Anderson, Judith. Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. xii + 324 pp. ISBN: 978-0823224210. $61.15 cloth. 

Anderson, Judith. Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton. New York: Fordham UP, 2008. xii + 436 pp. ISBN: 978-0823228478. $77.50 cloth.

Anderson, Judith and Joan Pong Linton eds. Go Figure: Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World. New York: Fordham UP, 2011. 215 pp. ISBN: 978-0823233496. $49.65 cloth. 

In a famous exchange on the question of style, the quattrocento Italian humanist Angelo Poliziano shrugged off the pressure of classical inheritance, making a claim for the unique individuality of his own voice: “You say I do not write like Cicero. So what? I am not Cicero; I express myself.”[1] The boldness of this declaration with its apparent gesture of radical rupture contains a double encounter. Even as it disavows Ciceronian influence, it enacts Cicero’s own call for rhetorical decorum; even as it looks toward a renascent modern subjectivity, it relentlessly connects future innovation to a beloved past.

Reading Judith Anderson’s three most recent books brings to mind a similar doubleness. For Anderson herself, like the humanists she writes about, looks backwards and forwards at once, seeking to connect Early Modern scholarship with postmodern (specifically, poststructuralist) theoretical concerns, and extricating herself from critical habits and orthodoxies even as she tangles with them. This same doubleness contained in any act of imitation or translatio (a term that, Anderson reminds us, itself translates the Greek metaphora) is also fundamental to the condition of a reviewer and interlocutor. To engage with a particular work of interpretation in its contemporary context, and through it, to interact anew with a primary textual object and a cultural-historical past, is to cultivate a kind of bifocality. In some inescapable sense, then, the review represents the apex of critical self-reflexiveness; it is an invitation to participate generously in what Anderson calls a “textual community,” even as it must simultaneously distance itself from that community in order to comment upon it. It is thus Janus-faced, looking outward at a community of readers and inwards to reflect upon the multiple critical engagements in play.

This essay is an exploration of the rich possibilities of such doubleness in reading and interpretation. It takes its cue from Anderson’s emphatic insistence on the bifocality of metaphor and the double-vision of allegory to explore the seemingly perennial fascination of these tropes for literary critics and theorists. More urgently, perhaps, it uses her lead to examine the implications of cultivating a theoretical doubleness that harnesses the constructive power of a “both/and” approach to our objects of study—a perspective that, I will suggest, offers a potent response to debates on the future of criticism and the emergence of a so-called “post-critical” condition.

It is perhaps not surprising that reading Judith Anderson brings me to these questions—after all, both her monographs (which are, in an important sense, a diptych or intellectual companion-pieces) are concerned with figuration. But neither Reading the Allegorical Intertext nor Translating Investments requires a book report or conventional homage—Anderson’s work is well known and beloved to Spenserians in particular and to Early Modern scholars at large, and her writing is too deeply learned, too fine-grained and witty in its precision to permit of mere summary.[2] Instead, I take up here the invitation contained in Anderson’s books to wrestle with some of the central, seemingly intractable issues at the heart of literary study—figuration, mimesis, the relations of the abstract and the fictional to the material and the “real.” To do so, this essay returns to a set of fundamental questions about the nature of reading and interpretation: what is the mystique of allegory? Why does it remain such an alluring subject for and figure of the task of interpretation itself? And what might our collective fascination with allegory reveal about possible futures for theory and critical practice?

I

Today, allegory seems to be everywhere. Or perhaps, despite many proclamations to the contrary, that familiar and yet still-so-nebulous term seems never to have left. 2010 was a bumper year for its critical fortunes, seeing the publication of both a Cambridge companion and a Routledge New Critical Idiom volume on the topic.[3] Indeed, a decade into the new millennium, allegory seems to have acquired a renewed canonical status: it has become a concept so ubiquitous in academic discourse that a casual search unearths essays in a surprising range of disciplines, including organizational management research, psychiatry, economics, “youth studies” and maternal medicine, as well as the usual suspects—religion, philosophy, literary and cultural studies. Such a disciplinary spread indicates the continued centrality of the term to critical debates in what we might describe as the “human sciences.” Anderson’s own books preceded this wave by a few years, and her interest in the conceptual work of allegory (and metaphor more generally), participates in this upswell.

