Saturday & Sundry Thoughts on Walking Away.

A short story by fantasy/science fiction author,
Ursula K. Le Guin, who died in January this year: Those Who Walk Away From Omelas, is an allegorical tale. The story is superficially simple, with layers of depth to uncover, open to a variety of interpretations depending upon a reader's experience and insight. Full text of the short story is available HERE.

A nutshell version:

In the city of Omelas, everything is beautiful and wonderful - everyone is happy, except for one small child, locked in a cellar. The child can never be shown the smallest shred of love or compassion. These are the terms on which the people of Omelas are happy, and they are non-negotiable. In order for their state of grace to continue, the child must continue to suffer. In return, once in their lifetimes, the people of Omelas must go down into the cellar and see the child who is suffering so that the observers can continue to live their happy lifestyles. Most of them enjoy the lives they lead all the more as a result of it, because they understand the sacrifice that has been made so that they can do so. Occasionally, however, someone comes out of that cellar leaves Omelas forever.

It's possible to relate the message of that story to a variety of real-life issues. There's no solution offered by its author, and no judgment. All is left to the reader.

If a reader is so inclined, the story can have a Christian interpretation: the child is a Christ figure, making it possible for the city to live joyfully because of the child's sacrifice.

My first reading of the story led me to relate the situation to the spoiled inhabitants of the developed western world relying on the sweat-shops and near slave situations in third world countries where so much the west has come to rely upon is produced.

That view came from using a wide-angle lens.

Pulling in, nearer to home, there are all kinds of injustices which echo the Omelas story. There's the ever-present problem of poverty, in one's own country and in the world. There should be no need for poverty, the Earth has always had sufficient resources for all its inhabitants to live comfortably - yet it hasn't worked out that way. A tiny - very very tiny - group of its inhabitants control the resources, and the wealth flowing from them. This leaves just sufficient resource for many of us to get by in relative comfort, but hardly anything for another large group who struggle to survive against growing odds: the metaphorical child in the cellar.

Solutions though?

Were those who walked away doing the right thing?

Were there no people who stayed behind and fought to develop "a better way"?

The message I took from the story is this: in every instance of any injustice what we should be doing is not walking away, but staying to fight. Too many of us are used to either complacently accepting injustices, especially when they seem to be to our own advantage, or walking away from them, to ease our consciences, but without even attempting to work towards changing things for the better.

"They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas." (Ursula K. Le Guin)

When I mentioned this short story in a post some 7 years ago commenters added these thoughts:

Gian Paul said...
Another angle: Domestic animals! At times one has the impression that dogs, horses, even cats (though less so) look upon us as if we were "god". They often quietly suffer, being alone, maybe hurting, or just not sufficiently occupied. Sure we can ignore that (or walk away), but not if we want to be "loved by them". So it's normal to "go down to see them", isn't it?

Sabina said...Well, walking away from implies walking towards and in this story I think it is the idea of another reality where no one need pay for the happiness of all to exist. The only Christian angle I thought of was something Jesus is reputed to have said about the least of these. Personally, while I am prepared to acknowledge the facts of, and limits of, life on this planet - including death, disease and natural disasters - I too do not believe there can be happiness and fulfillment for all while even one is excluded. It is a numerical and spiritual impossibility.

Wisewebwoman said...The cost of our "happiness" on this side of the globe is huge. I often think of the source of even every day items, what sweatshops and child labour might have been involved. Most people are deluded or refuse to dwell on such details. The devil you know philosophy. Yet we will all hunt the bargain and gloat over it without a care to its real cost. Shame on us.

Vanilla Rose said...Thank you. I must confess that I hadn't actually thought about people staying in Omelas. Perhaps in Omelas, there are experts who defend the status quo with great sincerity, but who are wrong. Perhaps the child could be released.
I'm still "walking away from omelettes" and other animal products, but yes, there are examples in life where staying and doing something would seem to be a good idea. Thank you for pointing that out.

Twilight said...Gian Paul, Sabina, WWW, & Vanilla Rose ~ Many thanks for your additional thoughts on this.

Saturday & Sundry Thoughts on Allegory as Side-effect

Allegory: we humans seem wired into it, a side-effect of human nature, encouraged and developed by early exposure to myths, parables, fables...and religion.

Allegory, as a concept, has been around since at least the days, and philosophers, of ancient Greece. I suspect that it was around but undocumented long before that. Its use and appreciation in matters religious, moral, political and general is accepted as another of our innate human characteristics.

Billy Collins' poem, The Death of Allegory, proposed that allegory is really a thing of the past. First verses are below, the rest at an archived post HERE.

