Allegoresis and the Eclipse of the Extraordinary
By Gabriel Hartley
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson
This semester it struck me, for the first time ever, as I was teaching “The Lady of
Shalott” in my Introduction to Poetry and Drama class that very few readers ever actually read
the poem. Of course, everyone reads the poem in one way or another, but what I mean here is
that perhaps no one reads the poem for what it actually says. What people do read is a poem
about the domestic entrapment of women during the Victorian Age; or perhaps they read a poem
about the profanation of a world subject to the rules and regulations of a quickly transforming
capitalist commodity culture; or they read a poem written as an allegory for the plight of the
artist in an age of crass materialism.
But it seems possible to me, now that I think about it, that nobody—at least nobody
anymore—reads a poem about “the fairy / Lady of Shalott” who, constantly singing under the
weight of a curse, “weaves by night and day / A magic web with colours gay” by means of which
she captures the mirrored shadows of the comings and goings of the people outside her tower
window on their way to and from Camelot. We tend not, in other words, to read “The Lady of
Shalott” as a poem about a magical being who “still delights / To weave the mirror’s magic
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sights” as she is engaged in a magical transformation of the world around her by means of her
magic mirror and her magic web. I would suggest that it is we, poor readers, who are implicated
in the tragic onset of the curse upon the Lady of Shalott as expressed in the words of my
epigraph:
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
I would suggest, that is, that in a world divested of magic, of the extraordinary, it is we who have
lost the power of the web and mirror.
What I am suggesting, of course, is that in our tendency to read such magical accounts as
allegories of this or that particular social condition, we cut ourselves off from the enchantment of
the world around us and the various ways in which such enchantment is conveyed in literature
and the other arts. True, the condition of women in England during the Victorian Age was, by
modern standards (if not necessarily by modern reality), a dismal affair. True, the effect of the
commodification of everyday life meant the loss of the magic of our relationship with our
environment. True, in an increasingly materialistic and “scientific” culture where such things as
fairy ladies and mysterious webs and mirrors no longer weave us into their magic, then such a
poetic tale must strike us as a bit of fanciful child’s play, Arthurian nostalgia, or anachronistic
spiritualism. Such a tale is altogether too “poetic,” in the dismissive sense of the word, to even
register with us as a possible content of the poem to be taken seriously. And so all we have left
as we pass this by, as a result, is our drive to read such things as allegory.
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What we are left with, I will argue, is the drive to allegoresis as a defense mechanism
against the threat of the markings of magic apparently seducing us away from our rationalistic
hold on material reality. For who could, after all, take seriously the idea that Tennyson’s poem is
really about a fairy lady, her magic, and the curse that undoes her? Allegoresis—the
interpretation of various communicative experiences as allegory, for which the surface
impression is assumed to serve simply as a vehicle for some deeper message—all too often steers
us away from elements in the immediate layer of the communicative experience that strike us as
altogether too trivial or fantastic for us to take seriously. And yet there might be moments when
the surface is in fact the deeper layer that has something truly profound to convey to us.
To clarify, I am not here arguing that literary (and other) works do not have allegorical
dimensions, intended or not, nor that we should refrain from interpreting poems (and other
objects of study) in the light of various external concerns and methodologies, as various critical
methods often lead us to do. I will later in this essay argue that our attention should rightly be on
all of the multiple registers of the object of study, including the literal level of those works that
invoke what would normally be called the fantastic—what I will instead refer to as the
extraordinary. The fact that fairies, magicians, witches, vampires, angels, goblins, or extraterrestrials show up in a work should not automatically lead us to assign the realities behind such
narratives or references to the realm of the fantastic or the imaginary. Yet this is what almost
every reader will inevitably do, and especially those readers—which is my main point—who
have been schooled in academic literary, sociological, or psychological criticism. “There is no
such thing as fairies, after all, so we have no choice but to read the poem allegorically.” In such
cases, then, the job of academic study is to “demythologize” such magical referents, to relegate
them to the genres of Fantasy, Horror, or Science Fiction, at which point these topics can be
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taken seriously in their “proper” allegorical contexts: “‘The Lady of Shalott’ is an allegory for
[insert any other possible interpretation other than the one explicitly drawn for us in the
poem]”—for there is no way on earth that the poem can really be about a magical fairy lady
locked away from the world of human activity and the consequences of her attempt to join that
human world.
Nor am I arguing, moreover, that authors of works dealing with fairies all actually believe
in the existence of such beings and wish to highlight the effects of our interactions with them,
although some authors certainly do believe such to be the case. I am arguing, instead, that the
“literal” reading of a work inhabited by fairies, ghosts, or Martians might, in fact, lead to far
more liberating and expansive understandings of the multidimensional nature of reality and the
expanded place of humans within that multidimensional cosmos than typical social or
psychological allegories would tend to do. What might we learn about ourselves if we take
seriously the idea that we inhabit this planet and this universe with other extra-human beings?
What might we be able to do in a world where the extraordinary is taken seriously? What
magical being might we ourselves, in fact, be? If we can hold off the impulse to allegorize every
apparently far-fetched topic we come across, we might then allow ourselves to let the light of the
extraordinary cast off the eclipsing effects of allegoresis.
Sex in the Bible and Other Outrages
As it turns out, during the week following our reading of “The Lady of Shalott” and other
magical ballads, I had my students read various translations of the Biblical book “Song of
Songs,” reportedly written by the Biblical King Solomon (an attribution which itself could
already be allegorical). Here we have another work that more often than not tends to be read as
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allegory. In it we read “Your waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies; Your breasts are like
two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle” and, perhaps even more provocative:
Let us go early to the vineyards
to see if the vines have budded,
if their blossoms have opened, and if the pomegranates are
in bloom—there I will give you my love.
Allegorical readings of the book have been around for a few thousand years now, many driven
by the same impulse: to explain what a work of erotic love poetry might really mean in the
context of a holy work such as the Bible. For we certainly must not be expected to take these
depictions of sexual longing and fruition literally! While some scholars and Biblical exegetes do
in fact argue for a literal reading of the “Song of Songs,” explaining that human sexuality is a
gift from God that we should rightly celebrate, most interpretations argue instead that the book
represents the loving nature of the relationship between God and His people. In fact, according to
some interpretations such as those by kabbalists, the key to understanding the Song of Songs is
to see the ways it tunes us into the multiple levels of reality:
In simple terms, the kabbalistic view is essentially this: The love in the Song of
Songs represents the longing of creation for its Creator, the longing of worlds
detached and distant from their origin to return and reunite with their Maker.
However, for our purposes we must emphasize that for kabbalists, that which
takes place in the supernal realms is reflected in (or, casts a shadow upon) the
events of our world. The reflection is revealed in multiple stages and by various
means. Thus, we may conclude, a variety of hermeneutics of the Song of Songs
are possible: The literal interpretation, describing the love between a man and
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woman; the midrashic, referring to God’s love for his people; the hermeneutic
which speaks of the devout’s love for God; the mystical interpretation, which is
about the love that permeates all of creation. For kabbalists, each hermeneutic
points to the same essential idea, even if revealed in a variety of ways and in
different stages.
http://seforim.blogspot.com/2012/09/introduction-to-song-of-songs-excerpt.html
Again, I am not arguing against such allegorical readings—which I believe in fact
enhance our understanding not only of the text but of the multidimensional nature of love and
divinity, as in the kabbalistic commentary above—but rather wish to point out the likelihood that
the initial impulse towards allegoresis in confronting cases such as the Song of Songs serves as a
defense mechanism, shielding us from the feelings of guilt, shame, or embarrassment when
confronted with such an apparent impropriety as taking an erotic text in the Bible at face (or
other body part) value. (Such, I might say, is often also the case with Sufi erotic poetry.)
