After thinking about my post the other day, “It All Comes Back to Stories“, I wanted to come back to the ideas I started at the end. Basically, when it comes to dealing with clearly stated messages, we have a tendency to recoil and retreat back into examples, images, and stories. A dense philosophical text makes more sense to us if we can turn it into a story in our minds. I’m all for this.
However, I mentioned in the second part of my essay “Sacramental Imagining” that I agreed with Tolkien’s assessment of allegory – that it exacts a kind of tyranny on its readers that was a little unsavory, and eminently harmful for the story. I’d like to qualify that sentiment. While I still think that stories work better as applicable metaphors than as rigid allegories, I do love the cave in Plato’s Republic, Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and even Tolkien’s own Leaf, by Niggle. All of these are allegories.
The thing about these allegories is that with the exception of The Cave, they are great stories as much as they are devices, and as such they can be reapplied to different situations or messages, or taken just as stories in themselves. Leaf, by Niggle can tell us as much about art as it can the afterlife, and Animal Farm is as much a lesson in the perils of power as it is a lesson in Russian history. And they’re eminently entertaining as mere stories.
On the other hand, Plato’s Cave may not have much of a story by itself, but it is employed not subversively, but openly – it makes no pretense to trickery, but instead serves as explanatory example of principles argued for conceptually in previous books. It seems less tyrannical for its honesty. Beyond this, you can easily find ways of seeing lessons in the allegory of the cave that go beyond merely illustrating Socrates’ point in context. People take it out of context all the time, to great effect.
But allegory is hard to get right. You want the message to work without dominating the reader. You want to be able to see the message, but still have the story work if you don’t. But in the latter scenario, is it still the same story? In Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, he develops an idea of historiography as a dialectical disruption, an academic move which tears a moment in time from its both its place in the temporal flow, losing sits places in chains of cause and effect, as its lateral context. It becomes something new and different when ripped free and concretized by the outside observer who is mired in her own flowing context. You want to disrupt the one-to-one comparison just enough to allow for some imagination in interpretation, but if you’re trying to say something specific, something you think is important, it can be tough to let it be so ripped from you and its intended context. It cannot be easy for an author to send their story out into the world, where it might – or will – be torn from them and created anew by readers. Overt allegory is one way of planting firm contextual ground in your work, one way of keeping an auteurial hold on a story so it cannot rip free and be cast off alone into the wind.
Stories & Soliloquies 