the ramble dump

When I studied Orwell's Animal Farm in school at the age of about eleven or twelve, it was never a book I was particularly fond of, perhaps just because I found the subject matter so bleak. But it still held its status as a book of value and an important piece of satirical literature.

However, while being an obvious allegory may have been the whole point of it, when I found out that all the events and characters were supposed to represent different aspects of the Soviet Union and its history, with the pigs based on certain individuals and the horses representing the classes and the building of the windmill an analogy of the Soviet's Five-Year Plans and so on and so forth - I remember feeling a bit disappointed that it was so blatant. Sure, it's supposed to be like that; it's supposed to be a frank and direct criticism of the Soviet Union. But nevertheless, I felt there was something ungenuine about it, which took the shine off the book's prestige for me. Not that all this was consciously articulated in my twelve-year-old mind - back then it was just the slight feeling that I was being lectured and that I didn't much like it.

Many people have suggested that Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings was an allegory for the World Wars. Tolkien responded to this in a foreword to the second edition:

It is neither allegorical nor topical...I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Another real danger of allegories as well as this is that characters are too often reduced to abstractions. They're there to have some kind of meaning but can end up, as characters, a bit meaningless. A notorious example of this would be one from the world of recent cinema: the Matrix trilogy. The trilogy as a whole illustrates some fine and worthy philosophical issues (albeit not especially original ones), with regards to metaphysics at least. However, one of the criticisms of the sequels in particular was that they were convoluted, bloated on all the philosophy the Wachowski brothers were trying to cram into it.

A good deal of this was religious allegory. The allusions to Neo as Christ had been strong since the first film. The same was true of the allusions to Nietzsche's ubermensch. But the first film at least worked as a story independent of allegory going by the logic of the world presented. In the sequels, however, when they continued down this path, the story began to break down. After Neo lifts up his hand and fries the Sentinel at the end of Reloaded, we're never really given an explanation for it in the third film. Exchanges between characters which should have provided us with some explanation of what was happening were vague because they couldn't be any other way. Neo's powers have supposedly transcended the Matrix. He's supposedly connected to the Source. But really, how does that work when he's in the Real World? You can believe it at a stretch going by the logic of the world as it's been presented to you so far, but it's a long stretch and a sloppy explanation. Eventually it seems to break down to, 'Because it's an allegory of...' And all these characters who were vaguely interesting in the first film have been reduced to passive, dimensionless parts of it.

Of course, if I've missed something in my attempts to understand the trilogy, I'd be happy to hear it. But despite all these allusions and allegories that were piled on top of me, it ends up feeling a bit empty.

[Edit: amendment.]

Labels: allegory, films, i am the ramblemaster, literature, morality, orwell, rabbit-hole theory, the matrix, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 3:19 PM