SITUATING ALLEGORY: DEFINITIONS AND JUSTIFICATIONS

Harry Williams was cited earlier in connection with the requirements to which he felt an interpretation of the Conte du Graal should be subject.  Among these were that 1) the text must not be bent to fit external ideas, and that 2) sources or analogues must not be necessary to the interpretation of the story of Perceval.  It was Williams’s program to provide these strictures so that interpretations of Chrétien’s romance would be unbiased and consider the work as an intact unit, and while he is correct in principle, his methodology requires some qualification.  First of all, if by the use of “external ideas,” Williams refers to a consideration of Chrétien’s text with reference to the conditions that existed at the time and place in which the author lived, one should not take this to imply that these circumstances ought to be ignored when approaching the poem.  The analysis of any conditions corresponding to Chrétien’s period must simply be based upon the conformity of these circumstances to the text, and not vice versa.  Similarly, sources and analogues in the form of influential compositions and compilations circulated at Chrétien’s time can also be used to shed light upon the mindset of the author, so long as they, too, complement the text of the Conte du Graal.  To deny the critic the use of these tools is to arbitrarily uproot the story from its context and to approach it as if it were composed in a sociological and cultural vacuum, an absurd methodology.

Holmes and Klenke come closest in their attempt to interpret Chrétien’s story in relation to its environment.  “Chrétien,” says Klenke, “like any normal man, must have been influenced by contemporaneous events taking place about him.”[1]  And while this much goes almost without saying, Holmes and Klenke both provide abundant information on a wide variety of sociological factors that might have had some impact on Chrétien.  But, to cite the ideas of another Twelfth Century thinker, Hugh of Saint Victor, they have been unable to lay a proper foundation for their allegorical interpretation because they have neglected the literal flow of events recounted in Le Conte du Graal.  M-D Chenu comments that Hugh was “contre une allégorisation prématurée,” that he spoke out “catégoriquement en faveur de l’historia et de son irremplaçable valeur; hors de la lettre, prise comme fondement, on bâtirait à vide.  Escamoter ce plan et sa première technique, ce serait ressembler à qui veut être grammarien sans connaître l’alphabet.”[2]  The presence of allegory as it is proposed by Holmes and Klenke turns Chrétien’s story into a patchwork quilt of scenes with no comprehensible relation to the events that take place in the whole work.  And yet, one has to wonder if allegory can exist in Chrétien’s tale in any other way.  It is for this reason that Hugh of Saint Victor is mentioned here, for his thought best represents a larger system providing a foundation upon which a chronologically accurate allegorical interpretation in Le Conte du Graal can and should be generated, for it conforms adequately to the text and complements it in every respect. 

Hugh of Saint Victor: Defining Allegory

The medieval mind even before the Twelfth Century, especially among members of the clergy or those trained in schools, was acculturated to the use of allegory and related concepts like symbolism and metaphor.  These literary concepts provided a means of interpreting the reality of the world, a place enshrouded in the mystery of creation and God’s often incomprehensible will and purposes for that creation.  Generally speaking, the ever-present tendency to interpret things and events in an allegorical light, especially in its application to exegesis, grew in influence in the Twelfth Century.  Speaking of developments at this time, M-D Chenu notes:

A plusieurs reprises…nous avons observé la tendance des médiévaux à tourner la métaphore en allégorie; chacune des lois du jeu symbolique favorisait, semble-t-il, pareille propension.  De fait, l’allégorie a à peu près complètement recouvert les champs d’expression que nous avons parcouru : nature, histoire, rite, comme aussi elle a envahi tous les genres littéraires : commentaires bibliques, homélies, liturgies, formulaires dogmatiques, poésies ….  C’est la forme littéraire la plus universelle.[3]

The usage of allegory in interpreting both sacred and vulgar texts became prominent to the point that it also became excessive.  Chenu describes allegorization in this period as “la description analytique d’une idée à partir des éléments morcelés et abstraits d’une image, dont chaque détail prend signification.”[4]  This evolution led to intense creativity and enormous outpourings of work, but was also dangerous because the interpretation often given for an object such as the Ark of Noah or the Temple of Solomon lost all relation to the original unit upon which it was based as each of its parts was examined in minutiae.  The resulting allegorical construction was shorn from any relation to its literal source through the process of abstraction this type of allegorical analysis entailed.  This is similar to the type of allegorizing in which Holmes and Klenke engage.

