The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism

In a review of Robert Smithson's collected writings, published in this journal in Fall 1979, I proposed that Smithson's genius was an allegorical one, involved in the liquidation of an tradition which he perceived as more or less ruined. To impute an allegorical motive to contemporary art is to venture into proscribed territory, for allegory has been condemned for nearly two centuries as aberration, the antithesis of art. In Aesthetic Croce refers to it as science, or art aping science; Borges once called it an aesthetic error. Although he surely remains one of the most allegorical of contemporary writers, Borges nevertheless regards allegory as an outmoded, exhausted device, a matter of historical but certainly not critical interest. Allegories appear in fact to represent for him the distance between the present and an irrecoverable past: