i don't know that much about ifs or allegory but they are the same thing

i tried to just tweet that out once but no one understood what i was talking about so here is a slightly longer post

people on my tl are always talking about ifs (=internal family systems) & parts work. i have never tried ifs/parts work. my understanding of it is that you conceive of, or else recognize, yourself as being made up of different more-or-less-personified modules with different desires, which interact to create your often-contradictory personality and behaviors. what’s interesting to me here is that this is the exact structure of much of the courtly-love poetry that still has a lot of impact on how anglophones think about love.

in the 2nd paragraph of the “allegory” chapter of c. s. lewis’ the allegory of love, which you already know i think you should read, lewis describes how allegory works: “If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia.” in much courtly love poetry, chrétien de troyes for example, there’s an alternation between external action & these ifs-y internal dramas, but other poems (including my particular obsession, guillaume de loris’ le roman de la rose)¹ have no external plot—just interactions between different aspects of two lovers, & to a lesser extent aspects of the social world around them, playing out in a dreamscape.

i am sorry to say that i tend to be suspicious of new-to-me self therapy modalities until i feel that i have seen them work out for people, and i am even sorrier to say that reading about allegory made me more bullish on ifs. it doesn’t make a lot of sense—i don’t really have much reason to think that writing allegory “worked” for the medievals, honestly courtly love doesn’t seem like it was super fun or healthy—but the poetry is so lovely & touching that it overwhelms the deliberating, options-weighing part of my mind (there’s some parts work for you). i hate to say it but (what i have read of) writing about parts work today, always seems to choose a tone on the spectrum from “dry” to “syrupy wooden-beads therapist.” i think this is in service of making the reader feel emotionally safe but i’m sorry, it’s just not for me, i don’t feel the trust that i think i’m intended to feel. i do trust chaucer & troyes & de loris though. medieval courtly love allegory actually feels like feeling.

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pursuing a different line of thought—i’m interested in why the allegory/ifs structure was so fascinating to both medieval love poets & to the kind of modern person who is likely to be reading this substack, when it seems like it was particularly unappealing to most audiences in between us timewise. in “the allegory of love,” lewis repeatedly apologizes to his 1936 audience for the artificiality & off-puttingness of the form of allegory. the very first sentence of his book is “The allegorical love poetry of the Middle Ages is apt to repel the modern reader both by its form and by its matter.”

this quote, from part ii of the “courtly love” chapter, might explain some of it:

Chrétien de Troyes, judged by modern standards, is on the whole an objective poet. The adventures still occupy the greater part of his stories. By the standard of his own times, on the other hand, he must have appeared strikingly subjective. The space devoted to action that goes forward only in the souls of his characters was probably beyond all medieval precedent. He was one of the first explorers of the human heart, and is therefore rightly to be numbered among the fathers of the novel of sentiment. But these psychological passages have usually one characteristic which throws special light on the subject of this book. Chrétien can hardly turn to the inner world without, at the same time, turning to allegory…it would not surprise us if Chrétien found some difficulty in conceiving the inner world on any other terms. It is as if the insensible could not yet knock at the doors of the poetic consciousness without transforming itself into the likeness of the sensible: as if men could not easily grasp the reality of moods and emotions without turning them into shadowy persons. Allegory, besides being many other things, is the subjectivism of an objective age.

“the subjectivism of an objective age.” i think right now we are in, or just coming out of, a very objective age in fiction—the “show don’t tell” mfa mantra, the impatience with the victorian novel’s long emotionally-expository asides. & i hate to use the word postrat, but a lot of people who are into ifs went through a long period of, let’s say, valuing objectiveness at more than its objective value. don’t take this the wrong way, because i love allegory too, i just think it’s interesting…..

1. i’m specifying “loris” here bc i don’t particularly care for, & didn’t finish reading, jean de meung’s continuation of loris’ unfinished poem