Hugh of Saint Victor reacted against this mode of interpretation.  For him, the chronological pace of the interactions between God and man had great significance in providing the fundamental source of allegory.  When Hugh speaks out in favor of historia, he is insisting upon the primacy of a chronological reading of the scriptures, or the obtaining of a comprehension of the literal recounting of the history of humanity.  This is integral to a correct understanding of scripture, since at the allegorical level scripture represents man’s progress back toward God after the Fall, a sequential movement from a natural state, through the rigors of the Mosaic law, toward a final state of grace made possible by the sacrament of the redemption of Christ.[5]  The advancement of humanity is a story of restitution: “This is our entire task – the restoration of our nature and the removal of our deficiency.”[6]  This relates to scriptural study, a restorative according to Hugh, a practice that often requires the ability to think allegorically.  In his magnum opus, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, he defines the principal objects of his method:

History is the narration of events, which is contained in the first meaning of the letter; we have allegory when, through what is said to have been done, something else is signified as done either in the past or in the present or in the future….[7]

For Hugh, the presence of allegory was intimately and inseparably tied to the chronology of the text of the Holy Writ and prefigures, in general, the movement of humankind back toward God through a periods of Nature, Law and Grace, as stated above.  Interestingly, while concentrating his efforts on the sacra pagina and the importance of the latter two stages, Hugh did not neglect to address the period between the Fall and the time of Moses:

One consequence of the importance which Hugh attached to historical development was that he took more seriously than late scholastic theologians the condition of mankind in the period between Fall and the institution of the old Covenant with Moses.  During this initial period after the fall, mankind – with no other guides than nature and reason – was left on its own to discover the extent and limitations of human knowledge.  For Hugh’s enquiry into the stages of human recovery, this period of mankind’s journey of self-discovery was of great importance for establishing the bed-rock of unaided human powers after the fall.  His special genius lay in the care with which he reconstructed the stages by which mankind was compelled to recognize human powerlessness and to acknowledge the need to seek God’s help in a succession of stages.[8]

These ideas unite to form an important overall picture whose main points of emphasis are the following: 1) Hugh was vitally concerned with the project of humanity being restored to a prelapsarian state of grace, requiring a progression from a first State of Nature to a final State of Grace; 2) scripture, or the word, plays an important role in this progress; and, 3) scripture contains allegory, which is vitally connected to, and derives its meaning from, historia, or the literal flow of the text.  This depiction is vital, for an allegorical interpretation of Le Conte du Graal using the historical methods of Hugh of Saint Victor is much more appropriate to a consideration of Perceval’s story than is allegory in the sense that it is often defined, one in which the signification of persons and objects, such as those included in Chrétien’s recounting of Perceval’s visit to the castle of the Fisher King, are considered outside of the larger context of the chronological flow of Le Conte du Graal.  Instead, an allegorical interpretation of this work should demonstrate the progress of Perceval through three states, each decipherable and provable via a chronological reading of the text: a State of Nature, a State of Law, and a State of Grace, represented respectively by niceté, chevalerie and courtoisie, and finally charity.

Significantly, one of the aspects of Le Conte du Graal that Jean Frappier finds innovative is precisely a new emphasis on the chronological sequencing of events as seen through the eyes of the protagonist:

Le Conte du Graal se caractérise en outre par une méthode plus raffinée et fort originale : sa composition est progressive.  Chrétien raconte, à de rares exceptions près, en se mettant à la place de Perceval, en voyant tout par ses yeux.  Présenter les faits au fur et à mésure qu’ils se produisent et, peu à peu, s’éclairent partiellement pour le héros, aboutissait par une conséquence logique à un impressionnisme à la fois psychologique et artistique.[9]

Frappier is indicating that he bases his interpretation on a reading of the literal level of the text, and he is correct in doing so inasmuch as it serves as a sort of baseline from which the remainder of the interpretive effort should arise.  Frappier, whose efforts are laudable, simply neglects to take the next step.  The search for allegory in the tale of Perceval revolves around a young knight progressing from a natural state of ignorance, through one in which he is governed by Law, and finally to a State of Grace signified by the presence of charity, or the love of God and neighbor, the highest of Christian virtues, as he comes to an understanding of Christ’s Redemption.

[1] Holmes and Klenke, p. 91.

[2] Chenu, p. 200.

[3] Ibid., p. 188.

[4] Ibid., pp. 188-189.

[5] R.W. Soutehrn.  Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, volume II.  Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001, p. 62.

[6] Hugh of Saint Victor.  The Didascalicon of Hugh of Saint Victor.  Ed. and trans. Jerome Taylor.  New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, p. 48.

[7] Hugh of Saint Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith.  Trans. Roy J. Deferrari.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Medieval Academy of America, 1951, I.iv.

[8] Southern, p. 62.

[9] Frappier, Chrétien de Troyes et le Mythe du Graal, p. 174.