The Allegory of Love

Well, my summer has most definitely been a summer break. Anyhow.

C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love. 1936. Amazing what a memory will conjure up.

This book is a tour de force through the history of allegory, starting about as early as it could (Greek and Roman writings) and continuing through Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

There are probably three centers where the book is of key importance or interest to me. The first is in its focused study of The Romance of the Rose. Here, Lewis is best at demystifying the process of allegory. Instead of looking at it as some sort of double-step, where an extra veil is drawn on one's eyes or an extra level of interpretation is required (as with a symbol), I should read working allegory as a story that functions on two levels of action - what literally happens, and what is represented by the action. The personifications are real versions of abstract qualities. For The Romance of the Rose, the characters can be regarded as figures of the lover, figures of the loved, or figures of both. Fair Welcome is a figure of the loved, as is the castle itself, and the other people there. My interest in Fair Welcome is partially relieved and partially revitalized. It isn't significant that the lover treats with Fair Welcome as a substitute for the Rose, because Fair Welcome is a part of that loved woman. I still think there is something going on with gender assignation, but it isn't as simple as, to use a quote I've overheard, "There's something gay going on there."

Two is the interstitial period, and particularly figures like Chaucer and Langland that tend to fill the middle line of allegory, where it develops and gets adapted to other genres (like the romance), or where it is developed enough to become a mere veneer for other work (rather like the 19th century Gothic architecture as compared to its 12th century roots). One point that is laughable here - how Lewis judges poems and poetry. Besides his other humorous disparagements and praises, he frequently draws the distinction between a poet and poetry (from Shelley or Wordsworth, for instance?). I think he struggles here with a form of the intentional fallacy that would soon emerge. What is best - a poet that realizes his talents and produces the greatest art intentionally, for intended meaning is more poignant (if not more meaningful) than accidental meaning. What many poets (and non-poets, in his parlance) produce - poetry, that which can delight and excite both the intellect and its sentiments, which has rhythm, structure, and intangible ectasy. I think I could learn from him how to judge quality in writing. At the same time, I see how silly such pursuits sound now. This is a day where we demonstrate the worth of a text through more subdued means. (I realized that the spots I observed were between poems and poetry, but both differences abound. His bias in the latter case is between what qualifies a full poem structurally, and the bits that strike him as good in any work.)

He reads the poets quite well, and I'll have to return to him when I'm done with Chaucer. He also gives a brief travel through the 15th century that is more a light skip, but which may be useful for summaries when I don't want to read a 24,000 line poem once, let alone twice.

Three is The Faerie Queene. He provides a diligent allegorical reading for each book, while being careful to distinguish those elements that do not cleanly fit his allegorical reading well. For Lewis, there is an allegorical core to every book, and then the spiraling adventures that can serve as examples or exemplars of the central theme but which cannot be read in the allegorical manner - they are fantasy, or romance, without much superstructure. Mutabilitie is the core without the dressings. Lewis is also good at distinguishing between the Italian epic tradition, with works like Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where Spenser borrows obviously in great volume, and the English allegorical tradition, from which Spenser borrows a less provable mood and intention.

My discussion thus far must include one other factor, the role of courtly love. He traces that through ancient writing like Ovid, through early medieval Latin texts, and to Andreas Capellanus. Helen Cooper's criticism of Lewis here is fresh in my mind, of how he hallowed Andreas's exemplification of adulterous love as a rule by which to read other books by. I think, contrary to Lewis and with Cooper, that love can (and did) happen frequently in marriage in the romantic tradition, so that FQ, with its frequent marriages and the figure of amorous marriage, isn't the glorious exceptional endpoint to courtly love's common practice. At the same time, Lewis chose his texts well, and there seem to be these two parallel discourses of love, depending on whether one is reverent of or irreverent of marriage. Certainly marriage is no necessity for love, but the lack of it is not a necessity either.

Now for my notes:
(116) - Good explanation of allegory - the two realms of action here are the inner and the outer world. If I can distinguish between the two using the significatio, I can read the allegory.
(140) - The most relevant treatment of Fair Welcome in RotR. He depicts the breakdown in allegory, where Fair Welcome is treated as a young woman by the Old Woman, rather than a young bachelor as he appears. Lewis, typically, attributes this slip to clumsiness.
(142, 222, prior) typical places where poem/poetry dichotomy occur.
(163) A still relevant critique of Chaucerian study - we look too much to the "mocking" Chaucer, and not the serious Chaucer.
(185) He reads Criseyde spot-on here. Criseyde is driven by fear from the start, and seeks above all protection. All her actions can be read in this way, including her betrayal of Troilus.This makes her out to be a sympathetic character, one who ultimately fails the test of courtly love but gains pardon in a court of human emotion.
(220) tergiversation - the act of turning one's back on another.
(233-4) Lewis can only justify studying the 15th century by looking forward, though at points he shows that medievalist glint of really liking what he reads.
(247) He uses Occam's razor to determine that the author of a poem is a woman because the speaker is. While such a process is rather generous, it lies uneasily with me, because women will frequently write narratives for men (Marie de France the first to leap to mind), and men will write in women's voices (The Earl of Surrey the first to mind this time.) I suppose, if one must use an author's gender for any purpose, it is better that it is female?
(270) - Ah, this point made me wonder about age and bad intentions and gender. That's really all I have to say - why are aged women so often the evil party?
(297) Here's where the italian epic (in reference to FQ) comes up.