PART II. FEATURES OF A PARABLE
2.1 Parables as a genre
A parable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse that illustrates a moral or religious lesson. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human characters. It is a type of analogy.
Some scholars of the New Testament apply the term “parable” only to the parables of Jesus, though that is not a common restriction of the term. Parables such as “The Prodigal Son” are central to Jesus’ teaching method in both the canonical narratives and the apocrypha. The word “parable” comes from the Greek "παραβολή" (parabolē), the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative, generally referring to something that might naturally occur, by which spiritual and moral matters might be conveyed.
A parable is a short tale that illustrates universal truth, one of the simplest of narratives. It sketches a setting, describes an action, and shows the results. It often involves a character facing a moral dilemma, or making a questionable decision and then suffering the consequences. As with a fable, a parable generally relates a single, simple, consistent action, without extraneous detail or distracting circumstances. Examples of parables are Ignacy Krasicki's Son and Father, The Farmer, Litigants and The Drunkard, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Spire andothers [43].
Many folktales could be viewed as extended parables and many fairy tales also, except for their magical settings. The prototypical parable differs from the apologue in that it is a realistic story that seems inherently probable and takes place in a familiar setting of life.
A parable is like a metaphor that has been extended to form a brief, coherent fiction. Christian parables have recently been studied as extended metaphors, for example by a writer who finds that “parables are stories about ordinary men and women who find in the midst of their everyday lives surprising things happening. They are not about ‘giants of the faith’ who have religious visions”. Needless to say, “extended metaphor” alone is not in itself a sufficient description of parable; the characteristics of an “extended metaphor” are shared by the fable and are the essential core of allegory [43, 140-156].
Unlike the situation with a simile, a parable’s parallel meaning is unspoken and implicit, though not ordinarily secret.
The defining characteristic of the parable is the presence of a prescriptive subtext suggesting how a person should behave or believe. Aside from providing guidance and suggestions for proper action in life, parables frequently use metaphorical language which allows people to more easily discuss difficult or complex ideas. In Plato's Republic, parables like the “Parable of the Cave” (in which one's understanding of truth is presented as a story about being deceived by shadows on the wall of a cave) teach an abstract argument, using a concrete narrative which is more easily grasped [12].
In the preface to his translation of Aesop’s Fables, George Fyler Townsend defined “parable” as “the designed use of language purposely intended to convey a hidden and secret meaning other than that contained in the words themselves, and which may or may not bear a special reference to the hearer or reader” [12, p.167-172].
Townsend may have been influenced by the contemporary expression, “to speak in parables”, connoting obscurity. In common modern uses of “parable”, though their significance is never explicitly stated, parables are not generally held to be hidden or secret but on the contrary are typically straightforward and obvious. It is the allegory that typically features hidden meanings.
As H.W. Fowler puts it in Modern English Usage, the object of both parable and allegory “is to enlighten the hearer by submitting to him a case in which he has apparently no direct concern, and upon which therefore a disinterested judgment may be elicited from him” [20]. The parable, though, is more condensed than the allegory: a single principle comes to bear, and a single moral is deduced as it dawns on the reader or listener that the conclusion applies equally well to his own concerns. Parables are favored in the expression of spiritual concepts. The best known source of parables in Christianity is the Bible, which contains numerous parables in the Gospels section of the New Testament. Jesus' parables, which are attested in many sources and are almost universally seen as being historical, are thought by scholars such as John P. Meier to have come from mashalim, a form of Hebrew comparison. Medieval interpreters of the Bible often treated Jesus' parables as detailed allegories, with symbolic correspondences found for every element in the brief narratives. Modern critics, beginning with Adolf Jülicher, regard these interpretations as inappropriate and untenable. Jülicher held that these parables usually are intended to make a single important point, and most recent scholarship agrees [12, 198-205].
In Sufi tradition, parables (“teaching stories”) are used for imparting lessons and values. Recent authors such as Idries Shah and Anthony de Mello have helped popularize these stories beyond Sufi circles.
Modern stories can be used as parables. A mid-19th-century parable, the “Parable of the Broken Window”, exposes a fallacy in economic thinking.
