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"Instant Moments: Allegory and the Spatial Compression of Time"
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In Samuel Delany’s 1966 science-fiction novel Babel-17, the heroine Rydra Wong, a universally acclaimed poet because of her uncanny ability to express other people's inmost feelings, must decipher a mysterious code, Babel-17. To do so she captains the space ship Rimbaud on a journey that brings her finally into the secrets of what she realizes is not a code but a language. Learning this language is revelatory, exhilarating. It is "small," she says, "tight," as if on a tiny area of her tongue she could feel an extraordinary amount being expressed--so much so that any other language seems nightmarishly slow. The metaphor of the place on the tongue is an intriguing image of the identity of apprehension and expression in Babel-17. To recognize meanings in this language, it seems, is to speak--or perhaps it is to be spoken through: to understand by speaking; to apprehend an alien meaning on the surface of one's own tongue. Rydra wonders what kind of mind would speak such a language, and whether she will encounter the enemy that does. "Babel-17, how good a language would it be to argue with for your life?" (88). Not very good, as the metaphor of the tongue might suggest. In this fantastically compact and expressive language, which turns out to work like the old computer language Fortran, there is no word for "I."
The instantaneous apprehension of information that Babel-17 makes possible has an interesting counterpart in a later Delany novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984). Near the beginning of that novel, a former slave who has had access to almost no knowledge at all is given a special glove that connects him to something which Delany presciently names the Web, or GI--General Information. This connection provides the slave with a wealth of instantaneous context that enables him, for the first time in his life, to read books, which in his world take the form of cubes: you hold one in your hand and everything in it is almost immediately imparted--quite literally you grasp it all at once. The image evokes the allusion to Blake implicit in the title of the novel:
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
These are the Auguries of Innocence, however, and experience tells a different story. As in Babel-17, something about this very compression and totality is not quite right. As it turns out, the Web--one might have suspected as much--has holes; "GI" is subtly controlled and manipulated by "Spiders" engaged in producing merely the illusion of universal knowledge. It really is true that GI is an invaluable, comprehensive source of information relayed in an instant, without which communication across the universe could not exist, but it also works like ideology, to preclude certain kinds of knowledge and discourse.
These scenes and images in Delany’s work pull toward allegory--but obliquely, with a great deal of strain and counterforce like some perpetually unresolved dissonance in a work of music. The name Rydra Wong strains toward but also away from an allegorical resolution into "Right a Wrong," which must be somehow held in suspension with the possibility that her ship is a bateau ivre. "Babel" is a maximally referential word infused with allusions to human overreaching and divine retribution, human unity and difference, tragic disparity and overwhelming fusion, the simultaneity and totality of all human expression and potential meaning--but it can never quite float free from its strangely minimalizing, almost non-referential qualifier, "17." I would suggest that the strain toward and away from allegory in Delany’s work is related to the fact that so much of it--as in the images of the place on the tongue and the book cubes--is about the pleasures and dangers of the kind of apprehension that allegory traditionally makes available.
Allegory is a method of representation, whether in the plastic or written arts, in which spatial markers, and visual signs established in significant spatial relation to each other, operate as compressed forms of expository discourse (theological, historical, political, sociological, psychological, etc.)--not with the effect of replicating those discourses, or repeating what they say or what they know, but with the effect of engaging with more directness, immediacy, and instantaneity the kinds of issues those discourses engage. Critics as diverse as C. S. Lewis and Paul de Man have assumed that these issues are, in de Man’s version, "the furthest reaching truths about ourselves and the world"; in Lewis’s version, "_______" ("Pascal’s Allegory of Persuasion" 2; Allegory of Love p. _). To put it another way, the domain of allegory is the borderland "beyond which," to appropriate T.S. Eliot’s description of poetry, "words fail, but meanings still exist." In keeping with its special relation to "the furthest reaching truths," allegory as a method of representation is predicated on and seeks to provoke a mode of apprehension, even in some cases of revelation, that transcends both the affective resources of expository discourse--which cannot (without recourse to allegory) evoke in the reader the sensory, emotional, and/or spiritual experience of any of those various others/antecedents to which allegory refers--and also the ordinary temporal exigencies of expository discourse, which requires by definition a linear extension in time. Despite the fact that immense extension in time is notoriously a characteristic of much allegorical narrative (Spenser, Jean de Meun), and despite the temporality on which the functioning of signs in allegory is predicated (see de Man, BI), reading allegory involves an experience of compression that is very like understanding Babel-17 or like grasping a whole book, together with its whole plurisignant context, by holding its infinity in the palm of your hand.
