Figure of speech. After finishing his tale of the
two old women on Nelson's pillar, Stephen is asked for a title
and offers two: "I call it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or
the Parable of The Plums." Calling something a parable
will make most people think of the homely stories that Jesus
tells in the gospels, which appear to have derived from Hebrew
traditions. But the term originated in Greek rhetorical theory
as parabola, a brief story that illustrates some
concept, usually a moral one.
Parabola (puh-RAB-uh-luh, from Greek para- = beside +
ballein = to throw) suggests "throwing together" two
unlike things, specifically an idea and a simple story that
illustrates it. Since parables have a didactic purpose, they
have much in common with fables, the difference being that
parables depict realistic human experiences. They also are
close kin to metaphor and simile
and to the narrative form that extended metaphors can take: allegory.
Roman rhetoricians, often using synonyms like similitude,
comparison, or exemplum, emphasized this metaphorical element.
The Rhetorica ad Herennium says that "Comparison is a
manner of speech that carries over an element of likeness from
one thing to a different thing. This is used to embellish or
prove or clarify or vivify."
Jesus tells parables to make a single instructive point, not
as allegorical narratives from which many different meanings
could be drawn. Rhetorical theorists advance the same view. In
The Elements of Rhetoric (1882), Canadian professor
James De Mille writes that "The parable may be defined as a
fictitious example designed to inculcate moral or religious
truth. It is similar to the allegory; and indeed it often
happens that it is difficult to assign some pieces with
certainty to the one or the other. There is, however, an
essential difference between them. The allegory sets forth a
story which shall impart moral instruction of a general
character; the parable is a story told for the sake of
illustrating some special point. The former is many-sided, the
latter is single in its aim; in the one the moral follows from
the narrative, in the other the narrative is made up expressly
for the sake of the moral; in the allegory the story itself is
full of interest, in the parable the moral quite overshadows
the story."
If Stephen's little story is indeed a "fictitious example,"
it is difficult to say what instructive point he expects his
listeners to take from it. That even in old age virgins remain
sexually frustrated? That Ireland will forever remain
frustrated in its desire for independence? That biblical
models of leadership like Moses remain relevant in modern
times? Parables typically do not explain their meaning, but
they do usually allow a listener to reliably infer it. At the
end of Aeolus, MacHugh and Crawford respond to the
sexual element: "Onehandled adulterer.... That tickles me";
"Tickled the old ones too...if the God Almighty's truth was
known." But other forces are certainly working in the tale.
It may be that Stephen considers his little story a kind of
down payment on a longer, more open-ended narrative––probably
not an allegory, but perhaps a realistic narrative with
diverse symbolic suggestions like Ulysses. Or it may
be that he is thinking of the more inscrutable parables told
by Jesus. Many of his parables feel decipherable, but some are
baffling, and it appears that he may have intended these to be
obscure. In Mark's gospel he says to his disciples, "Unto you
it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but
unto them that are without, all these things are done in
parables: / That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and
hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time
they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven
them" (4:11-12). In other words, some of the little stories
are designed to keep people out of the circle of the
saved, not to bring them in.
Surely many of Joyce's readers feel about as enlightened
after hearing Stephen's Parable of the Plums as the
schoolboys in Nestor feel after hearing his
unanswerable riddle. As he prepares to tell the boys his
riddle, Stephen thinks of the influence Jesus has wielded over
European culture, and then he recalls one of the master's
sayings: "To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A
long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and
woven on the church's looms." Jesus was a riddler, then, and
if Stephen is thinking of him again when he tells the
newspapermen a "parable," it may be that he does not wish for
its meaning to be easily found.
