Hypothetical

Your name is Artemisia Gentileschi. Your oil portraits are coveted by 17th century collectors across the European continent; you are well-versed in the patronizing egotism of Italian patrons. Your “Self-Portrait as Allegory of Painting La Pittura” is currently housed in the Buckingham Palace At night, you sketch your naked silhouette is illumined by candlelight licking the mirror. You've been given a new commission intended to honor a nobleman, but you wonder what would happen if you accepted the commission and then honored the artist instead. You are the artist: the one who renders others immortal. Tonight, as you sit down to write a journal entry about this latest commission to paint a tribute to a Florentine nobleman, you think about what it means to be born into talent in a female body. You will explain how "Allegory of Inclination" comes about, including the secret decision to depict your own flesh, that it may rest above the heads of those in the Galleria in the Casa Buonarroti. You may say allegorical things about your secret decision while also exploring the larger allegory of the painting. Think about self-portraiture in the context of allegory, and how Artemisia leaned into titular abstraction or vagueness while personalizing the content.

Examples of allegories in fiction

There are allegories within stories (i.e. small allegories used to illustrate things) and then are stories that are allegories. What distinguishes the two is how an allegory works its large metaphor throughout the duration of the story. 

"A Mother's Tale" by James Agee, for example, has been read as an allegory of mental complicity in crimes against humanity. Agee sets up an allegorical family and reveals what leads ordinary humans to refuse to acknowledge the Shoah.

"Seven Floors" by Dino Buzatti relies on allegory to reckon with the inevitability of death. It is a haunting story, and Buzzati is unique and under-read in my opinion.

"On Hope" by Spencer Holst is a short piece that leans heavily into abstraction and into thinking. As in Lydia Davis' short stories, the piece is driven by a thought trying to think itself, or by the mind grappling with abstractions.

More allegories as crowdsourced by wonderful humans on twitter:

• "A Soft Taxonomy of Rocks" by Rachael de Moravia

• The Silk Road by Kathryn Davis (a novella)

• "Twilight" by Wladyslaw Reymont (allegory situated with Eastern European peasant life)

• "We Are Not Cat Island" by Theresa J. Beckhusen

• The Wave by Todd Strasser

• "On Discovery" by Maxine Hong Kingston

• "The Story of the Lizard Who Made a Habit of Having His Wives for Dinner" by Eduardo Galeano

• "The Swimmer" by John Cheever

• "The Stones" by Richard Shelton

[Pictured: a page from Vaughn Bode's 1972 pulp-novel style allegory of the Vietnam War titled "The Junkwaffel Papers.]

The use of allegory in contemporary propaganda

Effective political propaganda often introduces allegorical narratives that become the dominant worldview, establishing the frame for future conversation, demarcating the boundaries of "logical" explanation. 

Before his oil portraits were hung on the walls of American art museums, former U.S. President George W. Bush (the son of a son of Bush) leaned into allegory when he coined "Axis of Evil" to refer to three countries that his administration considered as global security threats. Developing this axiology, Bush used the term "Allies" to inscribe the countries that were "on our side." 

The Bush administration framed war as an inevitability—an event that could not be avoided. In this official discourse, the framing benefited from consistent thematic reinforcement: countries could only be "with us or against us". The binary with/against created a benchmark for judgment and determination. The binary’s extraordinary abstraction increased its political use: since it designated a condition based on feeling as if, it could be constantly reinterpreted and amped by emotional resonances.

This idea— the sense in which X can be with us or against us— is a matter of opinion. Power is the story about whose ideas matter in a culture or society at any given time. Power is a portrait of an “Us” created, administered, and reinforced by definition.

Power makes us feel things—

Isn't a threat, itself, defined by the determining assumptions of the one who feels threatened? 

How is the feeling of threat implicated in our constructions of "national security"?

Is national insecurity an excuse for preemptive aggression, which is to say, the insecure kid on the playground whose sense of safety can only be assuaged by bullying those who are most vulnerable to being bullied? 

Bush's binary naming-regimes also drew on nostalgia for World War I, where a sense of clarity characterized the mission. The "Allies" were the good guys; they were the states who would wage war against the enemy "Axis." The language games of agitprop absolved pro-war Americans from thinking about the Islamophobia and racial animosity underlying that threatening feeling. The three countries selected by the Bush administration facilitated a Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" mentality, which, in turn, created platforms and publishing opportunities for academics and scholars whose research invested the presentation of decadent, foreign threats to "Western civilization." 

But that was decades ago. Bush is a famous artist now. And American kids don’t spend time studying the war they waged against Iraq.

The urgent has changed. When you woke up this morning, you realized it must have rained. The blue chair near the window was soaked. You barely remember leaving the window open last night. The calendar near the fridge reminds you that today is a red-letter deadline. You are the speechwriter for a mediocre politician that wants to do something reprehensible in order to edge ahead in a close election. The usual platitudes will not rouse crowds. The politician specifically requested an unforgettable, thunderous speech; his left eyelid twitched when he said this to you. And so you decide to devise an allegory that will enable the politician's audience to surmount their personal consciences in the name of something greater. You will create a condition that echoes outside the unthinkable speech. The allegory is what you will use to persuade those who are looking for a reason to get off the fence. Write it. 

The prose poem as allegory for a failed relationship

Read Catherine Bird's "The Factory Floor" (below) which she described as an allegory for a failed relationship.

Use it as a model or jumping-point for your own prose poem that uses allegory to rub a relationship, whether past or present. Think about how subtext can be presented in actions of chosen characters; also consider ruffling up the sentence (i.e. making it choppier, more brisk) as a technique to indicate conflict or tension without "telling" too much.