the standard approach to medieval literature in traditional universities would cease to be dominated by philology, but already in The Allegory of Love, Lewis was inviting academic readers to engage with the great literary monuments of the period from a literary perspective—a perspective that was not just appreciative, as was often the case with earlier criticism of non-modern English texts, but was truly scholarly and analytical, arising out of his own expertise in philology. As the eminent Shakespeare scholar E. M. W. Tillyard exclaimed in 1937, “At last ... a medievalist who is also a critic”. Lewis may, in fact, be considered to be largely responsible for breaking the news to English Departments that the flowering of Renaissance literature cannot be properly understood without reference to its medieval roots.
Significantly, work towards The Allegory of Love began a little before Lewis's full conversion in 1931 and was completed after it. Significantly, too, the research was in progress when, in 1933, he produced The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism, an allegorical reflection on his conversion. In other words, his pursuit of academic truth was caught up in his pursuit of spiritual truth. Both pursuits involved the pushing of boundaries in respect of conventional ideas, and each appears to have fed the other.
Lewis scholars have, of course, recognised that The Allegory of Love has a bearing on his subsequent fiction. Medievalist Paul Piehler, for example, argued in 1991 that Lewis's readings in medieval allegory are reflected in both the structures and the imagery of his fiction.
Yet uncertainty persists concerning the precise nature of these reflections. With reference to the recent film of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, film critic David Canning simply assumes without question that the plot is an allegory of the gospel and Aslan, an allegorical representation of Christ. Lewis scholars, however, readily point out that he himself insisted to Mrs Hook that Aslan is not an allegorical figure but a “supposal”—an invention which answers the question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and he chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours?”
Attention is often drawn, also, to the clear-cut distinction between allegory and symbolism made in the second chapter of The Allegory of Love. In brief, whereas allegory involves moving from reality to fiction, symbolism involves moving from fiction to reality, or from a lesser reality to a greater reality. In these terms, the fictional Aslan would be, not an allegory, but a symbol of Christ. But The Allegory of Love has much more to say about allegory than this in its discussion of individual texts, and, arguably, it has more light to shed on Lewis's fiction.
Lewis's focal concern is love. The Allegory of Love traces the emergence of the idea of romantic love as a literary phenomenon set out in allegorical terms, from Classical and early Christian texts, through the neo-Platonic allegories of the School of Chartres and Dante's Divina Commedia, to later English compositions by writers like Chaucer and Spenser. The pivotal text in which the ideas and conventions of the past are seen to reach their fruition, and to which subsequent texts in the tradition are seen to be greatly indebted, is the thirteenth-century French allegory, Le Roman de la Rose (“The Romance of the Rose”), which was begun by Guillaume de Lorris and which was amplified and completed after Guillaume's death by Jean de Meun.
The poet's narrating persona dreams that he is wandering alongside a river on a pleasant May morning when he sees a walled garden. On the outside, allegorical figures are depicted, representing both qualities such as Old Age and vices such as Envy—neither of which have any place in the world of courtly love. Inside this garden (which is like a modern park), the Dreamer finds figures of different kinds: ad hoc personifications such as Youth and Delight (who presides over the garden); traditional personifications such as Nature and Fortune who are depicted as gods; gods of the Classical pantheon, such as Venus and Cupid, whose speech and actions entirely reflect their principal divine functions; and other figures who act partly literally and partly allegorically, such as the friar False-Seeming and the Duenna, who is meant to guard the lady's virtue. The main action consists of the dreamer's quest to pluck a certain rosebud, which, according to Lewis, represents (in Guillaume's section) the lady's love and (in Jean's section) her sexual potential.
Lewis regards the figures that do not operate in a purely allegorical way as failures. In this regard, he finds Guillaume's figure, Friend, a confidant of the Dreamer, a little less than purely allegorical. But he pours more scorn on Jean for his use of figures such as the Duenna (he says that her introduction “constitutes a complete breakdown of allegory”). Yet, as Lewis himself makes clear, this poem had an enormous effect on subsequent medieval writers, including Dante and Chaucer, and its medieval admirers seem to have been inspired rather than bothered by such “failures”.