To experience this compression, of course, requires knowledge to begin with: traditionally, the kind of apprehension allegory makes available depends on the reader’s embeddedness in, or even entanglement in, some particular web of ideology; on the reader’s access to the signs and symbols of a particular culture or subculture; on the reader’s familiarity with many intersecting discourses; on the kind of "information" that passes for "general" in a particular society, and that may or may not allow one to say "I." This fact should be considered in relation to another, which might at first seem to contradict it: the fact that, at least since the mid nineteenth century, allegory has been a privileged method of representation for what bell hooks would call "oppositional worldviews." More specifically, it has been a privileged method for writers whose work rends a particular web of ideology by engaging--against the grain of the kinds of "General Information" all allegories in a particular culture might be presumed to draw on for their very substance and life--in what Gerda Lerner has called "the struggle to control the dominant symbol systems of a given society." As Fredric Jameson, Susan Willis, and others have pointed out, for example, allegory has been a privileged technique of Third World nationalist literatures, anti-colonial literatures, and minority literatures in general--and not only, we might add, as a way of getting past the censors. One could argue further that, because of its formal relation to ideology, allegory has become, since the late nineteenth-century, not only a major literary and artistic technique of counter-representation as a strategy of resistance to colonizing discourses, but also an important technique of self-decolonization: a method of imagining ways out of the dilemma George Eliot described when she said that we all get our thoughts "entangled in metaphors and act fatally on the strength of them." Rejecting Coleridge’s distinction between allegory and symbol, and assigning some other, more qualified term ("Romantic symbol," for example), to what Coleridge wanted the word "symbol" to mean, it becomes possible to recognize that allegories are symbol-systems, as are ideologies. Just as ideology makes us protagonists of an allegory we experience as a "lived reality" (Althusser) rather than an interpretive sign of reality (we traverse a mere map of the world--a paysage moralisé-- as if it were the world itself), so oppositional allegories work to demystify this "reality" by reading it through another, oppositional set of symbols.
The definition of allegory presented above is informed by many other definitions of and commentaries on allegory, including Benjamin's insistence that allegory is "not a playful illustrative technique, but a form of expression, just as speech is expression, and, indeed, just as writing is" (162); Isabel MacCaffrey's description of allegory as "a model of the mind's life in the world" (6); Graham Hough's demonstration that allegory in the Renaissance was by no means expected necessarily to be "continuous" throughout any given narrative (this underlies, among other things, my choice not to describe allegory as a genre); C. S. Lewis's distinction between reading allegory "without translating" and the process of decoding allegory into something less than it is; Doris Sommer's attempt in "Allegory and Dialectics" to get beyond the temporal differentiation of "two parallel levels of signification" in allegory and to see allegory in terms of "mutually constructive meanings" (326). This definition also takes for granted some assumptions implicit in de Man's discussions of temporality in allegory: e.g., that allegory involves representation, duration, sequence and narrative (BI 201, 225; "PA" 1); that both symbol and allegory are "metaphorical modes" (BI 204); and that in allegory the sign points to something that differs from its literal meaning despite the too-broad applicability of this description (BI 209), which at one level applies to all language. (In this framework we might see allegory as itself a particular kind of language). It also takes as givens de Man's view that time is constitutive in allegory in that the allegorical sign necessarily refers to another, preceding sign (207), and his definitive demystification, with reference to temporality, of Coleridge's distinction between symbol and allegory. Within that framework, however, I want to approach the question of temporality in allegory from the vantage point not of the writer but of the reader, with a focus on the reader's experience of allegory as an experience of simultaneity brought about through the spatial compressions of time that allegory makes possible.
