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- A parable can be viewed as an allegory miniaturised, just as an
allegory can be viewed as a manifold of metaphors extended into
narrative.
ALLEGORY IS A hinge that lets us swing from one plane of meaning to
another. This, as the image suggests, goes both ways. We can convert the
unknown into the known, allegorise it into the recognisable landscape
of our own mythology, or we can discover meanings in the text to which
our intellectual world made us previously blind. The technique of
reading the Old Testament typologically permitted Christians to see in
the Hebrew Scripture a series of promises of the coming of Christ. This
was an allegorical reading Talmudists found perverse
....'metaphor started growing ragged and incoherent very quickly; it went
from positive analogy to negative analogy. If the model was a planetary
one, then how come the electrons were not continually losing energy in
their orbits, as one would expect? If the inside of an atom were really
functioning according to its metaphoric other half then the electron
would soon lose its necessary energy and spin counter-clockwise into the
nucleus. And in any case, since the force of the nucleus is positive
and that of the electron negative, why don’t the two simply get together
as soon as possible? Either way, there would be no atom. The metaphor
only works if (however remotely) this can still be said to be that.'
