2011 paper for JLS on Blending and Censorship

JLS 40 (2011), 23–42 0341-7638/11/040–23DOI 10.1515/jlse.2011.002 © Walter de Gruyter

Allegory, blending, and censorship in modern literature

CRAIG HAMILTON

Abstract

I argue that politically subversive texts written in allegorical form attain their significance because they are conceptual blends. Political allegories allow writers to criticise regimes indirectly since writers can count on readers to mentally contruct appropriate blends. Readers are naturally driven to find new values that fit an allegory’s fixed roles, often yielding new meaning for texts in different contexts. Unfortunately, politically subversive allegories may be censored when censors run the same blends. The three main texts discussed here – Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Miller’s The Crucible – are often interpreted as political allegories. I turn to conceptual blending theory to show in some detail how those readings arise. When it comes to allegory and censorship, I suggest that conceptual blending theory can offer us new insights into these timeless topics.

“For we may speak against the tyrants in question as openly as we please without loss of effect, provided always that what we say is susceptible of a different interpretation, since it is only danger to ourselves, and not offence to them, that we have to avoid. And if the danger can be avoided by any ambiguity of expression, the speaker’s cun-ning will meet with universal approbation.”1

Quintilian

1. Introduction

When censorship is the problem, allegory may be the solution. In The Unbear-able Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, however, allegory ends the pro-tagonist’s career. Tomas is a talented surgeon in a Prague hospital who, one day in early 1968, writes a letter to a newspaper to criticize communists who feign ignorance about political repression in the USSR. The immorality of Czecho-slovakia’s rulers reminds Tomas of the story of Oedipus:

AUTHOR’S COPY | AUTORENEXEMPLAR


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Oedipus did not know he was sleeping with his own mother, yet when he realized what had happened, he did not feel innocent. Unable to stand the sight of the misfor-tunes he had wrought by ‘not knowing,’ he put out his eyes and wandered blind away from Thebes. When Tomas heard Communists shouting in defense of their inner purity, he said to himself, As a result of your ‘not knowing,’ this country has lost its freedom, lost it for centuries, perhaps, and you shout that you feel no guilt? How can you stand the sight of what you’ve done? How is it you aren’t horrified? Have you no eyes to see? If you had eyes, you would have to put them out and wander away from Thebes (Kundera 1991: 177).

Tomas’ letter, which contains his “reflections on Oedipus” (Kundera 1991: 178), is eventually published in the newspaper. Soon afterwards, the Soviet crackdown occurs, and in this new political context the hospital director one day informs Tomas that he must retract what he wrote or resign. Tomas refuses, is forced to leave the hospital, and becomes a lowly general practitioner out-side Prague.

Two years later, a government agent pays Tomas a visit to persuade him to return to Prague, where his skills in surgery can be put to good use. But, as the man explains to Tomas during a conversation, the infamous letter remains a problem. The man asks Tomas why he wrote what he wrote:

“Then tell me, Doctor, do you really think that Communists should put out their eyes? You, who have given so many people the gift of health?”“But that’s preposterous!” Tomas cried in self-defense. “Why don’t you read what I wrote?”“I have read it,” said the man from the Ministry in a voice that was meant to sound sad.“Well, did I write that Communists ought to put out their eyes?”“That’s how everyone understood it,” said the man from the Ministry, his voice growing sadder and sadder (Kundera 1984: 186).

When Tomas sees that the new statement of retraction he is asked to sign is worse than what the hospital director had asked him to write – the new one “contained words of love for the Soviet Union, vows of fidelity to the Com-munist Party” (Kundera 1991: 190) – he refuses to sign the statement. He quits his job in the provincial clinic the next day and becomes a window washer in-stead, thus ending his medical career for good.

This scene from Kundera’s well-known novel might sum up the entire his-tory of the censorship of politically subversive texts, especially texts written in allegorical form. While one may challenge a regime either explicitly or implic-itly, writing an allegorical text is one way to challenge a regime implicitly. A censor could tell an author who did so that the criticism was nevertheless u nderstood figuratively by everyone. The author could then defend himself by saying he did not criticize anyone in power literally. In his defense, the author could tell the censor that his text was not literally intended to harm those in



Allegory, blending, and censorship in modern literature 25

power, as Kundera’s protagonist suggests in the scene above. The author might even ask the censor to point out specific words in his text that seem offensive, but the censor knows better than to play that game. This is what Kundera’s civil servant indicates above when he says, “That’s how everyone understood it.” A censor knows that readers can interpret texts figuratively, but what makes those interpretations possible in the first place? Part of the answer was suggested by Lakoff and Turner (1989: 109) in another context, when they wrote: “Mean-ings are [ . . . ] in people’s minds, not in the words on the page.” However, as I explain in this paper, a more complete answer to the question of how politically subversive allegories work may be found in conceptual blending theory (Fau-connier & Turner 2002).

2. On censorship

I must admit at the start that this paper in no way can pretend to cover the full history of literary censorship; such a task would require monographs. In-deed, several noteworthy studies on literary censorship have been published recently. For example, there have been recent monographs on censorship in 19th century German literature (Stark 2009; Heady 2009), in 20th century I talian literature (Bonsaver 2007), in 20th century Canadian literature (Cohen 2001), in 20th century Latin American literature (Herrero-Olaizola 2007), as well as in 20th century British literature and cinema (Parkes 1996; Aldgate & Robinson 2005; Marshik 2006). Censorship seems eternal, recurring many places at many different times. According to Reinelt (2006: 3), there are v arious types of censorship:

Narrowly defined, it [censorship] is state suppression of expression or information where state surrogates might be oversight panels and bodies or governmental agen-cies. Often this censorship occurs after the fact of expression or production. A perfor-mance is closed or forbidden, a script is edited to remove offensive material, a televi-sion station is shut down, a certain press is forbidden to publish [ . . . ] A broader definition, however, would see censorship as suppression of expression or informa-tion by anybody, including the potential creator (“self-censorship”).

Censorship can occur either before or after “expression or production.” While the history of literature is full of examples of after-the-fact censorship, exam-ples of before-the-fact censorship – including self-censorship – are much harder to find for obvious reasons. Who knows how many politically subversive texts remained in the minds of their creators, never to be set down on paper, out of fear of censorship (or even worse)? Discussing censorship in the USSR, Parthé writes (1994: 297), “Some texts were genuinely lost, but less of the canon than one might fear; in the end, the more significant losses to Russian literature are



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in those works that never got written.” Nobody knows for sure how many texts “never got written” out of fear of censorship. What we do know, however, is that many texts in the USSR and elsewhere were indeed censored. Ironically, the three main texts I discuss in this paper – Heart of a Dog (1925) by Mikhail Bulgakov (1925), Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945), and The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1953) – all deal with communism in one way or another, al-though that is not the reason why I have selected these texts. I have chosen them because even though they were written in different countries at different times, they are allegories arising from blends.

Given the difficulty of studying before-the-fact censorship, Reinelt focuses on after-the-fact censorship. She argues that after-the-fact censorship can be found in at least five different situations:

(1) military censorship in times of war;(2) political censorship in times of peace;(3) moral censorship;(4) religious censorship; and(5) corporate censorship (Reinelt 2006: 6).

While Animal Farm was first censored during WWII, Heart of a Dog and The Crucible were essentially censored in times of peace, albeit in different ways. For my purposes here, the second type of after-the-fact censorship, political censorship in times of peace, which “blocks criticism of regimes in power” (Reinelt 2006: 6), will be the primary type of censorship that I discuss in this paper. In this paper I argue that allegorical literary texts can be politically sub-versive precisely because of the conceptual blends they encourage readers to construct.

3. Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog

Between January and March 1925, the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov wrote Heart of a Dog, a short novel set in contemporary Moscow. In Heart of a Dog, a surgeon, Professor Preobrazhensky, takes in a stray dog, whom he calls Sharik. With the help of his assistant, Dr Bormenthal, the Professor eventually transplants a dead man’s testicles and pituitary gland into the dog. The unwit-ting donor, Klim Grigorievich Chugunkin, was a lowly tavern musician with a criminal record before he is stabbed and killed. For Bormenthal, the opera-tion’s scientific purpose is to study “the pituitary gland’s . . . effect on the reju-venation of the organism” (Bulgakov 2007: 51). After the operation, Sharik the dog gradually begins to become a man who calls himself Poligraf P oligrafovich Sharikov. In many scenes, Sharikov’s behavior is shocking and scandalous be-cause he acts like a dog although he looks like a man. Sharikov’s rowdy per-




sonality, inherited partly from Chugunkin the man and partly from Sharik the dog, causes numerous problems for the Professor as well as his maids, patients, and neighbors. Although these problems are the source of many funny scenes in the novella, by the end Professor Preobrazhensky admits that his experiment has failed. Therefore, he puts the dog’s original testicles and pituitary gland back into Sharikov, and the scoundrel comes back to life again as Sharik, “a fairly loveable mutt” (Howell 2006: 549–550).

Bulgakov read his novella in two parts in public in March 1925. The pub-lishing house Nedra wanted to publish it, but GLAVLIT, the Soviet censorship office, decided against it after reading a report by a secret informer who had been at the readings (Bulgakov 2007: xii). Bulgakov’s editor at Nedra asked him to appeal the decision, which he did, but when a senior communist party official read a copy of the novella and said “it must not be published under any circumstances” (Bulgakov 2007: xxiv), no publisher would touch it. Then, in spring 1926, Bulgakov’s manuscript was confiscated by the secret police (Parthé 1994: 297). It was only in 1987, during glasnost and perestroika under Gorbachev, that Heart of A Dog could finally be published officially in the USSR. A popular film based on the novella then appeared in 1988.