Allegory relies chiefly on seven visual kinds of presentation: the journey, the procession, the psychomachia, the tableau, the house/body, the paysage moralisé, and the personification. Although some of these involve temporal sequence, even in its use of them allegory makes meaning spatially. Its primary engagement is with relationships (ontological, spiritual, political, economic, emotional, moral, and also temporal), which it theorizes in spatial terms: by means of geography, topography, juxtaposition, superimposition, and spatial order (high/low, near/far, large/small, front/back, etc.). It is in fact by means of the visual simultaneities thereby created--spatial compressions of time--that the pre-eminently narrative and discursive character of allegory, its temporal dimension, is apprehended.
This aspect of allegory is most readily apparent in visual allegory, of which Lois Maïlou Jones’ "The Ascent of Ethiopia" (1932) can serve as an example [http://cgfa.kelloggcreek.com/j/p-ljones1.htm]. In this painting, a historical narrative of African Empire, slavery, the Great Migration, and the evolution of African American art, as well as a discursive framework--cultural, political, religious, aesthetic--for understanding that narrative, unfolds in a single space, in a single instant of visual apprehension. Most basically this is the apprehension of movement from depths to heights; a journey from one symbolic place to another; a procession of symbolic figures that refer to specific historical moments and to a process of suffering and transcendence. The black figure of the artist at the pinnacle of the journey, together with the word ART at the top, means that these figures’ ascent occurs not only in historical time, and in the discursive space of African American historical memory and oral tradition, but also in the space of the aesthetic discourse and debate of the Harlem Renaissance, which is evoked in the 1920’s style lettering and in the homage to Aaron Douglas inscribed in the stylized black, silhouetted figures, as well as the concentric circles, the pyramidal shape of the buildings, and the black star. If these images evoke the political, social, and aesthetic discourse of the Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP to which Douglas contributed so many covers, as well as the central arguments of Alain Locke’s 1925 manifesto-anthology The New Negro, which contained much similar black-and-white art (including some by Douglas), the basic structure of the painting also suggests that what these figures climb is surely the "racial mountain" of one of the most famous artistic manifestos of the time, Langston Hughes’ 1926 Nation article, "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" [http://past.thenation.com/cgibin ... 9260223hughes.shtml]. In the concluding paragraph of that article, Hughes had himself ascended rhetorically to an exalted vision of what it means to be a true "Negro Artist" in racist America: "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves."
Maïlou Jones’ allegorical painting presents, and also enacts, a similar vision of a triumphant African American art, whose transcendence of prejudice is figured in the climbing of a mountain toward a social and artistic freedom sustained, supported, and founded on pride in the beauty and splendor of an African past. For it is only in one dimension of the painting, the dimension represented on the left side just above the figure with the water jug, that "Ethiopia" (a code-word for Africa in African American political and religious discourse at the time) is degraded to exile and darkness, is bowed down and must begin her journey up out of the depths. At the same time, as in medieval and Renaissance paintings in which sacred figures and realities exist in a different space altogether from earthly realities but also co-exist with them, Ethiopia remains in another dimension unchanged, unchanging, as she always was: a presence in reality, in history, and in potentia as the founding civilization and support for the new, African American civilization realized at the end of the journey. Africa seems in the painting literally to be carrying this civilization on her head, just as the African woman who is paired with her at the bottom of the painting carries a jug on her head. Even if you follow closely the path of the journeyers upward on the left, on the right Ethiopia is so big that you can never not see it, and indeed the upward motion of the painting takes place on both sides: on the right there is a vertical movement up from the figure of "Ethiopia" to the setting of the urban U.S., with the pattern of his/her headdress echoed in the pattern of windows in the high-rise buildings just as their shape echoes that of the pyramids. The right side of the painting says that Africa is never lost as a sustaining presence for the triumph of African American art at the top, but the left side says that it must nonetheless be arduously sought and found from another direction, another place. In the linear time of history, peoples of the African diaspora climb the racial mountain--Ethiopia ascends. But the picture itself is multi-temporal; on the left Ethiopia ascends--goes up to the top of the picture--but on the right Ethiopia both ascends and goes nowhere, remaining unchanged in some timeless, enduring space. This endurance is figured by, and refigured in, the persistence of the individuals in their climb.