This scattering and transference—this translatio—of allegory itself has a kind of Spenserian flair, a pervasiveness and figural power that seems at once all-encompassing and fragmented in a manner familiar to readers of The Faerie Queene. Allegory is not only a trope to be identified and explained in particular texts, but has come to signify large-scale cultural habits of seeing and signification; it has even become a convenient term to describe entire conceptual structures of domination and subordination in postmodern parlance.[4] It is hardly surprising then that “allegory” is a theoretical buzzword and node, both a sign of particular intellectual postures and a rhetorical figure that enacts a certain kind of representation. The term has itself become rhizomatic, expanding its map of doubleness in sometimes counter-intuitive ways. Considered in this sense—as both rhetorical trope and theoretical tool—allegory offers a provocative conjunction between contemporary critical concerns and the workings of Medieval and Early Modern texts, as works such as Teskey’s Allegory and Violence and Anderson’s own Reading the Allegorical Intertext have shown. But such a conjunction goes beyond using contemporary theoretical perspectives to read Dante or Chaucer or Spenser; it also invites reflection on difficult questions involving the future of literary theory and criticism, particularly with regard to scholarship in so-called “early” fields. In the wake of furious debates over period realignments at the MLA, declarations of a new “post-critical” era, and an increasing emphasis on presentist cultural-historical themes, these questions are not merely the stuff of idle speculation. They demand to be addressed squarely and thoughtfully, without the polemical baggage of local critical battles.

Beyond their investigation of literary form, Anderson’s three most recent books (I am including here the edited volume, Go Figure), respond precisely to these questions. As meta-critical meditations and forays into specific theoretical debates, they ask to be read not only as practical criticism about individual authors and texts, but as theoretical interventions in their own right. Anderson inspires her readers to engage in intense marginal dialogues as she poses fundamental questions about the workings of literary form and figure that few dare to ask. To take one provocative example: if Milton’s unholy trinity of Satan, Sin and Death is a Spenserian allegory, as critics have long observed, then is the parallel scene in Heaven with God and the Son also an allegory? In raising this issue, Anderson cuts to the heart of troubling questions about the nature of representation (should God and the Son be understood as mimetic or allegorical characters? What is the difference?) and metaphysics (can the identification of literary form tell us something about the nature of “the real”?).[5] Such a line of investigation takes seriously the unique potential of literature, and literary criticism, to uncover aspects of our experience and our beliefs that are otherwise obscured. They remind us that, in some crucial sense, we live in language and must therefore attend to it with sensitivity and care. Anderson’s provocation is thus to push against surfaces and cut to the grain, to shrug off a hermeneutics of suspicion and to listen instead, with attention and generosity, to a text’s own workings. In her approach, there lurks a powerful response to Rita Felski’s call “to imagine a form of post-critical reading that does not look behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives—but in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.”[6] Beyond the specifically acute analyses for which Anderson’s essays are justly famous, it is her practice of this style of reading that demands attention, for it offers a potent rebuttal to those who bemoan the future of literary study.