Why was Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog originally censored? Many critics agree that the novella is an allegorical attack on the nascent Soviet regime. For example, while Burgin (1978: 495) suggests a “politico-allegorical interpreta-tion” is not the only reading possible, she does admit that the novella is a “po-litical parable” (1978: 495). Howell also agrees that the novella can be seen either “as an anti-Soviet satire or as a warning against scientific hubris” (2006: 545). According to LeBlanc (1993: 58), the “ill-fated transformation of Sharik (the pleasant dog) into Sharikov (the unpleasant man) . . . is generally inter-preted as serving to parody the grand social experiment of creating a new spe-cies of human being: homo sovieticus.” These opinions suggest that Bulgakov literally tells a story about scientifically transforming a dog into a man in order to criticize figuratively the Soviet regime. The failure of Preobrazhensky’s project is Bulgakov’s way of saying that the USSR’s attempt to create a New Soviet Man will fail. In 1924, Trotsky had concluded his book, Literature and Revolution, with the hope that communism would create a new type of man, one less selfish and individualistic, for example, than the kind of man produced by capitalism. Bulgakov, however, implies that such artificial transformations are impossible. In the novella, Professor Preobrazhensky also makes openly critical remarks about the proletariat (2007: 27), Bolshevism and Pravda (2007: 30), Karl Marx (2007: 32), the counter-revolution (2007: 34), and Russians “who are about two hundred years behind the Europeans in their development and still aren’t quite sure how to button up their trousers” (2007: 33). Despite these explicit remarks, however, the novella has been interpreted as an allegory of sorts.



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Unfortunately, critics who interpret the novella allegorically never discuss the cognitive process that makes allegory possible: conceptual blending. But as Figure 1 below shows, Heart of a Dog results in a very rich conceptual blend. Each input space has roles in common that come from the generic space. The unspecified roles of agent, action, and patient are in the generic space while more specific values for those roles come from the input spaces. In each input space, the roles of agent, action, and patient are filled by more specific values reflecting social relations. Those values, in turn, become even more specific in Bulgakov’s story when named characters fill those roles.

The blend’s generic event structure is that of transformation: an agent car-ries out an action on a patient to transform said patient. The input spaces pro-vide more specific details about each transformation. First, the Professor do-mesticates Sharik the stray dog, treating him so well in fact that the dog feels he has been given “the grand prize canine lottery ticket” (Bulgakov 2007: 36). Second, the Professor operates on Sharik the dog, who then slowly starts to become a man. Third, Bulgakov compares the operation to a religious cere-mony, calling the Professor a “priest” several times (2007: 43) and noting Bor-menthal’s “hope of developing Sharik into a spiritually advanced individual” (2007: 58). Fourth, Sharikov becomes a communist. His political conversion is brought about by Shvonder, a staunch Bolshevik and president of the new res-ident association in the building the Professor lives in. Before the operation, Sharik the dog realizes he has become “a creature of culture” (2007: 43) be-cause the Professor has domesticated him, but Shvonder turns Sharikov into an obedient communist who rebels against the middle-class values that Preobra-zhensky and Bormenthal maintain.

The four transformations in the input spaces seem successful, but a different inference arises from the blend. First, Sharik is domesticated within two weeks or so. Second, Preobrazhensky and Bormenthal successfully finish the opera-tion after thirty minutes. Third, Sharik’s life is saved several times on the oper-ating table while “the priest” (Preobrazhensky) operates on him. Fourth, Shvonder’s re-education of Sharikov takes place during the four weeks or so

Figure 1




of Sharikov’s life. In isolation, each transformation in each input space seems fine. In the blend, however, the transformation of Sharikov is “unsuccessful” (Bulgakov 2007: 112). Sharikov’s numerous antics convince the Professor that he has merely brought Chugunkin back to life by “transform[ing] a perfect darling of a dog into the sort of scum that makes your hair stand on end” (Bul-gakov 2007: 95). Bormenthal thinks it makes no difference “whose pituitary gland it is,” but the Professor realizes too late that Chugunkin’s “case history” should have been studied thoroughly before the operation was performed (Bul-gakov 2007: 59). While Bormenthal feels Sharikov cannot be “turned into a decent human being” (Bulgakov 2007: 93), the Professor reluctantly admits he did the operation due to an interest in “eugenics” rather than “rejuvenation” (Bulgakov 2007: 96). According to LeBlanc (1993: 77), “Preobrazhensky at-tempts to transform both Sharik and Sharikov . . . from primitive beasts into relatively sophisticated creatures,” but ultimately fails. For Howell (2006: 552), this is Bulgakov’s way of criticizing “the belief that a qualitatively ‘new man’ can be created by changing the environment of the ‘old man.’ ” Living for a month with two educated physicians who try to teach him middle-class m anners has no beneficial effect upon Sharikov. Instead, Sharikov becomes the type of man who thrives under the new communist system represented by the likes of Shvonder.

As Meeks argues in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the novella, intellectuals started the Russian Revolution yet later would become its victims (Bulgakov 2007: xvi). That is why the Professor predicts that Sharikov may bother someone like him now, but the day when Sharikov turns on Shvonder, things will be much worse (Bulgakov 2007: 96 –97). Because we see that the social improvement of Sharikov fails, in the blend, that new inference may cause us to cast doubt on the transformations in the input spaces too. This type of process in blending is what Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 49) call “modifi-cation”: “Any space can be modified at any moment in the construction of the integration network . . . [and] the inputs can be modified by reverse mapping from the blend.” Specifically, the inference from the blend that Sharikov’s so-cial transformation is a failure reshapes our views of Sharikov’s biological metamorphosis (input space 2) and political conversion (input space 4). As Bormenthal asks the Professor desperately near the end of the novella, “what if that Shvonder keeps working on him, then what will he turn into?” (Bulgakov 2007: 96). The Professor eventually replies that things will get worse because “Sharikov is only manifesting the remnants of canine behaviour” (Bulgakov 2007: 97). Just as Sharikov’s metamorphosis from dog to man is not yet com-plete, his political re-education is also incomplete. Since the Professor and Bormenthal predict that Sharikov’s behavior will get worse rather than im-prove once he fully becomes a man, they resort to operating on Sharikov in the end to turn him back into a friendly dog.