Another author whose work raises interesting questions in this regard is the Irish poet
William Butler Yeats. As one of the proponents of the Celtic Twilight movement, also known as
the Irish Literary Renaissance, Yeats sought to revive the myths and legends that to his mind lay
as the substrate of Irish national consciousness. And one key element of this consciousness was
the belief in—and interaction with—fairies, also known in Ireland as the people of the Sidhe (the
Sidhe being the sacred earthen mounds dotting the Irish landscape that to this day function as
doorways or portals to the Underworld). In his book Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, Yeats
documents many accounts of human interactions with fairies as well as many local legends
concerning such interactions. Under the tutelage of one such person, Yeats himself encountered
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these extra-human beings. Such a context gives us a very different scope of understanding the
possible “literal” levels of Yeats’s poems concerning fairies, such as “A Lover's Quarrel Among
the Fairies,” “The Hosting of the Sidhe,” “The Stolen Child,” “The Wind Blows out of the Gates
of the Day,” “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Man Who
Freamed of Faeryland,” and “To Some I Have Talked With By The Fire.”
“The Song of Wandering Aengus” proves especially significant for my purposes here in
that Yeats uses the poem to document the human engagement with the shamanic consciousness
necessary for such fairy encounters. The poem reads as follows:
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
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Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
What are we as readers to do with a poem that talks about a man with a fire in his head who,
having gathered magical items such as a hazel wand and berries in the moth-like starlight,
catches a silver trout that he then attempts to cook, only to find that the trout has been
transformed into glimmering girl who calls his name and then runs off into the woods, leading
him to spend the rest of his life in haunted search for his fairy love? Shamanic practitioner Tom
Cowan, in his book Fire in the Head: Shamanism and the Celtic Spirit, explains this poem in the
following passage (which I quote at length in order to tie together several points at once):
Yeats’s Aengus may have been a shaman. He had the fire in the head that
shamans everywhere believe is their source of enlightenment, illuminating visions
of other realities. . . . Following the light of his vision, Aengus journeyed through
the “hollow lands” that lie just below or behind the denser terrain of ordinary
reality. In some respects, Aengus’s journey is a classic shamanic soul journey,
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illuminated by the imagination. But calling attention to that does not lessen its
authenticity, for the imagination is the shaman’s visionary tool that describes the
contents of the imaginal realm of consciousness, and the survival of shamanism
over the last 20,000 years strongly suggests that the tool works. (Cowan 8)
Aengus’s “fire in the head,” then, is a description of his sudden shift into shamanic
consciousness, a consciousness in which the world around us in our everyday experience—
which Cowan refers to as “Ordinary Reality”—gives way to a Nonordinary world (what I am
referring to as the extraordinary) that has just as much reality as our everyday world. Cowan
above refers to this extraordinary world as “the imaginal realm,” which he explains in the
following passage:
[As for the term imaginal:] For example, a shaman may journey to a place in
nonordinary reality and speak of it as a realm of the spirit world, then later learn
that such a place exists in ordinary, physical reality. It may turn out that other
shamans have also traveled there (either in the body or out of the body) and are
also familiar with it, thus indicating that the Otherworld has an existence
independent of the individual shaman’s imagination. In addition, the widespread
testimony to the manifestation of spirit entities in the physical realm suggests that
they too can appear and operate in the ordinary, physical world, at least partially
independent of the imagination of the person seeing them. (Cowan 4)
While the shaman travels to this Otherworld or imaginal realm through his or her creative
imagination, in other words, we are not to confuse this state as simply imaginary in the sense of
fantastic, fictitious, or delusory. The imaginal (not imaginary) realm exists as a parallel reality, as
another dimension of experience that is independent of (not a creation of) the individual’s
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imagination. The imagination, then, is a faculty for transport and transformation rather than for
the creation of “imaginary,” unreal beings and conditions.
This turn to the Imaginal rather than imaginary Realm also occurs in the writings of
Henry Corbin:
Here we shall not be dealing with imagination in the usual sense of the word:
neither with fantasy, profane or otherwise, nor with the organ which produces
imaginings identified with the unreal; nor shall we even be dealing exactly with
what we look upon as the organ of esthetic creation. We shall be speaking of an
absolutely basic function, correlated with a universe peculiar to it, a universe
endowed with a perfectly "objective" existence and perceived precisely through
the Imagination. (Corbin, Alone 3)