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New literary history, 2017-01, Vol.48 (1), p.171-192
Ort / Verlag
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2017
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Project MUSE
Beschreibungen/Notizen
To greet a gallant soldier with the words "Behold our Lion" is to use an allegorical expression, for there is nothing intrinsic to the one that makes it correspond to the other, and clearly many features of lions-four legs, fur, claws, and so on-have nothing whatsoever to do with either gallantry or soldiering.6 Thus, there is always something instrumental, mechanistic, and arbitrary in the attempt to render the abstract into concrete form, and the effectiveness of one image in corresponding to an idea is dependent upon its correlation with other images and the correspondences that they assert.7 Allegory's substitutions-a lion standing in for a soldier-need to be made out and justified by the work itself, and the narrative unfolding of allegory always doubles as an argument for its own coherence. "Wearing its factitiousness on its sleeve," it is a notoriously didactic, managed, and controlled form, and it was eschewed by the Romantics accordingly.12 The symbol, on the other hand, was lauded as the very essence of Romantic art and thought.\n With that, Romantic history, as befits narratives culminating in empire and modernity, registered a world view that placed new significance on absent presences-faroff power structures and invisible impulses.87 Indeed, with the symbol ("great individuals") and the allegory ("natural laws"), abstraction uncannily leads us straight to the reification of history that Georg Lukács described.88 The Great Man and progress were foretastes of the "vast impersonal forces" that would haunt the modern mind.