Paul De Man and the Question of ‘Domination Free’ Allegory

Abstract

While talk of an interpretive tradition would be premature, it is nonetheless true that modern assessments of allegory display an intense preoccupation with what Julie Ellison has called the “aggressive tendencies of the mode” (102). For example, the American New Critics John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate argue that the allegorist’s treatment of nature approximates the instrumental, exploitative disposition toward nature expressed in science and technology. Observing that allegory’s “primary direction is towards the oversimplification of life which is the mark of the scientific will” (178), Tate suggests that science, despite its scorn for the allegorist’s naive belief in the causal efficacy of “magical fictions” (182), has its historical origins in the allegorical desire to dominate nature: With the decline then of pure allegory, we see the rise of a new systematic structure of entities called science, which makes good the primitive allegorist’s futile claim to the control of nature. Between allegorist and scientist there exists the illusion of fundamental opposition. They are, however, of one origin and purpose. For the apparent hostility of science to the allegorical entities is old age’s preoccupation with the follies of its youth. (180)