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4. George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Orwell wrote Animal Farm between November 1943 and February 1944. Coun-tries like the former East Germany, where censorship existed even though the government lived in “complete denial” of it (Bradley 2006: 153), would seem to be rather different from the UK, but it was actually in England that Orwell’s novel was first censored. The Ministry of Information let it be known openly that publishing the book in 1944 during WWII “was not in the national i nterest” (Rossi & Rodden 2007: 8). Several publishers therefore rejected Orwell’s manuscript for publication from 1944 to 1945 (Dickstein 2007: 134). They apparently did so for fear it would offend the USSR, an important war-time ally. According to Gottlieb (2007: 193), even a “surreptitious Stalinist agent . . . played an important part in suppressing the publication of Animal Farm” in London. Despite these obstacles, however, the novel was finally published on 17 August 1945, shortly after WWII ended. Animal Farm became a best-seller, and its success gave Orwell the means to move to the island of Jura in Scot-land, where he wrote his most famous novel, 1984.

In Animal Farm, there are four main human characters. There is Mr Jones, who owns Manor Farm in England. When the animals take control of Manor Farm, they call it Animal Farm instead. Animal Farm is situated between Fox-wood Farm, which is owned by Mr Pilkington, and Pinchfield Farm, which is owned by Mr Frederick. Finally, there is Mr Whymper, who becomes “an in-termediary between Animal Farm and the outside world” (Orwell 1970: 57). The other main characters are all animals. There is a goat (Muriel), a raven (Moses), a donkey (Benjamin), a cat, three horses (Boxer, Clover, and Mollie), sheep, dogs, hens, and many pigs. Old Major, the oldest pig, soon dies after he delivers a speech inspiring the farm animals to overthrow Jones. Their revolu-tion leaves Jones powerless as the animals in general, and the pigs in particular, seize control of the farm. But by the end of the novel, it is clear that the revolu-tion has failed to liberate the animals. The pigs begin to resemble so closely the humans they replaced that the other animals can hardly tell the difference any more between their human masters and the pigs. In fact, they seem even more hungry and tired than they were when Jones and his wife ran the farm.

Originally titled, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, the novel has been defined interchangeably as a fable, parable, or allegory (O’Neill 1998). At least two conceptual blends are prominent in Orwell’s novel. The first involves the ani-mal characters themselves. According to Turner (1996: 11), “the blending of talking people with mute animals to produce talking animals . . . is a basic process of thought.” Just as personified animals are commonly found in many stories for children, so too are they found in Animal Farm. Our ability to meta-phorically attribute certain salient properties to animals and compare them to humans is well-known (Glucksberg 2001: 52– 67), but according to Rossi and




Rodden (2007: 8), Orwell’s “allegory was both ingenious and ingenuous: a child and a sophisticated adult could understand Animal Farm at different l evels.” Presumably, what they mean is that young readers could interpret the novel literally as a story about farm animals who decide to run their own farm.

Adult literary critics, however, might call that a misinterpretation. This is because a second conceptual blend leads them to interpret the novel figura-tively, for example, as a story about the Russian Revolution. Just as “interpre-tive responsibility” can shift from speaker to hearer in a conversation (Camp 2008: 18), Letemendia (1992: 137) says “the burden of understanding Animal Farm . . . lay with its reader.” The conceptual blend, however, is really no “burden” in this case. In the network of the second blend, the unspecified roles of ruler, helpers, subjects, activity and setting are found in the generic space. As Figure 2 below shows, the input spaces provide specific values for those roles.

The story of Manor Farm before the rebellion, when Mr Jones is master over the farm animals and runs his farm in England, comprises most of input space 1. The history of modern Russia, where Czar Nicholas II is master over his subjects and rules his empire, comprises most of input space 2. In the blend, however, there is “selective projection” (Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 47) from the inputs to the blend as well as a shift in time from past to present. The basic event structure of the animal revolution on Manor Farm matches that of the 1917 Revolution in Russia, but the specific elements involved with the revolu-tion on Manor Farm come overtly from input space (e.g. Orwell’s story).