Like many critics writing in the last ten years, Anderson is driven to mediate between the seemingly oppositional pull of text and context—formalism and textual analysis on the one hand, and historicism and cultural materialism on the other. She self-consciously locates her work within the landscape of contemporary literary theory in the wake of poststructuralism and so-called neo-cognitivism, and identifies its place within a vexed shift from “linguistic text to thematic content and historical context” and “from literary writing to other expressions of culture and of society.” Seeking to reimagine the relations between these two poles of critical attention, she argues that “the possibility for a stronger balance between them and the linguistic and rhetorical foci essential to nuanced, critical thinking depends at this point on recognition, reassertion, and reconnection of the legitimacy and value of specifically textual concerns.”[7]

This claim for the centrality of “textual concerns” is, of course, also a pointed claim for the value of literary criticism. In asserting a renewed theoretical attention to language, Anderson aims to show how textual and linguistic analysis can in fact answer historical-cultural questions, rather than remaining divorced from them. The centerpiece of her argument is a rethinking of metaphor and allegory (“continued, or moving, metaphor”) as the hinge between the physical world and abstract thinking.[8] Returning to the etymological roots of the term, Anderson puts pressure on the notion of metaphor (from the Greek, meta + pherein, “to transport through”) and its Latin synonym, translatio (from trans + latus, “carry across”), as crucial acts of transfer, transposition and translation between different contexts, dimensions, and realms. These figures can therefore chart a movement from the material to the conceptual and back again, bridging the conventional binaries of mind and matter, emblem and narrative, abstraction and history.[9] As a result, the gap between a self-enclosed formalism focused solely on abstract representation and a historicism invested in particular cultural conditions can be understood as dialectically linked rather than irrevocably separate. 

This is an important and innovative argument (and I will return to its details), but its real pay-off, I would argue, goes beyond the effort to heal a methodological breach. Anderson’s understanding of metaphorical translatio as an act of mediation between physical and abstract, language and the world, points us towards a reinterpretation of the post-war history of literary theory—a history that took the trope of allegory as a touchstone for articulating frequently divergent critical commitments. Allegory, “that clumsiest and most belabored of formal devices,” was the vehicle through which figures as different as Benjamin and De Man worked out their theoretical positions; it haunts the work of Marxist critics such as Jameson, inflects postcolonial thought, and transforms understandings of the postmodern.[10] To redefine the scope of allegory by placing it back in the company of metaphor and to claim a simultaneously practical and philosophic force for it is thus a bold intervention in a broader debate about the tasks of literary criticism and theory. In using the adjective “bold” here, I cannot but think of Anderson’s own rich analysis of Britomart amidst the allegories of Busirane’s House as an allegory for her own theoretical quest: like Spenser’s knight, she too steadily charts a pragmatic but transformative course as she carefully reads the representational excesses before her. And as this analogy suggests, to understand the significance of Anderson’s work on allegory and metaphor in terms of a history of contemporary literary theory and its discontents, we must take a step back and examine that House of Theory with its own reliefs and masques.

As the excitement of post-structuralism and various historicisms receded in the late 1990s, it was replaced by an almost apocalyptic expectation of a new paradigm that would somehow transcend the entrenched battles and binaries of twentieth-century critique. To some, who understood the history of theory as a dialectic between form and content, text and context, it seemed only right that a New Formalism should rise up once again; but that expectation sputtered as no single theory emerged to dominate. Others bemoaned the futility of reified theoretical battles fought in a jargon that few outside those specialist discourses could understand. Most of us, however, have soldiered on, more or less ignoring theoretical prognostication and using the paradigms and methods that seem appropriate for particular projects. Strategic avoidance has seemed a more useful stance to cultivate than theoretical affiliation; many of us have learned to develop an eclectic theoretical toolkit rather than espouse any particular theoretical cause.

And yet, the larger question about the future of critique continues to linger, with increasing assertions of a new “post-critical” moment that transcends the critical battlefields of the previous century. Frustrated with a persistent hermeneutics of suspicion and eager to get beyond it, a range of critics have called for a “positive aesthetics,” an engagement with the literary or art object that returns to the physical, material and affective realms from the increasing abstractions and reified ideologies associated with twentieth-century theory. But, as Hal Foster warns, writing of criticism in the context of contemporary art, “the post-critical condition is supposed to release us from our straitjackets (historical, theoretical, and political), yet for the most part it has abetted a relativism that has little to do with pluralism.”[11] This is, in large part, because “post-critical” promises to replace critique with a turn to an intimate, affective experience in the place of demystifying, abstract analysis have not been satisfactory. The call to transcend critique has seemed too much like another swing of the pendulum—this time, a rejection of mind for body, of rational analysis for sense impression.[12]

