OUTING THE ALLIGATOR

Even if C. S. Lewis had never written the Narnia books, he would still be celebrated (at least in literary circles) as the author of The Allegory of Love. This book has set the agenda for critical discussion of The Faerie Queene for sixty years. For example, in her book Desire, published in 1994, Catherine Belsey, not the most willing bedfellow of C. S. Lewis, not only orientates her argument by reference to Lewis's reading of The Faerie Queene. but finds it ‘hard to resist the outlines of the story he tells’. Lewis did not just make an outstanding contribution to a field of literary study; it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that he almost single-handedly constituted a field of literary study. ‘The Alligator of Love’, as Lewis liked to call his famous book, is not only a marvellously informative account of its subject; it is also so compulsively readable that one can well believe the advice reportedly given to an Oxford undergraduate by his tutor not to bother with the primary text of The Romance of the Rose, since Lewis's version was so much better! Although Lewis appealed to very different audiences with his work as a literary historian and critic, on the one hand, and with his imaginative fiction, on the other, there are some fascinating connections running between the different kinds of writing he practised.

One such connection is the concept of allegory, which was central both to the theory and the practice of Lewis's work as critic, and also to the theory and practice of his work as a writer of imaginative fiction. Towards the beginning of The Allegory of Love he offers a definition of allegory: