Notes on Allegory

The evidence base for

allegorical interpretation?
Allegory -- from the Greek, allos, "other" and agoreuein,
"to speak in public" -- figuratively unites two orders,
one of which is shown and the other of which is
kept out of view, establishing relationships of
resemblance between them such that the reader or
spectator may construe meaning over and above
the literal. Allegory stages the relationship between
personal and political, private and public, which is often
central to the production of political meaning in art.
[Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 182]
• Film allegory paradoxically requires spectators
to take up a particular vantage point from
which a story "kept out of view" (to use
Page's words) can clearly be seen.

• As Ismail Xavier writes in Allegories of

Underdevelopment, in the case of allegory, it is
a particular 'narrative texture [that] places
the spectator in [this] analytical
posture' (my emphasis).

[Ismail Xavier, Allegories of Underdevelopment (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 16.]
This 'texture' -- including repeated or
repetitious story-elements, such as,
sometimes, seemingly gratuitous
features of characterisation, dialogue,
etc. -- eventually provokes in the
spectator the question "why are you
telling me that when you are
supposed to be (necessarily and
literally) telling me this (direct)
story?"
• The salience of the elements and their
patterning, together with their hermeneutic
journey from 'unnecessary' to 'necessary',
are essential in the triggering of "our
operations of decoding".

• This latter phrase comes from cultural

theorist Fredric Jameson. In his many
discussions of allegory, Jameson makes
clear that allegorical reading is a kind of
pattern recognition, involving our
imaginative capacities.
For Jameson, political and historical facts and realities
external to films find themselves

inscribed within the internal intrinsic experience of the

film in what Sartre in a suggestive and too-little known
concept in his Psychology of Imagination calls the
analogon: that structural nexus in our reading or
viewing experience, in our operations of decoding or
aesthetic reception, which can then do double duty and
stand as the substitute and the representative within
the aesthetic object of a phenomenon on the outside
which cannot in the very nature of things be 'rendered'
directly.
[Fredric Jameson, 'Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political
Film', College English, Vol. 38, No. 8, Mass Culture, Political Consciousness and English Studies (Apr.,
1977), pp. 843-859, p. 858]
• Allegorical recognition works best when a
film's patterns of allusiveness (Jameson's
'structural nexus') offer ‘clear configurations
for the essential pieces of its game';
• when there's a 'graphic isolation of the
[allegorical] elements put into relation’, as
Xavier again puts it (Xavier: 20):
• 'The greater the pedagogic impulse of the
allegory, the more unmistakable is [the
signalling]' (Xavier: 16).

["Notes on Allegory" by Catherine Grant, 2011]