The Blind Men and the Elephant, or the Novel as Rorschach

Civility got rather strained during the comments on the last post (I humbly admit my part, and have resolved to abstain from even genially crude Anglicisms starting with "b"). It all put me in mind of the old chestnut about the blind men and the elephant, as parlayed by one of the consciousness-raising gurus of our bustling culture. Beyond the human weakness for extrapolating from the obvious -- the elephant is like a wall, or a tree, or what have you depending on the part you encounter -- this guru enlarged upon the human weakness for reading various characteristics into the elephant. A blind Bill Clinton comes over the trunk and says "obviously quite a lover," a blind George Bush finds the tusk and says "clearly a warrior," and so on.

Something rather like this is happening with my modest little tales. To each person who reads them, they are emblematic of something that person finds important about local politics, and to this reader, that is their most important feature. One high-profile activist sees a parable about the County being run by developers. A poster to this blog focuses on the unfairness of basing a novel on the antics of the Boardroom's most consistent and colorful denizens, because they are "fringe players" and the author should have focused on the worker bees of the community. I have seen a post on another blog (Google is a wonderful thing) claiming that Murder Out of the Ballpark attacked heterosexuals for being heterosexual (one can only throw up one's hands after a quarter hour or so of attempting to comprehend this). One has made one's little comic foray, and discovers belatedly that it has so many fascinating subtexts!

But, now that we have had our laugh, does this not all beg a larger question? Does it not suggest that, to those with at least a minor hold on the engines of the community, never mind our movers and shakers, the world is some sort of Rorschach blot? It is thought provoking to imagine how many deeply personal agendas are converging when a group of citizens reaches consensus.