My daughter and I have been reading The Pilgrim’s Progress together. I knew that C.S. Lewis had written an essay about it, so I decided to check it out. One piece of gold from the essay is Lewis’ description of allegory – more specifically, how he believed one should read allegory. He was adamantly against taking to time to stop and dissect the allegory. Here’s a snippet I thought worth sharing:

This stupidity perhaps comes from the pernicious habit of reading allegory as if it were a cryptogram to be translated; as if, having grasped what an image (as we say) ‘means’, we threw the image away and thought of the ingredient in real life which it represents. But that method leads you continually out of the book back into the conception you started from and would have had without reading it. The right process is the exact reverse. We ought not to be thinking, ‘This green valley, where the shepherd boy is singing, represents humility’; we ought to be discovering, as we read, that humility is like that green valley. That way, moving always into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for.

C.S. Lewis, The Vision of John Bunyan, from Selected Literary Essays, p. 149

I don’t know if I am totally tracking with Lewis here. I had to think about this one a bit. But I think his point could be summarized in this way:

A bad reading of allegory is seeing an allegory for humility, stopping, and saying, ‘the author is talking about humility. Let’s discuss what we know about humility.’ That would be going ‘out of the book.’ Instead, as you read, and you come to this allegory for humility, it should lead you to say, ‘Ah, that is what humility is like.’ You are taking what you know and bringing it with you into the reading in order that your knowledge may be enriched, or, I suppose you could say, that you might receive new light on that knowledge. I think that is an excellent way of approaching allegory.