The News From Poughkeepsie - Day 53

June 13th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

General Stuff Fridays

Why don’t we do allegory and satire anymore? I mean, Animal Farm was a classic allegory, and if I’m not mistaken, today’s political and social climate pretty much begs for allegory. Why aren’t people writing more of it? I don’t really have experience doing it (but we know how to get experience, right?) but I’ve got something brewing in my head about some sort of wholesome organization, Girl Scouts, maybe, getting corrupt and frightening. Why the hell not? Would anyone buy allegory these days?

The News From Poughkeepsie is a daily blog post featuring an idea for you to take and do with what you will. Read more about it here. This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can take this idea, change it, make something new, and even make money off of it. All I ask is if you create something - anything! - that this post inspired you to make, please link back here.

There Are 3 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Nobilis on 14 June 2008:

    There’s a lot of allegory out there if you know where to look. People don’t base their books around it but there are elements.

    The evil organization in my most recent novella is a mercenary company known as “Blackstorm”.

  2. Comment by Robin on 16 June 2008:

    I agree with Nobilis (nice screen name, by the way). There’s quite a lot of allegory in modern entertainment. It’s probably easiest to create in sci-fi, fantasy, and supernatural dramas, because it’s easier to hide the metaphors under a layer of unfamiliar society than it would be in a “realistic” setting.

    The most common theme I’ve seen lately (unsurprisingly) is the hero/savior. For example, the Galactica folks have been putting in all sorts of Christ-like symbolism around Baltar. There was a scene from the second season when he’s lounging against a railing, but when they showed him from above it was a deliberate allusion to the crucifixion. Heck, just a couple of episodes ago they had him bleeding all over the place in a way that looked an awful lot like stigmata.

    Most epic dramas centered around a single (usually male) protagonist employ similar visual metaphors. It’s just an ingrained part of our collective psyche. Other examples that spring to mind are Paul Atreides in ‘Dune’, Rand al Thor in the ‘Wheel of Time’ series, Buffy Summers (the Vampire Slayer, natch), and of course Neo from the ‘Matrix’ trilogy. Not to mention Aslan from ‘Narnia’, but he was entirely deliberate and pretty blatant.

    If you’re using “allegory” in a broader sense of commentary within fiction about the state of modern affairs, again I have to point at Galactica and its exploration of civilization following a terrorist attack (albeit on an enormous scale). In fact, lot of sci-fi deals with current affairs under the guise of simple storytelling. TV executives had no idea that Gene Roddenberry was using Star Trek to comment on racism, sexism, or any other -ism, but he did so in pretty much every episode. Aliens and monsters make wonderful proxies for the disenfranchised and “the other”.

    Hmm. This has become much longer than I intended, but I hope it’s helpful and/or comforting to you. Guess I’ll go back to lurking now.

    A faithful reader,
    Robin

  3. Comment by Arkle on 17 June 2008:

    I agree there is allegory out there. It’s just not often intentional anymore. Sometimes writers create an allegory that they don’t catch until a fan points it out to them.

Post a Response