Wife was watching District 9 the other night. I didn’t join her because my head still hurts from being hit repeatedly with the “This is about apartheid!” stick the first time I saw it.
I may be over-sensitive to allegory. In the 4th grade I was subjected to The Pilgrim’s Progress and thought that the stone obviousness was intentionally funny, though later I realized it’s supposed to be intensely dull. Then in 7th grade my English teacher thought we should all read Animal Farm. Y’know, it’s not subtle when you can go through it and say, “Snowball is Trotsky except when he’s Lenin,” and I preferred the anti-Soviet propaganda in Religion class because it had comics.
So, are there any subtle allegories out there, or is it impossible for a work to contain both natures without causing the universe to implode? For more fun, what are some over the top allegories that we can laugh at? Or, better yet, works with which the creator tried to be subtle, but failed miserably?
Actually, you’d be surprised on how many people seemingly miss seemingly obvious allegories. For example, during my sophomore year in high school, I heard a student complain about having to read some stupid childish book about talking farm animals and nasty pigs. It was, of course, the aforementioned Animal Farm. Apparently, the fact it was an allegory about the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalin missed her completely. (And what was really irritating was she ended up with better grades than I got that semester.)
Given that the Russian Revolution was nearly a hundred years ago allowances should be made and explanations should be provided. The teacher probably said something but your friend missed it. Or didn’t care. The Cold War was still raging when I read it.
Likewise, since this happened in 1981. Incidentally, I did not have the same literature class that was reading “Animal Farm” so I wouldn’t know what–if anything–the teacher said about the book being an allegory for the Russian Revolution. I had read the book several years earlier on my own and knew enough about the history of the Soviet Union to get the obvious character parallels.
The magical slippers are indeed silver in the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, although there’s little reason to believe there was any sort of political symbolism intended.
“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.”- J. R. R. Tolkien
Samuel Beckett always denied that there was any allegory involved (he said it was merely a story “about people who are like that”), but I think*** Waiting For Godot ***had an effective and subtle allegory.
Vladimir and Estragon represent human beings who are waiting for God to manifest Himself. They wait a long time, and he never seems to appear… but a child (representing the Church and the prophets) keeps arriving and telling them to keep waiting, for Godot will surely come tomorrow.
They’re let wondering (as the faithful in the real world must occasionally wonder) if
Godot will arrive if they just wait faithfully a little longer
They’re wasting their time waiting for someone who will never arrive (and who sounds like an abusive bastard… is he worth waiting for even if he’s real?)
Maybe Godot has already come and gone and they just failed to recognize him (remember, Vladimir starts to wonder if perhaps Pozzo WAS Godot!)… just as Christians believe Jesus (who was God) came to Earth and was ignored or rejected by countless people who were faithfully awaiting the coming of the Messiah, because he wasn’t what they were expecting.
I’m going to defend NDP’s student here, because Animal Farm is pretty worthless as literature these days. It’s more of a piece of historical fiction, and should be read in history class immersed in its proper historical context.
Here’s the point of Animal Farm: STALIN IS BAD! No, really! He isn’t a pleasant little Socialist you’d invite over for tea! If he were here, the entirety of the Left Book Club, not to mention most other things, would be shot, sent to gulags, or shot and then sent to gulags!
That’s what Orwell was trying to get across. That’s what he’d been yelling for a while before he wrote the book, too. He was writing in a time and place (Britain in the Second World War) when that actually needed to be said. He couldn’t find a publisher for Animal Farm until after the war.
Orwell was an odd figure in the Britain of his time in that he was an avowed Socialist who was also unabashedly anti-Stalin, and had been since before the war. Orwell realized that, even if your enemy is Hitler, your allies aren’t necessarily nice people, or even nice in comparison. It’s possible for evil to find a reason to fight someone who’s just as evil.
All of the foregoing really needs to be part of any study of Animal Farm. Otherwise, yeah, it’s pretty pointless; it was written to fulfill a specific role that no longer needs to be filled, and it was written in a specific context that’s fairly alien to most people alive today. Strip it of its context, and it lives down to all of the worst stereotypes of English class: The over-analysis of a simplistic story you’d never dream of reading for pleasure.