Lewis's very frustration with the nature of the allegory in this archetypal medieval allegory has directed critical attention to the problem. It has been suggested that we might approach the problem by positing, in Le Roman de la Rose, two allegorical modes: basic “personification allegory” and “exemplary allegory”. In the second case, a figure like a friar or a duenna has a degree of literal existence and otherwise exemplifies a certain kind of behaviour. This type would have some similarity to Lewis's “symbolic” figure. We might, for instance, think of Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as exemplifying the wilful human being who needs to change course and follow Christ, and Aslan as exemplifying the way Christ would have acted in the supposititious realm of Narnia.
The critical instinct to associate the essentially literal narratives of the Narnia books with allegory (even though Lewis himself decried the association) may be due to the fact that Lewis does employ the second kind of allegory in the less strict mode. His imagination had absorbed this from much medieval allegorical writing, even though his intellect had found this second mode lacking the precision of basic personification allegory.
I turn now from the issue of allegory as a mode to features of the setting and the action of Le Roman de la Rose, and their reflection in The Chronicles of Narnia. I am taking it as agreed that the Chronicles are a set of stories that, in some way, reflect the Christian story of salvation, and I will focus on particular matters.
The comprehensive setting in the Roman is the Garden of Delight. This is revealed to the reader through the eyes of the Dreamer. His first impression on entering is that he is truly in the earthly paradise: “So delightful was the place that it seemed to belong to the world of spirit, for, as it seemed to me then, there was no paradise where existence was so good as it was in that garden which so pleased me”. Features he observes include the grass, herbs and spice plants, fruit trees and other trees, flowers and bushes, and, above all, the rosebush bearing the rosebud that becomes the object of his desire. The air is filled with the singing of the birds, woodland animals adorn the scene, and the inhabitants of the garden engage in dancing to the accompaniment of music. The atmosphere is joyful. One of the inhabitants is Joy herself. The whole garden is a square. It contains a fountain supplied with water from conduits bearing an inscription naming it as the Fountain of Narcissus.
This earthly paradise, like such places in other literature, evokes, in a general way, the biblical Garden of Eden. Its squareness, on the other hand, would seem to evoke specifically the shape of the apocalyptic New Jerusalem. Both references invite comparison between the garden of the poem and God's paradise, before it is lost and when it is created anew respectively. But the paradise of the poem is problematised even before it is first revealed by the indiscriminate exclusion, courtesy of the outside wall paintings of both the physically unattractive and the bad, in a confusion of aesthetic and moral principles. The gate by which the Dreamer enters is guarded by Idleness, a figure associated in medieval thought with the deadly sin of Sloth. And the problematisation continues as the action begins to unfold, for, as the Dreamer first spots the rose in the fountain and sets his heart on it, the allusion to Narcissus makes it clear that his will be a self-adoring, self-serving quest.
The Narnia created in The Magician's Nephew resembles rather more closely the biblical Garden of Eden, which then becomes the focal point of God's overall creation. Narnia develops from a dark void to a place of light without vegetation, and then to a green landscape in which appears grass, trees, flowers, bushes (including a wild rose) and a brook. All this creation comes about through the singing of the lion Aslan, and the landscape is filled with a great range of tame and wild animals and semi-human creatures. It is a pleasant and cheerful place. Suggestively, Aslan addresses Diggory as “son of Adam”.
While allowing the debt to Genesis, whether in the Bible itself or in Milton's retelling which is usually adduced as Lewis's immediate source, I would suggest that certain features of this creation scene seem to reflect aspects of the garden of the Roman or similar texts. Notably, the details of the vegetation in The Magician's Nephew include flowers—particularly the rose; it is singing (music) that brings the scene to life; and, except for the witch and Diggory's uncle, the inhabitants are presented as happy.
The biblical account of creation as we have it makes the Garden of Eden a limited site within a larger whole, and it is possible to be expelled to the outer world though a gate. The walled garden in the Roman is set within a larger area—a meadow—and in a general way, it matches the Genesis idea. Narnia is likewise one place in a larger whole—not least because it is distinct from the world of London and from other places in the other Narnia books. In one way, however, I would suggest that, in the creation episode, it recalls the circumstances of the Roman. There is no actual enclosing factor but what we hear about is what is perceived by the protagonists; the extent of their gaze defines the textual area whose creation is described. Both the world and the Garden of Eden in Genesis are understood by the believing reader to be phenomena existing independently from the reader's perception of them, but the equivalent places in the Roman and The Magician's Nephew are brought into existence and are delimited, in one sense, by an ordinary human author, and in another sense, by the eyes of their fictional perceivers in the text.