Heinz Politzer, the author of “Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox”, defined a parable as a paradox formed into a story. Speaking about Kafka's special gift for writing parables, he concluded, “He created symbols which through their paradoxical form expressed the inexpressible without betraying it”. Three distinctive elements of parable shine through this opening definition of the genre. First, a parable must contain a paradox or paradoxes - irreconcilable but equally plausible configurations of reality. Secondly, the parabolic form of discourse is not a gratuitous form, i.e. one among many forms that an author happens to choose, but rather one that the parabler must choose for a raid on the inexpressible. (The parable might choose its writer, if that doesn't make matters more obscure). In this sense the creator of a parable uses symbols the way a poet uses metaphorical language, not as ornament, but as the only way to speak. A third element concerns the duty of the artist to express the inexpressible without violating it. The idea of violation would include reductionism, making paradoxical elements of life seem simpler and more resolvable than they actually are. Or reaching closure in a story where psychic suspension would be the only honest denouement. This element of parables may be what leaves readers “hanging” [12].
Part of the difficulty in orienting parables among related literary genre - allegories, myths, fables, fairy tales, aphoristic or didactic stories - stems from the fact that parable study was once the exclusive province of Biblical scholars who considered all of the stories of the Old and New Testaments to be parables. While it is true that the Hebrew word covers all figurative language “from the riddle to the long and fully developed allegory”, modem scholars have imposed more refinement on the taxonomies. Some material from the Bible qualifies under modern definitions of parable, some does not.
The central element of parables is paradox, as Politzer noted. When a story has been completed there must be an irreducible paradox left. As Dominick Crossan puts it, “the original paradox should still be there at any and every level of reading” [12, p.55-63].
The aphorism “A stitch in time saves nine” does no more than extol the virtue of preventive maintenance or nipping trouble in the bud. This is true of all expressions or stories that can be reduced to an appeal: “Act like this and all will be well”. When a story can be translated into a direct message, and metaphorical expressions replaced by direct ones, the story cannot be considered a parable.
2.2 Form and content of parables
Marshall McLuhan in “Understanding Media” makes a number of arguments pertinent to the study of parables as a form. The first is that the form of communication has proliferate psychic consequences that are independent of content. To briefly illustrate, reading a play in the quiet of one's home and attending a live performance of the same play will be different psychic and social experiences. At home the ear is irrelevant, while at the live performance the ear must share the play with the eye. The home is private and individual whereas the live performance is public and socially shared. Only at the level of meaning might the alternative forins merge, but even there, different meanings may be derived from the “same” experience [23, p.115-124].
A culture may be at least partially defined as the sum of its communicative forms. Oral cultures, where speaking, listening and remembering predominate, differ from print cultures where writing, reading, and record keeping occur. Parables look like an old form since they still lend themselves to oral presentation. Being a form that has fallen into disuse outside religious circles, the parable looks alien, but being strange it also arrests attention, and excites curiosity. New forms facilitate certain social relationships while rendering others obsolete [12].
Parables as a form can be better understood against this background of illustrations. They are stories, of moderate length, amenable to repeated readings in one short sitting. They surprise the reader, arrest the regular “processing” of information and, in so doing, irritate the psyche. The reader cannot quite let go, because letting go is usually conditioned on closure which in the case of a true parable cannot be reached [13].
Thus when the parable is officially “ended”, the reader cannot serenely put the parable to rest. It sits in the psychic craw as a piece of unfinished business.
Parables are cool, inviting and participatory, unless sabotaged. For instance, Faulkner draws the reader into the story, but once in, the participation of the reader begins, rather than ends. The more powerful the parable, the more furious the involvement, the more sustained and profound the impact [36, p.56-59]. Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life.
Readers can feel their minds bend as they try to follow the above dialogue. A persistent immersion of students and teachers in parables would make them different as individuals and different in the ways they respond to each other. If this seems to be parabolic megalomania and absurd, perhaps the later material in the paper will make it seem less so.
Marshall McLuhan distinguishes several features of parables [31]:
1. The parable allows deep communication between the narrator and the reader. The parable begins “benignly”, disarming readers, drawing them in, and encouraging them to compare features of the story to their own experiences. They identify with a certain character or characters, and with the characters encounter dilemmas or unanticipated circumstances that call for choices. At this point the story teller departs and readers must tap their own resources, moving more deeply into self examination.
2. The parable involves indirect communication that provokes self discovery. Direct communication conveys information and, by reference to authorities, endorses certain lines of thought. By contrast, a parable presents a moral knot which the reader must untie by inward reflection and choice. Whereas direct communication creates observers and listeners, indirect communication creates participants and action. Those who prefer to “learn about the world” in a direct and controlled way, lose control of their responses when they encounter the parable. The parable carries them, willingly or unwillingly, inward toward undiscovered dimensions of self.