Anderson’s explorations in metaphor gain particular theoretical power when seen against this more ample context. Her work on allegory challenges the very need for theorizing such a rupture between the critical and the post-critical by suggesting how figural language effectively yokes together affective experience and abstractive thought. By emphasizing the link between the physical world and the conceptual work embedded in literary representation, she returns literary theory to its deepest roots—that is, to the central, thorny question of mimesis, the representation of reality—forcing us to grapple once more with the ancient philosophical and theoretical problem of how language, particularly figurative language, connects with the world.

II

To explore how allegory and metaphor fold back into questions of mimesis, let me offer a brief example, inspired by Anderson’s analyses, that illustrates the potentials for critical engagement opened by her work. Beginning in the early 1990s, as part of the History of Cartography Project, David Woodward produced a series of striking letter-press broadsheets called Literary Selections on Cartography, which sought to highlight evocations of cartographic themes in literary texts.

Figure 1. Printed by David Woodward and friends at the Juniper Press, Madison, Wisconsin. Used by permission of the History of Cartography Project, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The notably Early Modern sensibility of such a project, which explores connections between word and world, figural language and terrestrial mapping, finds an exemplary form in the broadsheet entitled, “Donne on Maps and the Microcosm: A Sampler” (fig. 1). Here, arranged around an image of the macrocosm/microcosm taken from the title page of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi maioris et minoris metaphysica (1618), are selections from Donne’s poetry and prose which link the “little world” of the human body to the vast “body” of the earth and cosmos. “The Good Morrow” offers a famous, much-discussed example (I cite the passage as reproduced in the broadsheet):

And now good morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one.
My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres<
Without sharp North, without declining West?

 

Even in its particular historical context, the poem dramatizes the workings of metaphor in Anderson’s terms—as translatio and proto-Hegelian sublation. The “little room” of the poem’s lovers is the poem itself as a stanza, a literary form, a place within language, a rhetorical topos.[13] But the particularity of the poem’s subjects and the space they inhabit also dissolves outward into an “everywhere” through the logic of analogy that looks ahead to the conceit of the macrocosm and microcosm (“Let us possess one world, each hath one, and is one”) and of eyes as globes. Here, as in other poems, metaphors work to bind the physical to the abstract, the material image to affective desire, particular self to generalized world. As the poem unfolds, the metaphors flow into each other, translating meaning from one domain to the next and performing a sublation, a “rising” that is also a partial “cancelling,” as metaphors simultaneously replace and augment each other.

This effect is further enhanced when we consider the poem in its broadsheet-context: its memorable metaphors now become an allegory for a new cartographic history that has sought to break with an emphasis on scientific absolutes. Donne’s metaphors now capture the imaginative flexibility and figural power of cartography itself as a mode of representation, a kind of mimesis. From this perspective, the layering of microcosm over macrocosm becomes a different kind of philosophic principle—no longer the assertion of cosmic harmony, but the privileging of an individual subjective gaze in the making of global knowledge. And yet, the traces of past meaning persist in the present configuration; to read the broadsheet with attention to these nuances is to recognize the simultaneous presence of Early Modern and postmodern significations. It is to encounter and enjoy the doubleness of allegory, the bifocality of metaphor’s conceptual labor.

In treating metaphor and allegory here as part of a continuum, I am following Anderson’s important reorientation of the two terms. In contrast to a long series of post-Romantic theorists who have systematically separated allegory from the supple workings of metaphor, confining it to the static category of emblem and abstraction, Anderson invokes Crassus in Cicero’s De oratore, who considers allegory as an extension of metaphor. Noting that it occurs, “in a chain of words linked together” [“ex pluribus [verbis] continuatis conectitur”], she insists on the temporal dimension of allegory, linking it firmly to narrative, and thus to history.[14] But metaphor, for Anderson, of which allegory is a particular type, already contains within itself a potential for historicity.