The Magician's Nephew does not reference the action of the end of world and the new creation as the Roman, but of course the Chronicles do so in a collective sense with The Last Battle which reflects more closely the Bible itself.
In referring specifically to the Divina Commedia and the entrance into the visionary world of the Inferno, Piehler makes the point that the poet's persona undergoes “a disturbance of the normal postulates of everyday life”—an experience we might otherwise term “liminal”. The Roman de la Rose uses a dream as the mechanism that allows the vision, a strategy which is also followed in Chaucer's so-called “dream visions”. The Divina Commedia, like Gower's Confessio Amantis (contemporary with Chaucer's work and treated by Lewis as as “allegory of love”), is recognised as belonging to a sub-type of the dream vision in which the dream is replaced by another sort of liminal experience. Such liminal experience is immediately recognisable in the Narnia books as the impetus for the various adventures, for example, in the wardrobe of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the picture that comes to life and absorbs the children in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
The central plot of the Roman revolves around a quest, and quests involve some kind of journey. Medieval romance in general involves quests for something beneficial to the quester or the community. Because Guillaume's section is not complete, one can only guess at the intended outcome and the terms in which it would have been expressed: it looks as if the Dreamer would have succeeded in plucking the rose, but just what that allegorical act would have represented is uncertain. Given the relative delicacy and refinement of his section, it might have represented simply a kiss. Jean, however, makes it very clear in heavy nudge-nudge terms that the plucking of the rose at the end of his section, and the whole text as it stands, represents the deflowering of the lady. Overall, the text as it stands may be read as satirising such self-serving behaviour—showing it up for what it is by setting up the generic expectations of romance. In The Allegory of Love, Lewis actually says Jean falls short of such purposefulness but raises the possibility.
The idea of a journey towards a beneficial end dominates Lewis's fiction, and progress is often expressed through the protagonists' choice between good and evil. Edmund, for instance, makes several wrong choices before seeing the light. Growth is typically part of the journey. With an allegorical approach, we may read the physical maturity of the four children at the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as representing inner maturity.
The process of temptation and decision-making arguable reflects the key process of the Roman and similar texts that follow the pattern set out in the fourth century by Prudentius in his allegory, the Psychomachia (the “battle of the senses”). In the Roman, the pattern is to be found in the struggle between Reason, who urges the Dreamer to desist from his quest, and the figures of Friend and Nature. Without possible recourse to modern psychological terminology, allegory found perhaps its most important role in medieval literature in enabling the representation of just such struggles. The most obvious reflection of the psychomachia tradition in Lewis's fiction can be seen in The Pilgrim's Regress but it can also be detected in less obvious ways in much of his fiction as various characters struggle to make the right decision.
One effect of the ubiquitous questing journey of medieval romance, exemplified in the Roman, is a structure in which, despite the overall idea of forward movement, episodes appear to be assembled to a large extent without a strong interconnectedness. Such juxtapositions are what gave rise to the concept of the Gothic. Colin Manlove remarks on the “loose structure” of the narrative in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and the sense of contingency in The Magician's Nephew where much appears to happen by accident.
The last matter I'll address, very briefly, is the figure of Nature, who dominates much of Jean's section of the Roman as in other texts in the tradition. She personifies the neo-Platonic concept of a force who carries out the divine demand for creation to perpetuate the species. Acting in obedience to God, she demands of creation complete obedience to natural law. What lies beyond her concern is reason, which is a direct gift from God to humanity. But her knowledge of the universe is profound, and, as she sees it, only humanity, amongst the created species, continually thwarts her and in so doing spoils her work.
The notion of a humanity whose sinfulness has brought problems to the divinely intended course of the natural world is thus recognised in both biblical and philosophical tradition. Lewis's fiction seem to draw on both traditions in that fallen nature may be described as unpleasant, while the unpleasantness points to wrong things happening. Kath Filmer notes that the image of nature as tainted appears in Till We Have Faces, personified by the goddess Ungit and in the character Orual, as well as in the unending winter of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
In this brief glance at some of the possible connections between The Allegory of Love and Lewis's fiction, I have suggested that we might find further illumination of that fiction, as well as of Lewis's imaginative and creative processes, in continued exploration of his work on individual texts in The Allegory of Love, as well as greater familiarity with some of those texts themselves.
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