3. Experiences with indirect communication cultivate the capability for developing the self. Whereas direct learning does not change the capability of a person (learning simply adds to knowledge) indirect communication jolts the person out of mental routines once and for all. Rather than a simple change in information there is a change in consciousness. Like the seeds of the sower in the New Testament, the parable does not always fall on receptive ground, but even in such instances, the person is placed on notice that a world outside regular understanding exists.
5. And the last is that parables are memorable and amenable to oral tradition.
V.A. Harvey and H. Bergson distinguish some more features of parables [3, 20]:
1. Generalization of the meaning - the situations described in the parable can be applied in real life.
2. The structure of the parable reflects the world sensation of the people who started to learn about the world.
3. An action has a parable character only when it is said in it: act like this and all will be well.
To understand the parable correctly we should take into account the following points:
First, it is not necessary that everything described in the parable has really happened. Moreover not all the actions described are good. The purpose of the parable consists not in exact transmission of an action, but in revelation of highest spiritual powers.
Second, it is necessary to realize the purpose of the parable that can be understood from the preamble or from the circumstances that induced somebody to create it.
Third, it shows that not all the details of the parable can be understood on the spiritual level.
Fourth, notwithstanding this, except for the main idea, the parable can have the details that remind us about other truth or confirm it.
Our research is based on these classifications.
PART III. W. FAULKNER’S “A FABLE” AS AN EXAMPLE OF PARABLE THINKING
3.1 General characteristic of the novel
A Fable occupies a curious position among Faulkner’s works. Written during the period of his greatest acclaim, the first major novel he produced after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950, it appeared at a time when critics were undoubtedly most disposed to heap praise upon him for the slimmest of reasons. A Fable was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955, but was considered a failure by practically all the reviewers and many of the influential critics; few commentators have since found reasons to alter their opinions. Not only did some reject it as art; they were actually angered by much of what they saw in it. The near unanimity of opinion regarding it is not curious in itself; the reluctance, with which many critics reject it, aside from Faulkner’s reputation and obvious disappointment, points up one of the novel’s peculiarities. If one were able to relegate it to the scrap heap of trivia, and if the negative critical opinion were widespread and consistent that it is trivial, A Fable would present few problems. But many, who rejected it, regardless of the extent of their rejection, have noted the novel’s vast scope, its wide compass in the process of their analysis [35, p.45-58].
It is readily admitted that the novel was among Faulkner’s most ambitious undertakings, as one dissenting critic called it, “a heroically ambitious failure”. No one has hinted that Faulkner wrote it to capitalize upon the wider recognition his Nobel Prize afforded him. A Fable was certainly not hastily conceived or written; it took nearly nine years for Faulkner to complete it. It was perhaps the most carefully planned of all his books; an examination of the wall of his study at Rowan Oaks corroborates this opinion. That a great writer may write an occasional bad novel is hardly news; the contention that A Fable is an aberration gets support from another widely held view regarding the total Faulkner canon. One tendency, to see Faulkner as the chronicler of Yoknapatawpha County, whether his work is viewed n general as all part of the loose “saga” of Yoknapatawpha or not, is bolstered by the interlocking of events and characters throughout many of the major novels and stories. Concomitant with this general attitude is the opinion that his best works have all been contained within the complex imaginary Yoknapatawpha world, a world grown out of close observation, introspection, and lived experience concerning the region and people he knew and loved best [11, p.115-146].
Although A Fable is among this less currently approved group of novels, it is not to be degraded merely for this reason. Opinion varies widely concerning the “form” of A Fable, whether it is an allegory or a thesis-novel or an attempt to construct a mythology. The functions of the characters are seen in multitudinous relations, and thematic interpretations transcribe an arc that is majestic in its scope. Although the variety of opinion in this regard may serve as testament to the novel's richness, the general opinion is that it attests to the confused form and substance of A Fable. The most pervasive attitude regarding the novel is that it is primarily an intellectual failure, ill-conceived and ill-made. Faulkner has been accused of many offenses against taste and tradition - the less-than-illustrious history of early Faulkner criticism in America bears eloquent testimony to this fact, but only very rarely has he ever been accused of carelessness in handling his materials. That Faulkner, whose proved ability to exercise exquisite control over extremely complex literary structures (Absalom! Absalom! or The Sound and the Fury to name only two) could be so blind, could commit so many obvious blunders in one novel without being sublimely careless, simply seemed absurd [13].