Until the twentieth century, a ‘story’ usually meant either one for children, or else a folk tale or legend; these are the earliest form of story and are constantly re-used, sometimes as a framing device or template, sometimes retold as a humanised experience. This is related to what Louise Glück does in her poem, ‘Parable’; she creates a very human story—it focuses on what is, as far as we know, a concern only of humans: why are we here, and what, if anything, has objective meaning?—and does so in a mythological or sacral frame. The main reason for including ‘Parable’ as a short story is very simply that when I first read it, its nature as a short story was the first thing that struck me.
It is not only short, it is, like ‘The Dead’, a perfectly proportioned story. Its plot, insofar as it can be said to have one, concerns a group of pilgrims (“it was by this word [purpose] we were consecrated/ pilgrims rather than wanderers”), who are setting out on a journey. That something is not quite straightforward is evident from the start. There are assertive statements regarding the reasons for abandoning worldly goods, but though by the fifth line, there is mention of mountain passes that they expect to encounter, immediately this is followed by their need to discuss “whither or where we might travel”. The pilgrims try to determine whether or not their journey should have a purpose, some arguing that it was an intrinsic part, others that purpose constituted a worldly good. In the course of vigorously debating this point, over four long sentences, “where the stars had shone, the sun rose over the tree line/ so that we had shadows again; many times this happened.” They do not stir from their starting point, they remain in a state of preparation but “we had changed although/ we never moved” and the debate concerning purpose is very satisfactorily resolved.
In an essay in American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Glück wrote of her fear that true happiness would deprive her of the ability to write, and ‘Parable’ would certainly refute this; despite the apparent failure of the pilgrimage, it is a very contented tale. It has the same acceptance as Gabriel Conroy’s inner monologue but without the melancholy. In the same essay, Glück briefly discusses “mythic or totemic stories”, which have “a certain interior spaciousness within clear outlines”, and though she moves on to speak of other stories, this description seems peculiarly apt for ’Parable’. The intentions and the resolutions of the pilgrims, their context and their perceptions, are clear and assertively presented, but the location, the passing of time, and the nature of their philosophical debates are sketched without the clutter of details or specifics. The poem is also, in its way, as mysterious a narrative as Aickman’s story, but where ’The Hospice’ is terribly heavy, ‘Parable’ is incredibly light, weightless; it has what Calvino called “a lightness of thoughtfulness”, the sort of lightness that can make frivolity seem “heavy and dull”. It articulates and resolves its single central concern, it manages to be both static (the pilgrims do not travel) and dynamic (the two schools of thought within the group achieve a radical intellectual or philosophical transposition).
Collected in Faithful and Virtuous Night, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014
A Personal Anthology 