Allegorical Violence

ANY “INTERPRETATION that goes against the text's manifest intenttions”, be it a critic's or the author's own, could be said to ‘do violence’ to the text it comments on. Ovid's medieval allegoriser Pierre Bersuire confesses that violence, in likening his extraction of Christian meaning from the pagan poet to squeezing oil from a stone. Coleridge, objecting to the imposition of an allegorical design on any good narrative, goes so far as to speak of it as a criminal offence, “the most decisive verdict against” it being “Tasso's own account of what he would have the reader understand by the persons and events of his Jerusalem”, since, “Apollo be praised! not a thought like it would ever enter of its own accord into any mortal mind”. And modern Dante critic Charles Singleton similarly employs the language of criminal violence, in holding that the effect of the allegorical scheme in the Convivio is “to rob the ‘donna pietosa’ of the Vita Nuova of all real existence.” It would be easy, too, to put the foregoing discussion of the letter to Raleigh into such terms, saying for example that its simplistic rendering of The Faerie Queene's plot, and of its heroes' moral standing, ‘robs’ the story and its chief characters of the complexity they have in the poem itself.

But it is one thing to say that allegorical readings can often, in such a metaphorical sense, ‘do violence’ to their texts; another to observe, as do several recent studies, that the effect on a narrative of an author's reading it allegorically can be the occurrence of literal violence within the narrative itself.