Response [to Mary Carruthers ‘Imaginatif, ‘Imaginatif, Memoria, and “The Need for Critical Theory” in Piers Plowman Studies

The dreamer’s melancholia marginalizes him and makes the text resistant to narrative order and consistency; it also inscribes the text with a deep “abjection” (as defined by Julia Kristeva) or sense of the necessity of penitence. Walter Benjamin’s discussion of melancholy and allegory (the latter indicating a breakdown of the relationship of signifier and signified) becomes a key to understanding the tearing of the pardon: “an allegorical act to explain the work of allegory.” Allegory is a way of speaking that defeats the expectations of a sure cognition.