Drawing on the debate between Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida on the nature of “dead metaphors,” Anderson emphasizes the importance of the “etymological trace,” the persistence of a linguistic surplus, embedded within figurative language, which a word carries within itself across time. Translating Investments charts the arc of such metaphoric transfers through its two keywords—translation and investment—across a stunning range of cultural fields. “Translation,” as Anderson unpacks it, can refer to transforming fashions in clothing, to a soul transmigrating to heaven, or to many other kinds of economic and cultural crossings: to the transfer of knowledge or empire westward, of an ecclesiast from one jurisdiction to another, of a tradesman from one guild to another, or of money or property. “Investments” similarly refers to clothing, particularly the clothing of priests in worship services, to the conferring of clothing on royalty, nobility, officials, or priests as well conferring on them rights and privileges and powers (the vesting of property), and thus to our own contemporary usage of laying out and risking money for potential gain. Following these shape-shifting linguistic traces and their conceptual associations allows Anderson to draw together formalist and historicist concerns at the minute level of the word (as she reminds us, metaphor in the Early Modern period works at the level of the word rather than the sentence). But it also suggests how a history of the word can map onto a history of the world—and by extension, how textual criticism must not be divorced from pressing historical and cultural concerns and vice versa.

Beyond the practical demonstration of a critical approach that can unite seemingly oppositional critical foci, however, Anderson’s investigation of metaphor shades into a more profound exploration of the process of “conceptualization, abstraction and transcendence.”[15] The metaphoric freight of words carries, in tightly condensed form, a story about the movement from physical experience to philosophic abstraction—Anderson’s favorite examples include idea (from the Greek eidein, to see) and concept (from the Latin, con + capio, “to seize together”). Reverting to the notion of sublation, she suggests that metaphors expose their roots in materiality, which can “threaten the transcendence of thought built on abstractions derived from them,” a problem that underlies “broader issues of symbolism and conception.”[16] Abstraction requires a separation or partial cancellation of the particularities of historical context, an elevation out of the physical detail into the intangible universal, even as the etymological trace of metaphoric language holds it down. Anderson’s own image for this process is sculptural. She invokes Panofsky’s classic discussion of Michelangelo’s unfinished Captives, as “form … extricated from the recalcitrant stone,” emphasizing with him, the “straining emergence, the tortuous freeing,” while insisting that materiality “like the stony substance … can and does assert a claim too strong to be cancelled or broken.”[17] It is by attending to metaphor, she insists, that we can begin to answer the fundamental question—philosophic and aesthetic—of how to connect the physical to the abstract, language to world, allegory to history. Metaphorical language thus becomes “a constructive force in the historical development of cultural meaning” and a “powerfully creative … source of code-breaking conceptual power.”[18]

As moving metaphor, allegory expands these verbal considerations into narrative. Thus, in contrast to most twentieth-century theories of allegory, which grapple with Romantic denunciations of the term as mere abstraction severed from any organic connection to the physical world, Anderson recovers an earlier rhetorical tradition that connects the workings of allegory to figuration, temporality, and ultimately, to history. Allegory for Anderson is far from being a closed system of signs pointing to some singular prior meaning or, in Gordon Teskey’s formulation, “the imaginative expression of … the logocentric metaphysics of presence dominating physical thought in the West.”[19] Nor is it, as for Benjamin, a kind of fleeting, fragmentary experience, a translation of things into signs, born out of an apprehension of mortality and the transitoriness of the world.[20] It is, instead, a “process of thinking,” a capacious term, ultimately coextensive with fictionality and figuration and emblematic of their constructive power.[21] It includes, in her words, “elements [that] range from realistic improbability and disjunction to conspicuous mythic characterization, sustained structural significance, radical puns and thematic words, insistent reiteration of meaning, allegorical projection, interiorized landscapes, persistent allusion to the forms, images, and words of earlier literary texts, and in short, to a concern with meaning as meaning that is not naively abstracted from earth but is radically discontinuous with it.”[22] However, as Andrew Escobedo notes in an early review, it is almost impossible to separate allegory from meaning itself under this rubric, a point that Anderson herself acknowledges.[23] Yet this conflation, from my perspective, is usefully polemical and theoretically productive because it uses allegory to revisit the concept of mimesis itself.

To unpack allegory’s relation to mimesis, I want to turn to a text that Anderson mentions only in passing, but one that occupies an important place in the Medieval and Early Modern theorizations of allegory. In the Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, Macrobius follows Neoplatonists such as Porphyry and Proclus in distinguishing between two kinds of narrative fiction—the fabula and the narratio fabulosa. The former, understood as mere entertainment, is “merely gratifying to the ear” and not admissible in philosophy because it has no purchase on truth. The latter, however, is admissible under certain conditions as when “a decent, dignified conception of holy truths, with respectable events and characters, is presented beneath a modest veil of allegory.”[24] In the Macrobian version, access to truth and its mysteries—a kind of “real Real” in Anderson’s terms—are intentionally concealed behind a veil, which is the allegory:

[Philosophers] make use of fabulous narratives; not without a purpose, however, or merely to entertain, but because they realize that a frank, open exposition of herself is distasteful to Nature, who, just as she has withheld an understanding of herself from the uncouth senses of men by enveloping herself in variegated garments, has also desired to have her secrets handled by more prudent individuals through fabulous narratives. [25]

 

We see in this passage a seemingly un-Aristotelian meditation on mimesis coupled with an ancient version of the hermeneutics of suspicion. There can be no straightforwardly “mimetic” representation of Nature, because any such mirroring is complicated by her own desire to conceal herself. To make matters worse, this vision is itself based on a submerged metaphor that converts Nature (here, standing for the physical world) into an alluring woman, whose “variegated garments” both titillate and conceal—or perhaps, titillate by concealing—what lies underneath. Her hidden “secrets” thus combine physical and abstract qualities: they refer to the body beneath the veil, and also to “things sacred and incommunicable,” for the Latin evokes a specifically religious connotation for arcana.[26] This doubling enables Macrobius to identify allegory as the trope that mediates the relationship between poetry and philosophy, enabling a kind of double reference.

As an allegory for allegory, the image is tellingly both tangible and intangible, material body and unspeakable mystery; it suggests that we must never take at face value what we see, but must push beyond surfaces to find the truth about the world—in other words, we must “penetrate into the inner and further recesses of nature,” as Francis Bacon would write in the Novum Organum, echoing Macrobius.[27] The metaphoric reverberations here touch on allegory as a fundamental mode of representation as well as on allegoresis as a fundamental mode of interpretation. It thus suggests an inextricable connection between mimesis and epistemology, for the process of representing/interpreting becomes a way of knowing the world.

And yet, even in this formulation, allegory is also mimetic in a quite Aristotelian way: just as Nature envelops herself “in variegated garments” (vario rerum tegmine), so the representation of Nature is clothed in fabulous narratives that use the “veil of allegory” (figmentorum velamine). The insistent metaphor of covering (tegmen and velamen are almost synonymous in post-Augustan Latin) suggests a fundamental discontinuity between allegory and the physical world (“Nature”); it is referential, but in a thoroughly counterintuitive way. In its mimicking of Nature’s own behaviors, Macrobian allegory still obeys Hamlet’s (Aristotelian) injunction to the players: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”[28] In its disconnection with reality, allegory paradoxically shows us a truth that we could not have otherwise seen.