For some, Animal Farm might seem like a roman à clef. By that I mean that many critics claim straightforwardly that Jones is the Czar, Old Major the pig

Figure 2



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is Lenin, Napoleon the pig is Stalin, Snowball the pig is Trotsky, Moses the raven is a Russian Orthodox priest, Boxer the horse is a proletarian worker, and the fierce dogs raised by Napoleon are his secret police who impose his will by force. Squealer, the eloquent pig and “brilliant talker . . . [who] could turn black into white” (Orwell 1970: 16), is official spokesman for the ruling class pigs. In the blend, he represents someone such as Bukharin, editor of Pravda in the 1920s and early ally of Stalin. Although Hunter (1998: 32) feels that one-to-one correspondences of this kind are limiting, few critics understand how we are able to make such correspondences in the first place. As Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 105) put it: “In retrospect, the mappings look like obvious matches, as if they were given immediately by the spaces themselves . . . [but] This is an Eliza illusion . . .” The matches I referred to above, such as Snowball is Trotsky, actually arise via blending although few critics seem to have real-ized that before. Of course, some critics have disagreed about which values fit which roles in Animal Farm. For example, while Letemendia initially suggests that the pigs represent Bolsheviks in general (1992: 130), Dickstein feels that Old Major stands for Karl Marx (rather than Lenin) and that Old Major’s dream represents Marxism (2007: 138). However, a debate over which value fits which role actually lends support to my hypothesis that Orwell’s allegory is a product of blending. Such differences of opinion among critics reveal that Orwell compels readers to find values to fit roles, even if critics later disagree about which values ought to fill which roles. So when Letemendia writes, “E vidence external to the text of Animal Farm is not required to establish the political meaning within its pages” (1992: 130), that is not entirely true. As Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 48) state: “We rarely realize the extent of back-ground knowledge and structure that we bring into a blend unconsciously. Blends recruit great ranges of background meaning.” While most readers may project elements of input space 2 into the blend, Orwell never explicitly men-tions Russia or the 1917 Revolution in Animal Farm. In fact, meaning is estab-lished here by a cognitive process that is “external to the text” itself.

When we run the blend in our minds, as it were, the “emergent structure” (Fauconnier & Turner 2002: 48) of Orwell’s allegory becomes clear. We may thus reason that just as the Bolsheviks overthrew the Tsar, the animals over-throw Jones. Just as Stalin and Trotsky fought for power, Napoleon and Snow-ball struggle for power too. Just as Stalin later exiled Trotsky, Napoleon exiles Snowball. Just as the birth of the USSR was marked by wars, so too is Animal Farm the site of two battles as Jones and the neighboring farmers try to take control of the farm by force. Just as Stalin carried out purges and killed many Russians, so too does Napoleon oversee the execution of many allegedly dis-loyal animals. Finally, just as Soviet communists became a tyrannical ruling class with unfair privileges, so too do the pigs set themselves apart by eating more than their fair share, living in Jones’ house, acting like humans, and grad-




ually changing the rules of the farm to arbitrarily suit their own needs. In this manner, just as Soviet rulers betrayed the principles of communism, so too do the pigs betray the principles of Animalism.

Many critics would probably agree that a reader who did not reach such conclusions would not have fully understood Animal Farm. Fully understand-ing Animal Farm, in other words, entails blending. What is more, the interna-tional popularity of Animal Farm might also be explained by the fact that r eaders in different countries can easily construct a new input space in order to relate the story to their own political situations. While Russia is most often as-sumed to comprise input space 2, Letemendia (1992: 136) says the novel “was intended to have a wider application than a satire upon the Russian regime alone.” Because Animal Farm was written in the middle of the 20th century, this is arguably one reason why Stalin’s regime is often seen as the primary target of Orwell’s critique. On this view, blends may be historically contingent. While the majority of Orwell’s readers understand Animal Farm as a criticism of the Soviet Union, readers in other contexts can nevertheless interpret the novel as a criticism of a different corrupt political regime. Indeed, a principal interest of New Historicists in literary criticism is really to reconstruct blends in texts from centuries ago, uncovering allegorical meanings that are not ob-vious to today’s readers but that were arguably obvious to readers in the past. The fact that we can re-read allegories from the past and still find them mean-ingful is perhaps why Ezra Pound famously said, “Literature is news that stays news.”

Finally, although this paper engages with conceptual blending theory rather than conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual metaphor theory does shed light on one peculiar aspect of Animal Farm which merits mentioning. Hunter (1998: 31) calls the novel “a complex satire,” perhaps because of the compari-son between oppressive rulers and pigs. Although Orwell writes of the pigs, “With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership” (Orwell 1970: 25), this is hardly “natural” according to the GREAT CHAIN OF BEING (Lakoff & Turner 1989: 172). Historically speaking, the GREAT CHAIN OF BEING was a metaphorical hierarchy via which Europe-ans for centuries imagined the order of life, with God on top, angels above people, people above animals, animals above plants, plants above inanimate objects, and so on. At each level, further hierarchies existed too. The GREAT CHAIN OF BEING suggests that horses and dogs seem stronger and more intelligent than pigs, so they would have been better suited than pigs to become leaders of Animal Farm. Boxer the horse, in particular, is admirable because of the example he sets for others as a very hard worker. The problem with the pigs is that they reject the notion of equality (Kearney 1996: 239), which was one of Animalism’s seven main principles. And by putting the pigs in charge, rather than other animals higher up on the GREAT CHAIN OF BEING, Orwell



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frustrates our assumptions about legitimate rulers. Comparing dictators to horses may not be flattering, but comparing dictators to pigs is particularly of-fensive. That alone might explain why countries like North Korea have banned Animal Farm.

5. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

The final example of a politically subversive text that results from an a llegorical blend is Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible. Miller wrote the play in 1952 and it premiered in New York City in January 1953. As I have explained in depth else-where (Hamilton 2007), The Crucible was readily recognized to be an allegory about McCarthyism, and the so-called witch hunt for American communists, immediately following its first performance. Although the printed edition of the play does contain prose passages in Act I (Miller 1995: 160 –161), where Miller writes openly about McCarthyism and contemporary politics, the play was not published until April 1953, four months into the play’s first run in New York.

Theatergoers who saw The Crucible within the first three months of 1953 therefore could not have possibly read it; nevertheless, many of them saw it as an allegory for McCarthyism. Generations of critics have also come to the same conclusion. For example, in January 1953 Chapman called the play a “political parable” (qtd. in Foulkes 1978: 302). In the 1960s, Popkin (1964: 140) wrote that the play represented “an unmistakable parallel to current events.” In the 1970s, Martin (1977: 290) called the play a “political allegory,” while Budick (1985: 548) recognized the “analogy” in the play in the 1980s. Finally, Adler (1997: 93) defined the play as a “political allegory” in the 1990s while Gross (2001: 57) more recently wrote of the play’s “political parallels.” Slight variations in terms notwithstanding, this quick overview of the play’s reception shows that, for over fifty years, critics have basically agreed that the play is “about” more than just the Salem witch trials in 1692. However, few critics have understood how such interpretations are possible. Thanks to conceptual blending, Miller can prompt audience members to make certain implicit connections when they see his play, and interpreting the play as an allegory for McCarthyism results from a certain conceptual blend. According to Dancygier (2005: 101), the value of blending is that it “seems to offer us a more disciplined and accurate, but also much broader, understanding of human imagination and creative thought.”

As Figure 3 below shows, in the generic space are the roles of judge, plain-tiff, prosecutor, defendant, crime, and setting. For input space 1, Miller gives us specific values to fill each of those roles, especially in Act III (Miller 1995: 200 –231). While Danforth is the judge and Hale is the prosecutor in Salem’s meeting house, Abigail is the plaintiff, Proctor the defendant, and witchcraft




the crime. In input space 2, the implicit setting is the House of Representatives’ Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) on Capitol Hill in Washington DC. When Miller’s play was first performed in 1953, Representative John Wood was chairman of HUAC, although he was neither the first nor the last HUAC chairman. If the HUAC chairman fits the role of judge, the prosecutor is unspecified because any committee member could question someone who had been subpoenaed to testify before HUAC. The value that fills the role of plaintiff, however, is specific: Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. Al-though he was a Senator, and therefore could not sit on the HUAC committee in the House of Representatives, he was nevertheless infamous for publicly leveling charges against people he suspected of being Communist Party mem-bers. The people whom McCarthy charged generally had to defend themselves before HUAC.

As for the role of defendant, sadly, too many people could fit that role. A critic familiar with Miller’s biography might say that in the context of Miller’s life in 1953, the primary value to fill the role of defendant would arguably be Miller’s friend, Elia Kazan, a famous director of plays and films. Although Miller did not testify before HUAC until 1956, Kazan testified before HUAC in 1952. Unlike John Proctor in the play, however, Kazan denounced others, thereby ending his friendship with Miller. The implicit inference that the HUAC hearings were unfair and unjustified results from Miller’s explicit por-trayal of the unfair and unjustified trial of those like Proctor who were charged with witchcraft in Salem in 1692. The tragedy of justice in The Crucible, which is explicit, becomes an implicit condemnation of McCarthyism in the blend. As is common, however, there is an incongruity in the blend. While Proctor behaves heroically in the play and is put to death, Kazan apparently did not

Figure 3



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behave so heroically when testifying before HUAC. Other counterparts for Proctor might therefore be found, including Miller himself, if one desired to interpret the play along biographical lines.

That said, when critics debate which values fit which roles, this supports my hypothesis that Miller’s political allegory comes to life through blending. For example, when Carson (1982: 74) mentions the Rosenberg couple and their testimony before HUAC, that suggests potential values for the role of defen-dant. Also, when McGill (1981: 263) argues that John Proctor in The Crucible “is not Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, or Owen Lattimore,” he unwittingly im-plies that other values should fill the role of defendant instead. The question is thus which values should fill which roles, rather than wondering if values should fill roles at all. It must be said, however, that filling roles with values can be flexible. For example, Bigsby (2005: 159) states that “compilers of programme notes [today] feel as great a need to explain the history of Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee as they do the events of seventeenth-century Salem.” Theatergoers today might thus know as little about the 1950s as they do about the 1690s. But then how can the play be seen today as targeting different political regimes? The answer is blending. According to Miller (1996: 164), “From Argentina to Chile to Greece, Czecho-slovakia, China, and a dozen other places,” audiences have felt that the play is relevant to their own political situations. That is because when they see or read the play, the blends they run involve input spaces other than the initial input space 2. In other words, when people find new values to fill the play’s fixed roles, The Crucible suddenly becomes relevant in new contexts.

