Allegory and Violence.

Gordon Teskey. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. $35. ISBN: 0-8014-2995-1.

Gordon Teskey takes as his framework the general history of creative allegory, still held by many scholars and assumed in C. S. Lewis's influential study, The Allegory of Love. In this schema allegory began at the end of the antique period and ended in the eighteenth century. Teskey himself concentrates on its closing phases, roughly the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. He argues that allegory in the Renaissance became secularized and served state power. Each state saw itself as a cosmos but was in competition with other states which saw themselves in the same way. For this purpose states used the pagan gods, who experienced a brief revival and appeared frequently in fresco cycles. Christian symbols were not used, since they suggested medieval power sources like the papacy. At the same time the Renaissance was a period of transition from the earlier conception of allegory as a form of contemplation, based on the analogy between the microcosm and macrocosm, to an instrumental use for the purposes of instruction. The eighteenth century carried this trend to a logical conclusion. If allegory educates, it must be clear and specific. Here Teskey provides some of his best material, discussing the Abbe Dubos's theory of allegory and illustrating points through The Botanic Garden of Erasmus Darwin, in which the verses illustrate the scientific notes rather than the commentary serving the poetry. Teskey also assumes that it is was the eighteenth century which turned allegory into a genre. Critics and writers identified allegory with personification fiction; and, as Teskey further argues, since the history of allegory tends to be confused with the history of the West, it was appropriate that the Enlightenment invented literary history at the same time. From this conjunction came the historical schema Teskey presupposes, a history of fictions which deploy numerous personifications from Prudentius's Psychomachia through the Roman de la rose to The Faerie Queene. Teskey's special contribution is to subject this thinking and its texts to a more modern philosophical evaluation. He takes over Nietzsche's analysis of the gods in The Birth of Tragedy with help from those who worked in his tradition, notably Heidegger and DeMan. Teskey gets around the fact that Nietzsche in The Birth ruled the Renaissance out of his analysis, by following the lead of Angus Fletcher. Since personifications replaced the old gods, once the Roman Empire became Christian, these personifications inherited from the gods something of their energy and vitality. Thus adapted, Nietzsche allows Teskey to deconstruct The Mutabilitie Cantos, his one extended analysis of a text and a spectacular climax for his book.

At the same time Teskey is aware that this standard schema, on which his analysis depends, does not fit the tradition very well, and he spends considerable time defending it. He explains away the fact that Renaissance and Enlightenment allegory differ so radically as a shift rather in emphasis within the definition. Spenser stresses narrative over personification; Samuel Johnson does the reverse. To do so, however, Teskey must ignore Jerusalem Delivered, though he cites Tasso's allegorical theory. The Jerusalem lacks personifications and so does not fit the definition. It gets more problematic in the Middle Ages, since so much of its allegory, like the Vulgate Quest of the Holy Grail and the Divine Comedy, also lacks personifications. For Dante, at least, Teskey mounts a special defence and mentions the pageants at the end of the Purgatory but later has to admit the Comedy does not fit the genre very well. Most problematic of all is the classical period. Since Teskey denies that pagan antiquity produced creative allegories, he must explain away the personifications in their stories, and he goes through all of them in Homer, ignoring the fact that classical commentators concentrated rather on Homer's gods and barely discussed personifications like the Prayers in Iliad 9. The commentators did so because they did not define allegory as personification fiction, but then who did prior to the eighteenth century? They can appear in some works like The Faerie Queene but are not necessary to the older conception of allegory, which is not generic, as Teskey knows. Teskey himself has an excellent potential explanation for their presence in Spenser. They are aids to help the audience think along with the poet's story.

Teskey has written a thoughtful meditation with wonderful insights and wide-ranging analyses but all based on the old schema, and he is good enough to know it needs endless defence, one he must make because without the personifications he cannot apply his Nietzschean analysis and escape the charge of anachronism. But he doth protest too much. The old scheme simply does not fit the data. In this respect we need not a new analysis but a new history.

MICHAEL MURRIN University of Chicago