Fredric Jameson, "Allegory and Ideology" (Book Note)

When thinking about allegory today, The Plague by Albert Camus might come to mind. Camus’s narrative—an epidemic ravaging a city in French Algeria—has long been interpreted as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France during the 1940s. The events in the novel unfold on two levels simultaneously: the literal health crisis and the symbolic struggle against tyranny. However, Fredric Jameson critiques this kind of allegory as “bad allegory at its most consummate”. His objection lies in how it uncritically merges the natural with the historical, effectively masking ideological processes. By aligning these two layers without disruption, the text makes historical conflict appear as if it were a natural phenomenon. For Jameson, this seamless unification exemplifies how ideology functions—it presents socially constructed realities as natural facts.

Jameson’s critique is particularly relevant in light of recent events. With the Covid-19 pandemic, Camus’s The Plague has experienced a resurgence in popularity, with readers finding it eerily resonant. Yet this allegorical framework has also been adopted by political rhetoric, though in reverse: while Camus used a plague to stand for war, contemporary leaders use war metaphors to represent the pandemic. This recycling of allegorical thought perpetuates the ideological trick Jameson identifies—blurring the boundaries between history and nature.

For readers frustrated by such simplifications, Jameson offers a more nuanced approach to allegory. In his work, Jameson explores allegory as a complex form of representation that resists simplistic unifications. His book, after laying out the theoretical foundations in the early chapters, delves into various topics, such as the history of emotions, interpretations of Hamlet, Mahler’s sixth symphony, and postcolonial literature. Along the way, he examines more conventional allegorical writers like Spenser, Dante, and Goethe, before closing with a reflection on postmodern allegoresis. The book culminates with three dense appendices, challenging readers to rethink allegory as more than an outdated literary device—it becomes a tool for grappling with the contradictions of modern life.

Jameson’s long-standing interest in allegory stretches back to earlier works, such as The Hegel Variations and The Political Unconscious. Central to his exploration is a return to the fourfold allegorical method developed by early Christian theologians, particularly Origen, for interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures. This method identifies four levels of meaning: the literal (a concrete event), the allegorical (its symbolic parallel), the personal (the interpreter’s investment), and the collective or political (the broader social implications). For instance, early Christians might read the exodus from Egypt as a prefiguration of Christ’s resurrection, much like Marx interprets the French Revolution through the lens of Roman history in The Eighteenth Brumaire.

The power of this method lies in its refusal to collapse these layers into a single meaning. Each level introduces a new perspective—moving from individual significance to collective struggle—while maintaining their distinctions. This approach contrasts sharply with “bad allegory,” which disregards the tensions between personal and collective, unconscious and political. In good allegory, these tensions remain unresolved but interconnected, creating a dynamic structure where meanings resonate across different levels without becoming identical.

For Jameson, the value of allegory lies in its “profound discontinuity” . It emerges as a response to historical crises—moments when contradictions within society become too stark to be smoothed over by ideology. Allegory surfaces when the symbolic harmony of everyday life can no longer contain the fractures beneath. As Jameson puts it, allegory arises when “the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another”. These moments demand acknowledgment, even though they resist neat representation. Ideology, by contrast, offers the illusion of harmony—an imaginary resolution of those contradictions.

Allegory, in Jameson’s reading, stands at the intersection between ideology and its critique. It does not resolve the contradictions but lays them bare, creating a space where we can confront the gaps and dissonances between the personal and collective, the psychological and social. This makes allegory a site of tension: it acknowledges the fractured nature of social reality while still holding its fragments together. As Jameson suggests, allegory can serve as both a coping mechanism and a prompt for deeper insight, urging us toward “more expansive knowledge” (34).