泡网俱乐部

有人说，越抽象的东西，离生活越远。这是个很好的问题，但答案并非如此简单。这里有篇关于象征主义和寓言的文章，可以一读。

Sanity through Symbolism

- Kirsty Milne

THEY NEVER left him. When he tried to sleep, they lay in a heap beside him, muttering and twitching. When he wanted to pray, they followed him into the temple. Their quarry had killed his mother. They knew where he was by the smell of the blood on his hands.

The Furies, vengeful canine pursuers who hunt down parricides, are among the most frightening figures in Greek mythology. When the Athenian playwright Aeschylus was writing the final part of his Oresteia triology, he put the Furies on stage, a snarling canine chorus on the trail of his hero, Orestes. They are Orestes's punishment for killing his mother, Clytemnestra. But for a modern audience, they embody his terrible guilt.

Two-and-a-half thousand years later, TS Eliot again invoked the Furies - Eumenides as they were called in Greek - in his verse drama The Family Reunion, revived by the Royal Shakespeare Company in a production that opens at the Newcastle Playhouse next week. Eliot kept the idea of the family curse, but swapped real for virtual murders. His main character, Harry, trailed by the Eumenides, believes he has killed his wife, but the play makes it clear that while he might have wished her dead, he did not kill her. The Eumenides bear witness to Harry's mental anguish, not to his actual guilt. (Eliot's biographer, Peter Ackroyd, finds echoes in the play of the poet's tormented marriage and divorce. Harry's wife is described as "a restless shivering painted shadow", a phrase that could equally be applied to Eliot's first wife, Vivien.)

Eliot was dissatisfied with The Family Reunion, which first opened in 1939. It fell short of what he wanted to create, a modern version of a Greek classic. In the theatre, it has become notorious for the problem of how to present the Eumenides. A Manchester Royal Exchange production in the late Seventies showed them as vast Ku Klux Klan figures draped in white. More recently, they were shown as midget versions of Harry's relatives. In Adrian Noble's RSC production, they appear in dark clothes with stockings over their heads, reminding one critic of "a collection of Anglican carol singers who've stolen a leaf from the terrorists' PR handbook". It must be tempting for a director to opt for naturalism and drop them altogether, relying on the actor to convey the impression that Harry is seeing them; just as in Hamlet it is increasingly common to portray the Ghost as a projection of Hamlet's grief and paranoia.

The truth is that allegory has gone out of fashion. For centuries it was the language of religion, the playground of literature, from the Seven Deadly Sins to The Pilgrim's Progress. But it has fallen out of favour. Symbolism is psychologically suspect. How would we describe, in today's terms, Orestes's perception that he was being hounded by Furies? As "projection", "transference", "dissociation"? As thoroughly unhealthy, in other words. Long before he was arrested for Clytemnestra's murder, Orestes would have been sectioned for delusional behaviour.

Modern expectations of sanity are too high. Ideas about healing the mind have followed too closely the analogy of healing the body. We expect wholeness. We expect people to contain every emotion, every experience, however terrible. We do not expect them to go splitting off bits of consciousness, personifying their emotions, or living in a world of allegorical spin-offs.

Yet centuries of experience suggest that these are strategies for tolerating what might otherwise seem intolerable. Easier to externalise remorse as a pack of mythological tormentors than face up to matricide. Easier to blame a "black dog", as Churchill did, than admit to being a politician with chronic depression. Easier to characterise love as an illness than own up to adultery.

Literature thrives on such survival strategies. Charlotte Bronte is using allegory when Reason and Passion fight over whether Jane Eyre should abandon the married Mr Rochester. In Samson Agonistes, Milton used the imprisoned hero as an allegory for his despair at the collapse of Cromwell's Republic and the restoration of Charles II. John Bunyan was intending to write a straightforward tract for Christians in spiritual crisis when he "fell suddenly into an Allegory" that became The Pilgrim's Progress.

Allegory's great 20th-century exponent is CS Lewis. As a scholar, he wrote about it in The Allegory of Love, a study of the medieval literary form preferred by Chaucer and Spenser. As a children's author, he practised it in his Narnia books. The underlying Christian meaning is obvious to adult readers, whether in the dawn resurrection of Aslan (The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe), or in Eustace's baptismal transformation from dragon to boy (The Voyage of the Dawn Treader).

But Lewis's study seems dated, just as his children's books seem dated. The decline of Christianity has accelerated the decline of allegory. Twentieth-century literature, powerfully influenced by the best US writers, values naturalism over metaphor, realism over symbolism. Freud, by elevating the subconscious to the role of author, did not help allegory's cause. Under the new dispensation, instead of offering relief or escape, projections and imaginings merely offer an incriminating trail back to the id. While psychotherapy has given us a new working vocabulary to describe feelings and states of mind, it tends to drown out the therapeutic poetry of abstraction. Therapeutic is a Greek word that Aeschylus would have recognised. He knew about healing; that is how his trilogy culminates. His Furies turn out to be less menacing than they look. In the final part of The Oresteia, their efforts to exact a primitive blood-price are thwarted. A jury of Athenian elders hears both sides of the case and votes to set Orestes free. Enraged, the Furies threaten to poison the city that has so insulted their ancient rights; but the goddess Athene sweet-talks them into a new role as benign civic mascots (the name Eumenides means "Kindly Ones").

In The Family Reunion, Harry too is freed from his family curse, and leaves, with "recovered sanity", to be led by the Eumenides into a life of altruism. They are "bright angels" to him now. Projection brings about healing.

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