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UBC #18: Allegory
Jul. 1st, 2006 09:39 amUBC #18
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. 1964. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1995.
This book went back and forth between ideas and articulations that I found useful and thought-provoking, and statements so contrary to my understanding of literature that all I could write in the margin was NO.
It suffers from a tendency toward Causabonism: the desire to make one's theory the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything. In Fletcher's case, this involves asserting that mysteries, westerns, and science fiction are allegories without actually wanting to--you know--go slumming to prove it. Which is a pity, because there are ways in which he's right about science fiction, and ways in which a careful consideration of its tropes would actually have informed his argument helpfully.
And I come away from this book with a theoretical question of my own. I don't agree that science fiction and fantasy are allegories in the way Fletcher wants to claim they are, but I think one way to frame fantasy1 is to describe it as an allegorical landscape through which realistic2 characters move. Because there's no denying that the landscape of fantasy has a heavy allegorical charge, but the characters who interact with that landscape are not allegorical daemons, to use Fletcher's term. They're mimetic.
And that makes fantasy a rather odd beast. Like a chimera.
---
1I'm less certain that this applies to science fiction. Or, rather, I think it may apply to some works of science fiction, but not others, and that in turn may depend on whether the work in question is rooted in the novel or the romance. Growing Up Weightless, for example, has a distinctly allegorical landscape.
2"Realistic" is an awful word. I mean, in this case, characters who obey the tenets of realism in literature, i.e., they have psychological consistency.
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. 1964. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1995.
This book went back and forth between ideas and articulations that I found useful and thought-provoking, and statements so contrary to my understanding of literature that all I could write in the margin was NO.
It suffers from a tendency toward Causabonism: the desire to make one's theory the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything. In Fletcher's case, this involves asserting that mysteries, westerns, and science fiction are allegories without actually wanting to--you know--go slumming to prove it. Which is a pity, because there are ways in which he's right about science fiction, and ways in which a careful consideration of its tropes would actually have informed his argument helpfully.
And I come away from this book with a theoretical question of my own. I don't agree that science fiction and fantasy are allegories in the way Fletcher wants to claim they are, but I think one way to frame fantasy1 is to describe it as an allegorical landscape through which realistic2 characters move. Because there's no denying that the landscape of fantasy has a heavy allegorical charge, but the characters who interact with that landscape are not allegorical daemons, to use Fletcher's term. They're mimetic.
And that makes fantasy a rather odd beast. Like a chimera.
---
1I'm less certain that this applies to science fiction. Or, rather, I think it may apply to some works of science fiction, but not others, and that in turn may depend on whether the work in question is rooted in the novel or the romance. Growing Up Weightless, for example, has a distinctly allegorical landscape.
2"Realistic" is an awful word. I mean, in this case, characters who obey the tenets of realism in literature, i.e., they have psychological consistency.