The Death of Allegory
By Billy Collins

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.........

It's a clever poem, nicely done, but in truth allegory is with us still, in literature, in art, in theatre, and in film.

A blog post is no place to be delving into every instance of recognised allegory. Blog readers, few as they may be in these Facebook-ridden days, are prone to ADD, as am I! That being so, I'm interesting myself here in just a couple of instances of allegory in movies, which had flown right over my head; perhaps I've not been alone in this.

A hat-tip to a piece at Taste of Cinema for this enlightenment. From the 14 examples of movies quoted - of those I'd actually seen - I found that the allegory in these two had zoomed right over my now silvery top-knot -

High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)
The Plot: On the day of both his marriage to a pacifist Quaker (Grace Kelly) and supposed retirement, a town marshal (Gary Cooper) is given less than two hours to decide what to do about a gang of killers headed for his town – a conflict that, playing out more or less in real time, is complicated by his realization that none of his neighbors seem willing to help.

What It’s REALLY About: McCarthyism

Wait, What? To understand this one, one must take into account when the film was made. Shot in 1951 during the Korean War, the film’s plot is heavily influenced by events concerning the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Carl Foreman, the screenwriter, was called before HUAC as he was in the process of writing the script and refused to name names, causing him to be labeled an “uncooperative witness.” He was blacklisted shortly thereafter.

Watching the film with this background knowledge, it’s impossible to disregard the parallels between the town’s inaction in the face of incoming danger and the refusal of many in Hollywood to stand up for their persecuted peers. The film isn’t quite as blatant with this idea as other works about McCarthyism were at the time, such as the plays The Crucible (1953) and Inherit the Wind (1955), so it’s understandable how the message of this thoughtful Western could go over the heads of modern viewers unaware of the circumstances under which the film was made.

And

RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)
The Plot: In a futuristic Detroit, Officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is brutally gunned down by a gang of criminals, only to be brought back to life as a crime-fighting cyborg (justifying the film’s tagline: “Part man. Part machine. All cop. The future of law enforcement.”).

What It’s REALLY About: Jesus Christ (once again)

Wait, What? Director Paul Verhoeven has made no secret of his aim to portray the title character as a Christ figure. After all, Murphy suffers a cruel and painful death at the hands of laughing sadists, only to be resurrected and become a savior figure. The biggest visual clue comes at the end, when RoboCop walks through shallow water, appearing to almost walk on top of it. Of course, turning the other cheek isn’t exactly RoboCop’s style. As the Dutch director has stated, he’s “the American Jesus.”

As it happens, I've just this week ordered a used DVD of the Robo-Cop re-make starring, in place of Peter Weller, a new favourite of mine, Joel Kinnaman, whose performance in the TV series The Killing impressed me so much that we're watching the whole Netflixed series for a second time! I shall be watching the Robo-Cop re-make with yet another layer of added interest now!

A final thought, fitting for the 21st century, from Flannery O'Connor,
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose :

“In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.”

Perhaps Billy Collins was right!

Wordy Weekend

I stumbled over the word "fnord" when reading online the other day. I initially took it as a typographical error, but checked anyway.

Wikipedia: Fnord is a word used in newsgroup and hacker culture to indicate that someone is being ironic, humorous or surreal. Often placed at the end of a statement in brackets (fnord) to make the ironic purpose clear, it is a label that may be applied to any random or surreal sentence, coercive subtext, or anything jarringly out of context (intentionally or not).

So now I know.

Another look-up occurred when husband called to me "What's a pinniped?" He was in the midst of his breakfast-time read of our local newspaper. Wikipedia to the rescue again: Pinnipeds (from Latin pinna "fin" and pes, pedis "foot") commonly known as seals. Oooo-kay - but I couldn't help wondering why someone writing for a local newspaper in Oklahoma would be writing about seals, and further, why didn't they simply write "seals"?

Looking for a book to read while drying my hair I picked up a stray I didn't recognise from my bookshelves: Ella Minnow Pea. I still do not remember why I bought it, or from whence it came. It's a 2001 novel by Mark Dunn. The full title of the hardcover version is Ella Minnow Pea: a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable, while the paperback version (mine) is titled Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters.

More look-ups!

A lipogram (from Ancient Greek leipográmmatos, "leaving out a letter") is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting in writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided — usually a common vowel, and frequently E, the most common letter in the English language. Larousse defines a lipogram as a "literary work in which one compels oneself strictly to exclude one or several letters of the alphabet."