Coterminous with the diasporic history represented here is the personal, individual history of Maïlou Jones as an artist whose struggle with the racial mountain was especially intense; she fought even to get her work shown in galleries, asked white friends carry her works in to competitions so they would be admitted, had one prize taken away from her when it was discovered she was Black. The masks are especially plurisignant in this regard. There are two, one comic, one tragic, evoking a Western tradition of drama, but with the "comic" one untraditionally black (and blue), suggesting an African rather than a Greek mask, and only ambiguously smiling, if it is a smile. ("We wear the mask," Paul Laurence Dunbar had said, and Edith Wilson had sung in a musical of 1929, Hot Chocolates, the tragicomic song "What did I do / To be so black and blue?") Thus the masks represent African American drama’s double identity as tragic and comic, its double roots in Western tradition and in Africa; more specifically they also represent Maïlou Jones’ own early career as a designer of masks for a Boston theater troupe before she decided that designers get no credit, and that her goal was the more individual heights of recognition as a painter. In this sense the 1932 painting is a kind of personal prophecy, which was indeed fulfilled, despite her continuing struggle against racism, during the long and brilliant artistic career which ended with her death only a few years ago. The figure of Ethiopia is also infused with a personal reference to an important early influence on Maïlou Jones, Meta Warwick Fuller, a mature artist who encouraged Maïlou Jones during her summers on Martha’s Vineyard. Fuller, like other artists there, encouraged and inspired her (La Duke 53; Tritobia Hayes Benjamin 16, 18). The sense that this figure, despite its allusion to Egyptian pharaohs, is also female inscribes Fuller’s artistic presence in the work by evoking her famous sculpture "Ethiopia Awakening," with its suggestion of upward motion, the resurrection of a buried African heritage, and a specifically female cultural and artistic presence.
The title, "The Ascent of Ethiopia," implies a linear image of historical time (Africa herself ascends over the course of history) but also the transcendent eschatological time connoted by the sign "Ethiopia" in religious discourse: the prophecy that "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God" (Psalm 68:31). This prophecy belonged also to the political discourse of African American political agitation, including that of such Black nationalists as Marcus Garvey. The presence of a star as a guide for the slave who follows it upward (north) suggests the North Star, and the journey of the succeeding black figures upward toward an urban center of course suggests the great migration in the early 20th century, with its background of the failure of Reconstruction, the climate of violence, race riots, and lynching, and the hope of a brighter day possible somewhere else. But the fact that the star is black also suggests the guiding light of a pan-Africanist aesthetic and political consciousness: and the kind of black pride articulated in Garvey’s speeches and writings and subscribed to by all who bought shares in his ill-fated Black Star Line. In addition, the glorious black star, by antithesis, evokes certain European and Euro American artistic discourses about the use of light, shadow, and dark, which Maïlou Jones would certainly have studied in her four years on a scholarship at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and which her African-centered, African-grounded art certainly draws on technically, but also rejects and supersedes. Blackness, not whiteness, is a source of light for these climbing figures, and the light from the black star shines on the sides of the buildings in urban landscape at which they finally arrive. These buildings invert and reverse the pyramids of the lower part of the painting; assuming the slaves have gone north to freedom and that the climbing couple have gone north in the Great migration of the early twentieth century, the light on the pyramids comes from the east, and the light on the urban pyramids of African American life comes from the Black star of the West. This black star in the upper left-hand corner is the western counterpart of the image of Africa in the lower right-hand corner, suggesting both a continuity of African identity and inspiration and a new identity born of an American experience.
The light from the black star streams down and splashes onto the upward-gazing black figure, who reiterates, but in a different space, the same figure seen in the African context suggested by the water jug on the woman’s head. This figure is transitional, climbing what looks most like a natural landscape of rocks with water/light spilling over them but also suggests stairs; in the next image up, the angle of the naked person’s knee becomes more ambiguously either a naked leg or a leg in Western clothing, and the rocks are more definitively stairs. The separate, androgynous figures of the African past, together with what is evidently a woman bowed under the weight of an African burden, resolve themselves into a more Westernized couple, holding hands, the man leading; at the top, the figures of music and art are most certainly, and the figure of drama is most probably, male. Maïlou's presence as a woman artist is confined to the masks and the palette--but then again the great, androgynous figure of the African king or queen dominates the whole painting. And if this foundational figure alludes to Meta Warick Fuller, part of this compressed discourse is about the African American woman artist’s own foundational presence, despite her relative absence from the iconography of the Harlem Renaissance evoked in the concentric circles at the top.
