the ramble dump

It returned to that same old fight, as it always does after a few drinks. I was arguing that literature can change the way people look at the world. Then one friend asked me something interesting. She asked, 'But has there really been a book that's done that? What novel has changed your life?'

I paused. The honest answer was that no single novel had ever radically changed my outlook on life. I told her that. But then I told her that literature doesn't need to radically change anything. It only has to make you think.

We talked about Orwell's 1984. It was her own choice of example, presumably because it has had the label of 'great novel' attached to it. She seemed to view it as some kind of paranoid manifesto against government and surveillance and declared it unlikely. I countered that it served as a warning. Maybe it was unlikely to happen, but it wasn't just about how many CCTV cameras we get captured on every day. I told her it was about the potential dangers of a controlling government, refuting as I usually do the line of thought that 'if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about', because that entirely depends on what the government considers to be 'wrong'. If you have a Big Brother character whose main aim is to stay in power, 'wrong' could be anything that is felt to be a threat to that power. This threat could even be the ability of people to think for themselves: while we were so busy arguing over surveillance, we both completely forgot to mention anything about doublethink, about dumbing down the language, about how this language can be used to control...

1984 isn't important because it makes us go around pointing the accusing finger at every sign of government we see. It's not seeking revolution through paranoia. It's there to make us think. It is there to make us aware of the potential issues, however much we might feel they apply to our own lives, our own government, our own whatever.

No single book has ever completely changed how I look at the world, but countless novels have, for better or for worse, caused countless small shifts in my perspective. Like all art, literature can still have massive influence on the way we think. I think it's worth taking seriously just for that.

Labels: censorship, i am the ramblemaster, literature, morality, orwell

# posted by Chris @ 11:32 AM 1 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