Because The Crucible was staged and published, one might say it was not really censored. However, Miller was certainly punished for it, and there is evidence to suggest that the book was censored abroad. In 1953, the State De-partment’s International Information Administration, under intense pressure from Senator McCarthy, sent directives to American libraries overseas. In those written directives, librarians were told to ban from their collections books by communists, communist sympathizers, and even authors who had invoked Fifth Amendment protections when questioned by committees in Congress like HUAC (Robbins 2001: 29). In spring 1953, McCarthy also sent two inspectors to Europe to be sure American libraries there were removing from their collec-tions books by no fewer than seventy-five communist authors (Robbins 2001: 31). It seems safe to assume that, given this state of affairs, Miller’s play in 1953 would have been removed from American libraries overseas. We know for certain that in 1954, “When Miller applied for a passport to attend the play’s Belgian premiere . . . the State Department denied his application” (An-dersen 2006: 23). And when Miller was finally subpoenaed to testify before HUAC in 1956, allegedly about his passport application (Anderson 2006: 24), he was unexpectedly asked to denounce others. Miller refused to cooperate,




was found to be in contempt of HUAC, and had to wait until 1958 – five years after writing his play – before finally obtaining a valid US passport.

6. Discussion and conclusion

I have suggested many things in this paper, but one of the most important has been that the political targets of a writer’s criticism can vary. The Crucible or Animal Farm, for example, have become popular in many different countries. As Gomel (1995: 88) notes, “Paradoxically, allegory appears both open and closed, both authoritarian and libertarian, both flexible and rigid.” In terms of blending theory, allegory may seem “rigid” because we are compelled to find values for roles, and yet allegory also seems “flexible” because, depending on context, we may fill the text’s fixed roles with different values. Some critics have complained that Animal Farm “was prone to different interpretations and could take on meanings of its own” because it was “written in the mode of a llegory” (Dickstein 2007: 144), but I think the allegorical form is a strength rather than a weakness for politically subversive texts. Likewise, Bigsby’s (2005: 159) opinion that current audiences may be ignorant of McCarthyism could actually reflect a common trait among successful politically subversive allegories – their timelessness – which sets allegories apart from romans à clef.

The three literary texts that I have discussed here also show us that writers can use allegorical forms to criticize political regimes indirectly. In essence, Bulgakov told a story about turning a dog into a man in order to indirectly criticize the idea that the Soviets could create a new kind of man. In the words of one critic, his contribution to Russian literature was “priceless” (Brown 1987: 124). Meanwhile, Orwell told a story about animals who run their own farm in order to indirectly criticize the hypocrisy of communist dictators. For his part, Miller told a story about the unjust trials in Salem in 1692 in order to indirectly criticize Washington in 1953. Each author could have directly criti-cized unfair political regimes, for example, by writing non-fiction essays; how-ever, they all apparently preferred to write literary allegories instead. One rea-son why they did so can be found in conceptual blending theory.

Scholars in pragmatics rather than cognitive linguistics, however, might o ffer an alternative explanation. For instance, imagine being asked if you think Queen Elizabeth II is a good queen, and answering that the queen is well-dressed. Your answer may be true but it is irrelevant in this context for you do not answer the question. Yet you can defend yourself against the charge that you think that the Queen is a bad queen because, although you meant it implic-itly, you never said that explicitly. Explicitly you make a compliment; implic-itly you insinuate that the Queen is not a good queen. As Camp argues (2008: 18), under censorship “metaphor may be one of the only ways left for people



38 Craig Hamilton

to communicate, precisely because it preserves a species of deniability that is lacking for explicit utterances” (2008: 17). What Camp means by “deniability” is what Quintilian meant long ago, in the epigraph to this paper, when he wrote of using statements that are “susceptible of a different interpretation” in order to criticize tyrants indirectly. In Animal Farm, for example, Orwell never re-fers to Russia, the Soviet Union, or communism, which is why he could have denied that the USSR was the target of his criticism. There is a “species of deniability” in allegory, to use Camp’s words, that might not be found in other literary forms. Although my concern here has been with allegories like Animal Farm as a whole, rather than specific sentences within them, Camp’s (2008: 21) definition of “telling details, which explicitly commit the speaker only to the content that is literally expressed by the sentence she utters,” suggests that writers of allegories are in a better position to protect themselves against cen-sorship, for instance, than are writers of non-fiction essays. As the scene from Kundera’s novel at the start of my paper revealed, writers like Tomas can say explicitly that readers misinterpret their texts by making unacceptable assump-tions about their intentions (Camp 2008: 8), even though the writers implicitly accept allegorical interpretations of their texts.

It must be also said that while each of the three main literary texts I have discussed in this paper are blends, not all of the blends are similar. Copland (2008: 143) has recently drawn distinctions between what she calls “non- collaborative blends,” “collaborative blends,” “collaborative narrative-agent-reflexive blends,” and “collaborative reader-reflexive blends.” While this tax-onomy is incomplete, it raises the issue of how much effort readers must do to run particular blends. Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog could arguably be called a non-collaborative blend since Bulgakov runs the blend while the readers ap-pear to merely observe it. Bulgakov’s negative remarks about communism in the novella make it more or less clear that his story parodies Soviet ideas about creating a new kind of man. Readers, especially Bulgakov’s contemporaries, thus seemed to need little effort to run this type of blend. Orwell’s Animal Farm, however, could arguably be called a collaborative blend, meaning that the blend is “triggered by the text, rather than modeled in it” (Copland 2008: 149). Orwell’s readers have more work to do to run the blend because the Rus-sian Revolution is never overtly mentioned in Animal Farm. Last but not least, The Crucible by Miller is probably the most complex text out of the three. The published version of the play seems to involve a “non-collaborative blend” because Miller makes many comments about McCarthyism, especially in the prose passages found in Act I. Input space 2, in other words, is given rather than inferred. On stage, however, things are different since the play involves a “collaborative reader-reflexive blend” which, for the theatergoer, may generate “self-reflexivity about his or her own way of thinking” (Copland 2008: 143). When the New York theatre critic Robert Warshow reviewed a performance of




