UBC #18: Allegory

[truepenny]

UBC #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.

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Seems to me it could be argued that all fiction is allegories about the recent past. (Not about the present, because by the time a story is published the time in which it was written has become the past.)

[vass]

Causabonism: the desire to make one's theory the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything.

*giggle*

asserting that mysteries, westerns, and science fiction are allegories without actually wanting to--you know--go slumming to prove it.

Ugh. I think I'll give this book a miss. It'll be better for my temper that way.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Sometimes it is an allegorical landscape. But sometimes the landscape is a character, and sometimes it's what it's all about. Sometimes I'm reading just as much to find out more about the world, the history, the way the universe works, the background, the landscape as I am to find out what happens to the characters. (I keep trying to think of examples, and every single one seems to be SF or SF that looks like fantasy -- The Left Hand of Darkness, Lord Valentine's Castle, Golden Witchbreed, Darkover, Jaran, Dune the Dragaera books -- maybe I just don't read enough fantasy.)

Allegory keeps us *centered* as in self

[nannypockets.livejournal.com]

I almost agree with you. This is a book I want to read. For Science Fiction, well, it might *only* appear to be a "less odd beast" when in fact, that's the illusion of human desire