Allegory conveys a painful secular disenchantment that symbolic language soon obscured.

Evidence

By virtue of the conventional succession of the signifier by the signified, allegory essentially played out an inescapable temporal destiny in which self and nonself could never coincide. Early romantic imagery therefore constituted the site of a reluctant coming to terms with the secular—a world in which there are no hidden depths, no natural continuities between the subject’s emotions and the objects of these emotions, no fulfillment of time. It could be seen that the real was not sacred, not enchanted. And yet—so de Man puts it—this painful clarity about the real world that the early romantics at first had (in contrast to the mystified consciousness of religious believers) did not last. Very quickly a symbolic (or mythical) conception of language was established everywhere in nineteenthand twentieth-century European literature and painting, allowing endlessly rich meanings to be recovered. Once again, de Man observes, symbolic imagination (or mythic interpretation) began to obscure the reality of this-world. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 312

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes allegory (temporal, disenchanted) from symbol/myth (rich, obscuring) as competing modes of secular self-understanding.
• XREF: Connects to Weber’s disenchantment of the world and to the broader ‘secular’ literature in this book’s larger argument. — connects to: Allegory shifted from outer corpses to inner relics as secularized commemoration — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 160
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that allegory, not symbol, is the honest mode of a disenchanted world—and that mythic language re-obscures it—is a dense, reversible thesis worth sitting with.