R.S.Gwyn: I recall reading some dismissive remarks that VN made about allegory
as a literary mode, but I can't recall where. Does anyone remember where
this was? Probably in the Lectures on Literature, but I just can't
remember in what context he said these remarks.
JM: A quick search in my archives:
Lolita - (VN) "Although everybody
should know that I detest symbols and allegories (which is due partly to my old
feud with Freudian voodooism and partly to my loathing of generalizations
devised by literary mythists and sociologists), an otherwise intelligent reader
who flipped through the first part described Lolita as "Old Europe
debauching young America," while another flipper saw in it "Young America
debauching old Europe."
ADA: "Osberg (Spanish writer of pretentious fairy tales and
mystico-allegoric anecdotes, highly esteemed by short-shift thesialists) as well
as that of an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, Ben
Sirine..."
Van: dreams cannot yield any semblance of morality or symbol
or allegory or Greek myth, unless, naturally, the dreamer is a Greek or a
mythicist. Metamorphoses in dreams are as common as metaphors in poetry. A
writer who likens, say, the fact of imagination’s weakening less rapidly than
memory, to the lead of a pencil getting used up more slowly than its erasing
end, is comparing two real, concrete, existing
things.
Demon: Bosch evidently found a wing or two in the corner cobweb of his
casement and showed the prettier upper surface in depicting his incorrectly
folded insect. I mean I don’t give a hoot for the esoteric meaning, for the myth
behind the moth, for the masterpiece-baiter who makes Bosch express some bosh of
his time, I’m allergic to allegory and am quite sure he was just enjoying
himself by crossbreeding casual fancies just for the fun of the contour and
color...
Darkbloom: Carte du Tendre: ‘Map of Tender
Love’, sentimental allegory of the seventeenth
century.