Bunyan with Mandeville: Allegory, Originality and the Superseding of Collective Experience in The Pilgrim's Progress

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 14; p. 9
• Main Author: Davis, Nick
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2010
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English literature
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Viewed in a similar light, and as Mr. Sagacity explains to the Dreamer in Part Two, long-persistent human attempts to improve the Slough of Despond, apparently well-intentioned, have mainly done the reverse.18 In Part One, the fair has flourished (having been established by devils) in the Town of Vanity for some five thousand years.19 This is a huge repository of repugnant, in large part, but also normative social practices where the vile and the neutral are thoroughly intermixed: [...]at this Fair are all such Merchandize sold, as Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles, Countreys, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures, and Delights of all sorts, as Whores, Bauds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters, Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls, Precious Stones, and what not. Here certain human beings mourn birth and celebrate death, while others have horns and converse like pigs, certain birds speak, notably those with five toes (Bunyan, of course, has birds which sing in human language on the Hill Difficulty of Part Two), certain animals, resembling lambs, are born from plants (Mandeville the traveller, not at all taken aback, compares them for his hosts' benefit to those British geese which hatch from barnacles), and certain waters - those of the Dead Sea - bear up iron objects while allowing feathers to sink, the thoroughly realised image of an anti-nature.32 This helps to establish a context for Bunyan's reception of Mandeville's Vale Perilous. Assisted by Mandeville, we can assign The Pilgrim 's Progress's indicial materials to two fundamental categories: the blood and other traces left by Christian's battle with Apollyon are, like the corpses of Simple, Sloth and Presumption hanging in irons, connected physically and directly with earlier, completed actions; items like the monument of salt formed by Lot's wife and the Edenic apple shown to Christiana and Mercy in the Palace Beautiful are more simply and tunelessly themselves, indices of the modern Christian's directness of encounter with and participation in the world of scriptural narrative as defining the unique scheme of salvation. At a pivotal point in the first part of his journey Christian's burden falls from his back as he passes through a location with Cross and sepulchre which clearly evokes Calvary. [...]Christian has seen here 'one, as I thought in my mind, hang bleeding upon the Tree', an experience which he will affirm with more confidence under Prudence's tutelage.39 I think that it is now possible to place indicial phenomena of these two kinds in the symbolic economy of Bunyan's text.