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May. 6th, 2009 04:20 pmAllegories have to be short or episodic, or they run that risk of obvious 1:1 correspondence with something that could be expressed better literally, non-fictionally, the kind Borges and others attack. Novels with allegorical, or anyway universal, aspects can get away with length by opening the text out in certain places (esp. the end - most novels are justifications for allegory, or allegory justifies most novel endings), contracting it back to mere plot interests in between them. It's not that allegories can only be static images, emblems - clearly they can involve happenings, characters, conversations, sequences - but that it's hard to come up with a vast number of details that enhance a single embodied meaning. And if you could, perhaps particularly hard to get a reader to follow or care to. So you reboot - Spenser does it many more than five times, in his endless sequence of dream houses, command centers, flowings, loomings and whatever I haven't identified yet.
(Melville too - though his digressions about whales, which so many people hate, are the most brilliant solution to providing traction to allegory I'm aware of; they're there to set up that final sequence, to make it vivid in every possible way at once, so that every physical detail in the chase is something you understand well enough by then that you can both take it into account on a literal level and not be distracted by these images from the meaning of what's happening. Perhaps he gets away with something no one else has?)
Spenser is also great at making variety come from the various ways to fail - which for him is a way to get the right path felt, even where it's hard to represent that path both directly and uninsipidly. Lindsay, Bloom and Borges follow him in this - they're all basically categorizing personality types as though they were religious heresies. More later.
(Melville too - though his digressions about whales, which so many people hate, are the most brilliant solution to providing traction to allegory I'm aware of; they're there to set up that final sequence, to make it vivid in every possible way at once, so that every physical detail in the chase is something you understand well enough by then that you can both take it into account on a literal level and not be distracted by these images from the meaning of what's happening. Perhaps he gets away with something no one else has?)
Spenser is also great at making variety come from the various ways to fail - which for him is a way to get the right path felt, even where it's hard to represent that path both directly and uninsipidly. Lindsay, Bloom and Borges follow him in this - they're all basically categorizing personality types as though they were religious heresies. More later.