Neoplatonism aside, this account of allegory contains within it the term’s troubled critical history as well as Anderson’s revision of that history—and in this sense, I am reading Macrobius’s description here as a kind of extended, sublating metaphor—an allegory even—for criticism itself. For in the Commentary, allegory is both a kind of abstraction and a narrative device, it discovers (in the etymological sense of the Latin dis-cooperire, “to remove a covering”) the physical world even as it remains discontinuous with it. It reveals “reality” by practicing a kind of non-referential referentiality. Allegory is thus both radically removed from history, creating the kind of total system that Teskey discovers in both Spenser and Derrida, but it is also intimately connected to history, as Anderson claims through her careful reading of Auerbach—and it is with Anderson’s intertextual dialogue with Auerbach that I want to conclude.

III

“When mimesis becomes naively conceived realism, or photocopy,” writes Anderson, “allegory must correlatively become naively conceived … abstraction… . [In such a situation] mind separates from matter, psyche from flesh, concept from history.”[29] To posit a rupture between mimesis and allegory, then, is to create and sustain binaries, which are reductive and frozen, not admitting the fluidity of thought and imagination. To do so is also implicitly to privilege realism, as literary criticism since the nineteenth century has done, as an intellectually emancipatory mode that allows a unique access to the world (“matter … flesh … history”). In contrast, allegory looks obfuscating, mystifying and oppressive—a “dark conceit” that participates in the workings of ideology (“mind… . psyche … concept”). By recovering allegory’s crucial participation in mimesis, however, Anderson argues that we can transcend such binaries, for “a denial of allegorical thinking and allegorical form allows binaries to reign.”[30] To do this, she must wrestle with the legacy of Erich Auerbach, whose essay “Figura” remains the starting point for any discussion of figuration, and whose Mimesis is still, in the words of Edward Saïd, “perennially present” and possibly, “the greatest and most influential literary humanistic work of the past half century.”[31]

Auerbach is one of Anderson’s own key “allegorical intertexts,” and in reading Anderson reading Auerbach, we also come to see his classic works with new eyes. In “Figura,” through careful philological explication of the kind Anderson herself favors, Auerbach separates figural typology from allegory, arguing that while the former engages history in complex ways, the latter remains fundamentally divorced from it. This argument bears on Mimesis as well, since for Auerbach, typology falls within the scope of mimetic representation while allegory does not. Anderson’s commitment to the temporality and narrative dimension of allegory demands that she counter Auerbach’s position.[32]

This she does, modeling a need for a renewed textual engagement with the German philologist’s foundational work in literary theory. Through a patient close reading of key passages in “Figura,” Anderson observes that Auerbach sometimes conflates literary allegory (understood as narrative or dramatic form) with allegoresis (exegesis), as he “endeavors to balance history with interpretation, the reality of flesh and the worldly event with the metaphorizing mind.”[33] For Anderson, the figura—“the one [who] both fulfills and annuls the work of [its] predecessor”—performs the labor of metaphor as it connects different temporalities and domains through a kind of sublation. In this way, Auerbach’s understanding of figural typology as “a combination of ‘practical politics with creative poetic faith’” looks, on Anderson’s analysis, very much “like literary allegory.”[34]

While such an analysis successfully recuperates allegory, it elides the reasons for Auerbach’s avoidance of the trope in favor of the figura. Where the figura articulates a precise relation between two discrete events or persons in time, acknowledging their distinct particularity even as it places them in a continuous narrative, allegory for Auerbach had a vagueness in which those particularities dissolved into abstract, universalizing meaning. To privilege the figura was therefore to celebrate the particular and the contingent over the abstract and the universal—to resist overarching systems of meaning and to focus instead on individuals and events.[35] While this view distorts the way allegory functions as a form of representation (and Anderson is not the first to notice this problem), it highlights the ethical and theoretical problem of rupture between the physical and the abstract that Anderson too confronts. But where Auerbach sees a necessary choice, Anderson argues for a conjunction: in her hands, allegory becomes the hinge between the physical and the abstract, matter and form.

These fine distinctions between allegory and figura circle back to two matters with which I began this essay: the double vision enabled by literary criticism and the question about its future. To measure the distance between Auerbach’s and Anderson’s conclusions—and their respective preferences for one trope over the other—is also to traverse the history of literary theory in the post-war period. Writing from Istanbul in the midst of the genocides of the Second World War and conscious of the erasure of peoples and cultures on a hitherto unprecedented scale, Auerbach sought to resist universalizing abstractions. In recent years, this figure of the German-Jewish philologist in exile has become a sign of a courageous humanism that seeks to recover the value of particulars, to honor historical difference, and to preserve the traces of cultural otherness within language and narrative. On the other hand, writing at the beginning of a new millennium in a deeply fragmented world yearning for some theoretical and political unity, yet one justly suspicious of totalizing ideologies, Anderson seems to face a different challenge. Hers is, in effect, the challenge of “post-critical” interpretation.

If “allegory is the rhetorical figure corresponding to postmodernism,” returning to interrogate and to renew our understanding of the trope’s potentials is certainly one answer.[36] But Anderson’s attention to the problem of mimesis and to Auerbach’s thinking on the subject through a reappraisal of the conceptual work done by figurative language suggests to me at least two other possibilities. First is a revival of theoretical attention to literary texts and theoretical concepts as humanly made artifacts—to reconsider, in other words, their artifactuality as a key to their interpretation. To do so would be to combine aesthetic and historical concerns, to look at and around the textual object and not just through it or beneath it.[37] This would amount to a re-examination of the Viconian roots of Auerbach’s method and a teasing out of its implications for own attitudes towards literature and art as particular kinds of cultural artifacts.[38] Vico’s historicism embraced a “poetic epistemology” that was famously predicated on the belief that “verum et factum convertuntur” (“the true and the made are interchangeable”)—we can only truly understand what we have made.[39] Full knowledge of any thing involves discovering how it came to be what it is as a product of human action.[40] This means that we must, once again, take poiesis, the act of making, as a worthwhile subject of study, understanding it not (only) in abstract Romantic terms, but also as a product of imitatio and translatio—as labor and craftsmanship as well as inspiration and genius.

Second—and consequently—a post-critical interpretive practice would need to take on board and rethink seriously the much-abused notion of humanism itself. In his final, posthumously published collection of essays, Edward Said argues for and celebrates this humanist ideal at the heart of literary criticism, transforming Auerbach’s work and legacy into an allegory for its importance.[41] But this preoccupation, which marks many of his final essays, has caused much critical consternation.[42] How and why did the man who famously disclosed the collusion of humanism and imperialism in Orientalism go back to this particular conceptual relic of European hegemony? Or more to the point, why did he never give it up? The question is of particular urgency for students of the Renaissance who think of “their” period as the one which invented the term, or at least, theorized it as such.

In a perceptive essay on “Saidian Humanism,” Emily Apter notes the many facets of humanism which, for Said, seem to have survived the compromise with imperialism: “emancipatory humanism, the ethics of coexistence, figural paradigms of ontogenesis in world-historical forms of culture, and the ideal of translatio as portal to a universal or sacred language.”[43] It is telling that at the time of his death in 2003, Said saw the future of criticism in a return to philology and humanism that could simultaneously affirm connection even as it acknowledged difference. This is the kind of interpretive practice that Anderson might associate with the “both/and” structure of metaphor. It affirms, as the Renaissance humanists did, the self-conscious, creative and emancipatory potential of homo faber—man the maker—even as it recognizes the darker sides of that potential. But, of course, to call for such a post-critical interpretation is, inevitably, to look backward. And if this sounds like Poliziano’s attitude towards Cicero, it is no coincidence—to move forward, we must simultaneously break and affirm our relationship to the past.

Ayesha Ramachandran
Yale University

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