One point of exploring this painting at such length is to suggest the extraordinary compression any one of its component parts involves, and also the compression of the whole, despite the fact that the discrete images invite us to slow down and let their individual meanings unfold in our minds, just as the painting as a whole invites us to puzzle out the many interrelations among the images. The painting draws us into historical time--past, present, future, and future prefect–and into the discursive time we enter as we recall The Crisis–its covers, its editorials, the major debates of the day in which it participated; The New Negro, with its plea for a new black art based on race pride and a pride in Africa; the art of Douglas and Fuller; the speeches of Marcus Garvey. On the other hand, to look at this painting with the right points of reference in the mind’s eye is to see it all--all at once. If reading the painting takes time, just as Rydra’s detective work takes time, once the language is understood --once the compressed file is expanded--the meanings are all present in an instant, and any other language for talking about the same thing seems laboriously slow. In this sense the painting illustrates a fundamental aspect of allegory: no matter how long it is, it works by means of a spatial compression of time. I do not mean only that this painting is an extraordinarily dense compression of time in the sense of history--the history of a people, the history of an artistic tradition, the history of another artist’s great representation of that people’s history, the history of the artist’s own engagement with her people’s history and art, the fusion of Western art (Greek masks/American architecture/the piano) with African (the pyramid-architecture/the black mask). I mean also that, to someone who knows all the multiple references these images compress, this picture is a narrative that takes no time to tell; an interpenetrating set of discourses one need not hear in words to understand, manifest all together, all at one time, not in the temporalities of discourse but in the simultaneity of vision.
One must ask then, how such compression works when the medium is words on a page rather than paint on a canvas. In allegory, both temporal and spatial extension work paradoxically to negate the usual dependencies of narrative and discourse on time. This negation happens in the "instant moment" of nonverbal apprehension described in Wallace Stevens' "Prologues to What is Possible," which is an extended metaphor about metaphor, and hence, it could be argued, an allegory about allegory. It describes the journey of a man in a boat built of brilliant, weightless stones, toward a syllable that contains no meaning and/or all meaning, which, as he enters it, will "shatter the boat.. .As at a point of central arrival, an instant moment…." Like Delany's tantalizing near-allegories, however (which function, like Stevens' allegory here, to engage the whole question of symbols and symbol-systems), even this meta-allegory finally resists an allegorical reading. The elaborately developed metaphor stirs the man's fear; he wonders under what circumstances he could be compared to "things beyond resemblance." What we are left with in Stevens' poem is an allegorical journey (but only, perhaps, an imagined, not a "real" one) across an implicitly moralized seascape that is nonetheless largely undescribed, and then a final arrival at a spare and radically unmoralized landscape: some northern trees, the early evening sky in spring, and a return to mere likeness: "The way some first thing…The way the earliest single light…The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes." And yet again, we arrived at this almost anti-allegorical moment, which nevertheless also encapsulates the "instant moment" of allegorical compression, by means of an allegorical journey.
Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, one of Samuel Delany’s characters looks down and sees, in a moment of vertigo, no bridge, only water beneath his moving feet. Going more slowly, he then sees the planks he walks across, which have small slits between them. As he speeds up, the slats again seem to vanish, leaving only the spaces between, and he sees, because of the bridge but without the impediments of the bridge, the expanse of water it spans. He escapes, that is, the linear, temporal sequence of the planks--first this, then that, then this, then that--which allow only a partial vision; by compressing that linear sequence into a moment, he is suspended in space. In this moment of suspension, compression, and expanse, something is revealed to him: a man in a boat. But then the boat seems to vanish before his eyes, leaving only the river. A series of experiments reveals that what he saw in the instant moment of compression, apparently a whole, was only a partial arc. Allegory, with its delimiting ideologies and its unexpected magnitudes, is just such a bridge.
(Draft, copyright 2001. Please do not quote without permission.) |
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狗仔卡
发表于 2006-8-30 11:42
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楼主
发表于 2006-10-9 20:58
，是文学批评还是哲学批评..allegorical都出来了..