Writing a lipogram may be a trivial task when avoiding uncommon letters like Z, J, Q, or X, but it is much more difficult to avoid common letters like E, T or A, as the author must omit many ordinary words. Grammatically meaningful and smooth-flowing lipograms can be difficult to compose. Identifying lipograms can also be problematic, as there is always the possibility that a given piece of writing in any language may be unintentionally lipogrammatic. For example, Poe's poem The Raven contains no Z, but there is no evidence that this was intentional.

I haven't read very far into the novel yet, and am not confident I shall stick with it.
From the book's back cover:

Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island's Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel. The result is both a hilarious and moving story of one girl's fight for freedom of expression, as well as a linguistic tour de force sure to delight word lovers everywhere.

*pangram: a sentence or phrase that includes all the letters of the alphabet.

From the little I've read, so far, I have Ella Minnow Pea categorised as a very, very twee lady's version of "1984", and suspect I shall come to the conclusion that it'd be preferable to re-read "1984".

Ella Minnow Pea is, I guess, an allegorical novel. At last, a word I do know well!
Simple Definition of allegory : a story in which the characters and events are symbols that stand for ideas about human life or for a political or historical situation.

All of which brings me nicely to this:

Flicking through my copy of "Taking Off Emily Dickinson's Clothes" (oddly named volume of selected poems by Billy Collins) I landed on The Death of Allegory. I like it! It reminded me of a couple of old posts of mine touching on the topic of allegory: Stops on a Mythical Journey from 2013; and The Rabbit Hole of a Wandering Mind from last year.

To save copy typing I've lifted it from Poetry Foundation website.

(I trust I am not going to be hauled over the coals copyright-wise - if I am breaking any law the item will be removed forthwith upon instruction to do so.)




The Death of Allegory
By Billy Collins

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.

Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,

Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.

Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.

Even if you called them back, there are no places left
for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.
The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums
and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies
and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,
exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,
objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,

themselves and nothing more, a wheelbarrow,
an empty mailbox, a razor blade resting in a glass ashtray.
As for the others, the great ideas on horseback
and the long-haired virtues in embroidered gowns,

it looks as though they have traveled down
that road you see on the final page of storybooks,
the one that winds up a green hillside and disappears
into an unseen valley where everyone must be fast asleep.

The Rabbit Hole of a Wandering Mind

Wikipedia's list of events for 6 May includes this entry:
"6 MAY 1940 – John Steinbeck is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath". That novel's title has always impressed me. Delving further into Wiki's store of knowledge I find that:

While writing the novel at his home.... Steinbeck had unusual difficulty devising a title. The Grapes of Wrath, suggested by his wife Carol Steinbeck, was deemed more suitable than anything by the author. The title is a reference to lyrics from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", by Julia Ward Howe:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored......

These lyrics refer, in turn, to the biblical passage Revelation 14:19–20, an apocalyptic appeal to divine justice and deliverance from oppression in the final judgment. This and other biblical passages had inspired a long tradition of imagery of Christ in the winepress in various media.

My mind wandered on, to other similar descriptive phrases from another book, a much older one: The Pilgrim's Progress: by John Bunyan

...the allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, written during Bunyan’s twelve-year imprisonment although not published until 1678 six years after his release, that made Bunyan’s name as an author with its immediate success. It remains the book for which Bunyan is best remembered. The images Bunyan uses in The Pilgrim's Progress are reflections of images from his own world; the strait gate is a version of the wicket gate at Elstow Abbey church, the Slough of Despond is a reflection of Squitch Fen, a wet and mossy area near his cottage in Harrowden, the Delectable Mountains are an image of the Chiltern Hills surrounding Bedfordshire. Even his characters, like the Evangelist as influenced by John Gifford, are reflections of real people.

There's a post in the archives expanding on such descriptive phrases...
.. Stops on a Mythical Journey.

While reading The White Monkey, one of John Galsworthy's continuation novels from his Forsyte Saga I noticed this lovely pair of descriptive phrases and jotted them down for an occasion such as this:

"The chrysalis of faint misgiving becomes so readily the butterfly of panic."

And ain't that the truth!

The mind wandered still further, into allegory and its history...the path became murky - too tangled for a simple blogger's blog post. Enough to say that allegory, as a concept, has been around since at least the days and philosophers of ancient Greece, and quite likely, undocumented, long before that. Its use and appreciation in matters religious, moral, political and general, seems to be another of our innate human characteristics.

One of the 20th century's most popular authors, J.R.R. Tolkien wasn't a fan of allegory (or so he said):

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so 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.”

Personally, I don't care what an author intended as allegory. If I read a novel I see in it what I see in it, and if it's something different from the author's allegorical intention - tough! I'll be doing applicability.