the ramble dump

As a sort of a continuation of this post, which was about the worth of stories beyond entertainment, and possibly linked to this post, which discusses what might and might not count as 'art', I was thinking about the complexity of some stories, with all the metaphors, inferences and allusions that they can be filled with. My main question, as I was reading all about this kind of thing in the introduction to Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway for the lecture and seminar next week, was: to what end?

Returning to all the talk in that first linked post of stories being able to suggest, the most obvious answer would probably be that all the figurative language and symbolic descriptions and motifs and so on can, obviously, be used beyond their simple function as poetic narrative to illustrate the kinds of things that a book or film or play is considering, using comparisons that may be effective enough to throw a new light or a different perspective on the subject matter.

Of course, there will always be some manipulation occurring here on the part of the author. This is why, for all the importance of receptivity and open-mindedness when it comes to art, the practice of literary criticism and the like can be a useful thing. The author is likely to be playing with the perceptions, preconceptions or ideas of the reader or audience to illicit a certain response -- this is one of the most powerful features of storytelling -- and it's up to the reader to be equally open-minded and rational enough to be able to identify where he or she might be the subject of this manipulation; and then to decide if the way in which the author is provoking this response might, as the author thinks it does, have something to it. As well as identifying manipulation, a critical approach can be used to mine the worth of a story. After consideration, you might feel that a certain comparison yields some truth; that the alternative perspective offered might just be of some value.

I've already mentioned my wariness of allegory. Allegory is the use of an extended metaphor to get a point across. But if I don't object to the potential philosophical value of figurative language in general, how can I object to allegory? What's the difference beyond levels of subtlety? Well, the extension of metaphor in this way, after representing something in a certain way as all metaphors do, then has the clear intention of drawing a conclusion from it for you. As Tolkien said in a passage I've already quoted, allegory is all about the 'purposed domination of the author' -- it sets out to make your mind up for you. The more subtle use of figurative language and symbology, as I've already said, is not without its potential for manipulation, but there's more freedom for the reader, more room for interpretation. The further you try to extend a metaphor, the less suggestive and the more controlling of the interpretation you're being, and it's much more likely that the comparison is then distorted or oversimplified as a result.

There are other ways in which inference can be abused. When I was thinking about Wilde's opinion of art, I mentioned pretentiousness. That could be applied here in the cases of those who will infer and allude and present empty motifs just for the sake of seeming clever. Poetic pretentiousness can often be found in the use of 'purple prose', by those who attempt to use over-elaborate and extremely flowery language to add prestige or suchlike to their work, and this can then be taken a step further by those who use similar methods to portray themselves as profound. When an author seems to think that the esotericism of a text is an indicator of how philosophically deep it is and rattles off some lengthy, convoluted metaphor supposedly, for example, penetrating the fundamental human condition (or something like that), we would have to question how someone could talk for so long out of their own arse.

Here's another form this pretence might take. For this next one, I'm going to use an example that could be argued either way. I seem to use these films as an example for a lot of things, but anyway: many have claimed that the Matrix films are very 'philosophical' in nature. The story is undoubtedly packed with a thousand inferences, references and allusions to all kinds of philosophers and different schools of philosophical thought in varying degrees of subtlety; but maybe all these things were dropped in merely to give the illusion that the films had philosophical depth (which would have been ironic, considering the subject of the films). Were the Wachowski Brothers trying too hard to make the films seem 'intelligent', or do the Matrix films really give us something to think about?

As fun a game as it might be for us to successfully identify all the various references and incorporated symbology in the films, and as clever as it might make the audience and the filmmakers feel, it may be an ultimately pointless activity. An argument often given in defence of the films is something along the lines of, 'You didn't enjoy the films because you haven't attempted to appreciate all the philosophy behind it', to which the retort is usually, 'You need to get out more.' It's hard to say how much genuine philosophy is involved in the Matrix films and how much is just there to give the impression of it (I'd say it seems a bit of both -- I think it illustrates a lot of philosophical ideas pretty well and gives us a lot to think about, but there are times when it feels like a bit of a symbological overload or philosophy for the look of it).

But in these films, and in many other films and books and so on, why require the audience or reader to have to look for these things? Why bury them so that they have to be dug out? This was already sort of answered by the allegory issue: this way, the 'answer' isn't being thrown at the audience. The fact that the readers of a book or the viewers of a film have to do more of the work invites them in and encourages them to think about it more for themselves. It encourages different interpretations and a more critical evaluation, meaning that, if it's there, the useful and relevant stuff can be properly discovered and appreciated. To use a Matrix analogy (which is, aptly, in itself a reference to something else), tumbling down the rabbit hole and having a thorough look around is surely preferable to having the rabbit come up and give you his potentially biased account.