The Crucible in March 1953, he asked a very powerful question: “How can he [Miller] be held responsible for what comes into my head while I watch his play?” (qtd. in Foulkes 1978: 304). While Warshow understood the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, he did not understand that conceptual blending was the mental process behind that interpretation. Thus, while the published ver-sion of The Crucible may involve a non-collaborative blend, the staged version might be the sign of a collaborative reader-reflexive blend instead. Therein lies the beauty of allegory in politically subversive texts: the message is in the mind, not in the text.

Having said that, recent publications by Canning (2008), Crisp (2008), Dan-cygier (2005; 2006) and Semino (2009) suggest that blending theory is becom-ing increasingly important in literary studies. However, few critics in the past seem to have made the connection between censorship and allegory on the one hand, and conceptual blending on the other. While Gomel (1995: 88) sensed over a decade ago that allegory was vital in the face of censorship, what she calls “the poetics of censorship” – meaning, “a collocation of the ways of read-ing and writing that are born out of external sociopolitical pressures exerted upon literature” – should now be extended to include what I would call “the cognitive poetics of censorship” when we realize that “the ways of reading and writing” Gomel refers to actually involve conceptual blending to a great e xtent.

As I see it, blending theory suggests why allegories pose problems for cen-sorship, but blending theory may not have all the answers to every question. Admittedly, doubts have been voiced about conceptual blending theory in the past (Forceville 2004; Ritchie 2004; Eubanks 2005), and Brandt and Brandt (2005) have proposed adding more mental spaces to the model than the origi-nal four presented by Fauconnier and Turner. That said, conceptual blending theory does seem to be more helpful than other theories in literary analysis. As Semino (2009: 65) recently wrote in her paper on text worlds in Carol Ann Duffy’s 1999 poem, “Mrs Midas”: “Overall, I would argue that an analysis in terms of blending theory provides a satisfactory account of the intertextuality of the poem and of the way the text world is constructed.” Conceptual blending theory may not be perfect, but it has proven to be useful. This is why I share Dancygier’s optimism when she writes:

The results of blending in thought can be modeled coherently and are thus far factu-ally revealing as well as theoretically inspiring. Even if we never obtain any solid evidence of whether blending occurs in predictable ways in our ‘wetware’ (another blend), we will still profit from the clarity with which meaning construction in a va-riety of texts can now be described (Dancygier 2006: 12).

With respect to this project on allegory and censorship, many questions remain to be answered. One does research to find answers to questions, only to dis-cover more questions that need to be answered. For example, allegory has



40 Craig Hamilton

many meanings in literary studies (Crisp 2005, 2008), but it would be interest-ing to see how much space politically subversive texts occupy in that genre. To continue, Hunter (1998: 44) refers to “truncated” genres in her discussion of Animal Farm, but whether or not politically subversive allegories tend to be short is an open question. Also, if it turns out that these kinds of texts do tend to be short, then the question why that is so will need to be answered. Likewise, whether or not Reinelt’s model of censorship is complete remains to be seen. Since allegorical forms represent a compromise between overt criticism of a regime on the one hand, and complete silence on the other, Reinelt’s model might be reconfigured to accommodate such forms. Authors may chastise re-gimes implicitly to overcome self-censorship (e.g. writing nothing at all), but their allegories might still fall victim to after-the-fact censorship, as was the case in the three texts discussed here. Finally, Copland’s taxonomy of concep-tual blends may need to be refined. The allegories examined here all require readers to “collaborate” with writers in order to make meaning. The amount of effort may vary, of course, but that is an empirical question. It seems unlikely that the thought processes of readers are sufficient to constitute input spaces in and of themselves. In sum, allegory offers one solution to the problem of cen-sorship, and conceptual blending theory can explain how allegories work. If Fauconnier and Turner (2002) are right to maintain that blending is the way we think, to paraphrase the title of their book, then it would appear that censors will continue to have trouble preventing us from doing what we do naturally. The even better news is that “the effects of censorship, of whatever variety, tend to be transitory. Truth has a habit of finding its way into the light” (Skid-more 2001: 144).

Université de Haute Alsace

Note

Correspondence address: [email protected]. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Cognitive Allegory conference in June

2009 at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I am grateful for the feedback I received, not only from colleagues there at the conference, but also from two anonymous reviewers from this journal. I also thank Professor Randy Allan Harris from Waterloo for drawing my atten-tion to the Quintilian passage. (Source: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/9B*.html)

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Documents

2011 paper for JLS on Blending and Censorship