Posted By BillHeise on June 14, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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I soon learned in graduate school that I was more interested in allegory than I was interested in the failing symbol. As such, I tended to read books that no one else was reading, and I took those books very seriously as expressions of serious philosophical matters.

This is not the way that CS Lewis had written about allegory at the height of Modernism.

I labor the antithesis [between allegory and symbol] because ardent but uncorrected lovers of medieval poetry are easily tempted to forget it not unnaturally they prefer simple to allegory; and when allegory pleases them, they are therefore anxious to pretend that is not allegory but symbol. (The Allegory of Love 46-47)

Lewis labors to build up the walls between allegory and symbol. But in my view, these walls were at best artificial and at worst actually harmful to the project of figuring out what was going on in allegory. Lewis had walled off the labor of looking at medieval works directly in favor of a meta-critical perspective which robbed us of the work as it is in favor of the work as we wanted it to be. This transformed our perspective from the medieval view of the world to the more satisfying (to us) Modern view.

This shift in perspective from the world to the meta-world was justified by the fact that the medieval thinker did not have any justification for his belief that he could bridge the gap on faith alone. There was, in the words of more than one modern thinker, “a gulf of reference.” We knew it on account of the Fall brought on by the advent of science; the medieval thinker was unaware of the gap and struggled on in ignorance of faith.

This was done (systematically in my experience) at the expense of taking the medieval thinker seriously on his own terms. Medieval literature was simply something we needed to get closer to the sources to understand, but it had nothing to teach us wise moderns in our wise modern world. Source criticism grew up as a way of explaining how anyone could have ever believed such absurd nonsense. The ephemeral barrier between the world of being and becoming was reerected by the Moderns between the modern critic and the medieval text.

I didn’t look at it that way. I reasoned, that the medieval thinkers who were using logic and reason were smart men, at least as smart as me. They were not looking at allegory from a modern perspective which had dismissed “Aristotelian jargon” as a “convenient academic refuge” (Robertson Preface to Chaucer 312). This was a dodge, as far as I was concerned. If they had given so much thought for so long to writing long poems in their attempts to reconcile (I use Plato’s words here) the world of Becoming to the world of Being, I should pay attention to the ins and outs of their work, rather than dismissing them out of hand.

This is why I started reading (and actually enjoying) some of the allegorical texts that nobody else in academia was paying any attention to. Of all the books I ever read in my life, the most disturbing to my professors was my love of Guillaume de Lorris’ and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose.

I was introduced to this poem at Northern Illinois University, where I had the privilege of studying with Sylvia Huot, who later went on to become a professor at Cambridge University in England. She introduced me to the criticism of D. W. Robertson, Jr. and taught me to be suspicious of it. Robertson had managed to find allegory as a once-great-now-forgotten bridge between the Modern worldview and the act of faith. We, as moderns, could never follow the medieval thinker into his complete faith-based view the world, but he had substituted in allegorical point of view in reading, nevertheless. We were to rise above the actual text to the level of configuring the text within its culture. His major work was his Preface to Chaucer. Written in 1962, the year that I was born, it had enormous effect on world of medieval criticism, far launched a whole series of encyclopedias which attempted to nail down the various points of view that one could have had in the Middle Ages. Without such a source, people believed that the point of view was “unattested.” This became my problem when I substituted the modern romantic point of view for the medieval argument about allegory.

This made me more of a suspect to my professors, who agreed that I was a smart man, but did not agree that I had managed to fulfill their expectations. Without a medieval source, I could not have managed to place my readings in a medieval universe. I was simply making the mistake of substituting modern expectations for medieval expectations. I needed to be corrected.

In my opinion, I was appealing to an underlying human condition in a world which was fully devoted to cultural historicism. This practice of cultural historicism tended to diminish, if not efface entirely, the similarities between cultures. Where cultures were similar, we were supposed to look for the various cultural reasons for their difference.

By 1994, when I was writing my dissertation, I recognized that a series of thinkers who styled themselves The New Medievalists, had arisen who are impatient with the inability of the moderns to close the gap between being and becoming in their thought. Relying on the works of Derrida, they thought that words were defined in the system by reference, not to the logocentric and stable locus of being, but only in reference to other words. They had, in other words, located an Ovidian horizontal position in the universe as opposed to the failed Modern search for stable entities in a vertically constructed universe.

At the same time they were not thinking about the medieval poem as having anything to teach them. After all, we were moderns or postmoderns. It was this construction that I would attack after I got out of graduate school.

The Romance of the Rose is a filthy poem. Its most famous episode comes when the character of Reason waylays the character known as The Lover–it’s in allegorical poem, of course, so people don’t have actual names. Reason corrects The Lover, telling him that he should follow her, and not his corrupting heart, which has led him to the pool of Narcissus (an Ovid reference for those who do not know).

In my opinion, Reason is not adequate to the task of guiding The Lover out of his narcissistic state. But the critical consensus was that Reason was at the top of the hierarchy of the world and that The Lover had managed to forgo the language of reason for the language of a more Ovidian nature and needed to be corrected. He was being too literal. She was urging him to read allegorically.

But, in fact, that was a misreading of the text. When The Lover gets involved in an argument about the language of the euphemism “coilles,” which means in modern-day English “balls” or “testicles.” Reason does not object to The Lover use of “balls.” She objects that he is using them directly and not as a euphemism for what God really meant when he created “balls.” She wants to have the lover use his “balls” literally, by which she means for the perpetuation of the species, and not for any sort of fun or enjoyment. Of course, in my lowly opinion, God had created “balls” for people to use, and it was not that he wanted people to use their “balls” only for the perpetuation of the species. He wanted people to use their “balls” to create offspring. By stepping away from the direct view of the universe had by the individual Lover to the view of the universe had by Reason, I believe that Reason was getting in her own way. You could not perpetuate the species without sex. There has to be an element of enjoyment in sex. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I was out of graduate school that I managed to figure out why this was [see my post #14 on Boethius].

Anyway, I went on about this for some night 50 or 60 pages in my dissertation. It’s still one of my favorite poems, although I recommend it more as a poem to be read for answers than as a poem to be read for fun.

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