allegory

One of my friends has been writing her undergraduate art history thesis about allegory, and the more I have learned about this project, the more upset I get and the more clearly I can define my own critical goals (in opposition).

Let us grant: 1) the validity of Freud's discoveries in psychoanalysis. 2) the existence of "real" allegories-- in renaissance painting, Dante's DIVINE COMEDY, etc. 3) "postmodernism."

In Freud's INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS (yes, I am capitalizing all book titles now), he strongly refutes the notion, still preserved in our mainstream ideas of both dream-interpretation and Freud, of the dream-book, a kind of dream dictionary. This is, of course, precisely *not* what Freud's book is. In such a book, water would "mean" desire, dreams of being naked would "mean" you are concerned about security, etc. etc. This is what Freud warns against-- a one-to-one correlation between a dream-event and a meaning (a premonition of what will happen, for example). What Freud shows us is how dreams are wish fulfillments that are not apparent as such. The whole book is full of elaborate interpretative contortions to show how absurd, contradictory, seemingly-irrelevant dreams in fact show us our desires-- through the medium of their "revisions" (the "dream work") and in fact their reception and re-telling. The meaning of this is that the latent content is not to be found in interpretation from the manifest content by a simple decoding of the elements. What gets in the way is 1) secondary revisions, 2) overdetermination, 3) transference in the analytic situation, and 4) the context (of the psychic past but also of the language that tells it). The unconscious (in a Lacanian formulation) is "what *will have been* spoken" in a dream. This means, the dream, like the Freudian slip, comes out at any opportunity, and if it is not one thing, it will come out in another. The dream is no exception. I think we all know what a Freudian slip is, so it will be helpful to think of a dream in the same way-- it "comes out" in the telling.

All of this means, there is no dream book--there is too much interference that has to be worked out. This explains two famous psychoanalytic aphorisms: Lacan's "There is no metalanguage" (ie: a dreambook), and Freud's "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" (meaning relies on more than just symbolism, there is no guarantee that a cigar will always (or only) mean "penis").

This guarantee of meaning, if I have taken a while to get to it, what allegory intends. The OED definition is "Description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance." So, a dream about driving through a tunnel would really be a dream about having sex. One thing stands in for the other, as long as the resemblence is "apt" enough to be decoded. This, I think, is the philistine understanding of all criticism: XXXXX is really about YYYYY. I would say, this isn't even what we call "meaning." If I were to allegorize Super Bowl xxxii as a medieval tragedy, once everything was decoded back out to the events of Super Bowl xxxii, there still wouldn't be a meaning--just a football game. This method can also be forced on just about anything. If you want to make THE GLASS MENAGERIE be about the recording of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, you could probably write the world's worst paper proving that.

This, of course, is not advisable. Nor is it criticism.

Hence my dismay at the idea that postmodern art (or say, le nouveau roman) can be taken as "allegorical" because it is "meta." For one, we already have the word "meta," so there is no need to drag in a perfectly good word like "allegorical" to explain something we already have a word for. Secondly, the justification for this seems to be that these works are "allegorical" because their meaning is about their failure to represent/capture meaning/etc. So, calling attention to the inadequacy of the frame, how the frame is contained within the subject, makes the works...allegorical.

Please note that this makes no sense. For one, this is not a new idea. Art has always been doing this. Ditto, literature. Look at fucking Hamlet, for Christ's sake: "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba!" Secondly, it makes the *subject* under the guise of another *subject* something like this: failure of mimesis, flux of meaning, temporality, artificiality of representation under the guise of a painting, sculpture, etc. . So, in the way that THE WIZARD OF OZ warns about the folly of William Jennings Bryant's economic program (see footnote to this post), although some may say that is really a parable--in this way, all "meta" art would be demonstrating/representing the subject "failure of mimesis" under the guise of another subject. And here I say, this is actually just what "meaning" is---because failure of mimesis is an inappropriate subject for allegory.

The confusion, I believe, arises in that, by commenting on the existence of shifting meanings, one is believed to have introduced the elements of time and multiple themes necessary for an allegory--because the allegorical "subject" is necessarily represented either as a series of events (a narrative subject) and/or the presence of numerous elements (as in a mannerist allegorical painting).

My point here is: IN FACT, ONE HAS ONLY THEMATIZED TEMPORALITY AND MULTIPLICITY. The allegorical "subject" occurs over time and has multiple themes---whereas the "meta" artwork only makes reference to this single, unchanging notion.

"Real" allegory works like this: A number of elements/narrative in the artwork--->stand in for--->a number of elements/narrative in the true subject.
To see the meta artwork as allegory is to say: X artwork ---->Allegorizes--->the multiplicity of meanings and play of time in representation.
BUT, all this is really doing is this: X artwork--->THEMATIZES---> the single theme of multiplicity and temporality.

That is to say, the subjects here are not parallel. All you have is a theme-- a representation, if you will. And this makes meta artwork seem very boring, which I don't see that it need be.


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WIZARD OF OZ:
Oz is short for ounce, the measure for gold and silver.

Dorothy, hailing from Kansas, represents the commoner.

The Tin Woodsman is the industrial worker, rusted as solid as the factories shut down in the 1893 depression. The Scarecrow is the farmer who apparently doesn’t have the wit to understand his situation or his political interests. The Cowardly Lion is Bryan himself; who had a loud roar but little political power.

The Good Witches represent the magical potential of the people of the North and the South.