Labels: allegory, cyberpunk, i am the ramblemaster, language, oscar wilde, philosophy, rabbit-hole theory, the matrix, tolkien

# posted by Chris @ 6:33 PM 0 comments

The Aberration Chapter 7.

Amelia really does have that many notebooks. I've never seen them myself, but she has mentioned them more than once. She has lots for all different kinds of things and thoughts and ideas. I wonder if you could assemble all the contents of her brain with those notebooks, like a sort of psychological biography with a split personality. I know that the black one is for Starcustard. I am sure at least one of them contains a list of the children she has yet to eat.

She is not here right now, so I can get away with saying these things for at least another eighteen months.

Underneath that Sherlock Holmes reference is a considerable amount of truth. I lack the notebooks of both fictional and factual Amelias, but the same sort of process goes on in my brain when I'm trying to write a story. Things like sciencing and philosophising and most probably detectiving too all require very analytical approaches to be of much use. Storytelling, however, is the opposite. You can get ideas from all over the place, and while they might all share the same theme or have something in common, you're still left with the task of making something coherent out of what is essentially arbitrary. Whatever reason you might have for including something, whether as a plot device or to represent something or just because you thought it'd be cool to throw in, they're still only there because you put them there.¹ There is therefore a great deal of Detective Muse's making stuff up as you go along.

As I've mentioned before, The Aberration has been a continuous struggle to try and achieve this. I started off with a couple of Halo parody characters, included a few more things just because I thought they were interesting enough, and then over the years the story has repeatedly run out of steam as I've tried to figure out where to go next or what relation any of it has to anything else. Its current form is very different from its earlier iterations, in which the aim was basically just to fill it with weird things, because I've got stuck and had to go back and change things constantly.

I've finally mapped out something that's a bit more coherent than it used to be, by mentally rearranging and adding to and editing the thing until it's formed something I can actually go somewhere with. But does all this arbitrariness, the fact that everything included is ultimately an arbitrary decision, mean that stories are empty? Well, as tA has shown, there's actually a limit to how arbitrary everything can be before it falls apart. It has to have some coherence, and even if the story works by its own internal logic or requires some suspension of disbelief, the logic still has to be there, and any kind of sustainable logic has to be based at least in part on reality.

Fictional stories are, for the most part, contrived. And creating the illusion that these things aren't arbitrary is all part of the craft. But reality plays its part, and the further a story drifts from it, the less believable it will be. This doesn't mean you can't include fantastical elements in your world's internal logic, and as Holmes points out and Detective Muse echoes in this chapter, improbability is not the same thing as impossibility. But that internal logic needs to be solid.

So where does this leave the meaningfulness of a story, beyond its entertainment value or simple emotional engagement? That internal logic, however sustainable or believable it might be, could still be considered arbitrary. Can you use a story to analyse or demonstrate something? Can you show, say, the personal, social or political consequences of certain circumstances being brought about? Or present a moral lesson or a warning? You can't scientifically analyse a work of fiction any more than you can analyse a dream (albeit a slightly more focused dream). But if the logic behind the story is reasonable enough, you can suggest. You, as the author, can throw light on an alternative interpretation; your interpretation. Conclusions drawn from a writer's own fictional world -- by the writer and reader -- can never be truly objective, but they can offer some balance of thoughts and ideas. In the end, you can't really conclude anything with a story. They can only offer questions. They can offer a new perspective, one that will always be open to criticism but is not necessarily without its worth. That, to me, is part of what it's all about.

And, as in the case of tA, things like fat men in tweed or talking microwaves or a man dressed in a mutated sort of rabbit costume, even if they were included out of complete arbitrariness to start with, can still become something suggestive or figurative in the context of their function in the story. And who knows, maybe there was already some subconscious significance to them.

So Detective Muse has a point, even if Mr Holmes might disagree that it applies in entirely the same way to his profession. Don't diss the improbable, don't diss the ridiculous, and don't be too quick to diss the arbitrary.

¹ Which is why allegory can seem so manipulative.

Labels: allegory, fat men in tweed, halo, i am the ramblemaster, science, starcustard, the aberration

# posted by Chris @ 12:31 PM 0 comments

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 4 comments