Perspectives....where you sit and where you view from...what you are taught and what you automatically assume...how you calculate importance...what you want along with or over what you need or think you do...what you care for or whom or both or either or neither. What do you do about it if you know what you are doing and what is to be done? What is a dream and what a reality...truth or myth? What's the story? Or the allegory....or the parable....?
From the Joyce Project Parable of the Plums:
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."
Stephen's Parable of the Plums is a story in James Joyce's novel Ulysses, Episode Seven: “Aeolus.
From James Joyce's Ulysses: Stephen's Parable of the Plums
by ROBERT FRUMKIN:
Though they didn't see eye to eye in everything, a certain
analogy there somehow was, as if both their minds were
travelling. so to speak. in the one train of thought.
He gets the plums and I the plumstones.
A Pisgah Sight of Palestine
or, The Parable of the Plums
by Stephen Dedalus
16 June 1904, ~1230 GMT
Two Dublin vestals, elderly and pious, have lived fifty and fiftythree years in Fumbally's lane. They want to see the views of Dublin from the top of Nelson's pillar. They save up three and tenpence in a red tin letterbox moneybox. They shake out the threepenny bits and sixpences and coax out the pennies with the blade of a knife. Two and three in silver and one and seven in coppers. They put on their bonnets and best clothes and take their umbrellas for fear it may come on to rain.
They buy one and fourpenceworth of brawn and four slices of panloaf at the north city diningrooms in Marlborough street from Miss Kate Collins, proprietress. They purchase four and twenty ripe plums from a girl at the foot of Nelson's pillar to take off the thirst of the brawn. They give two threepenny bits to the gentleman at the turnstile and begin to waddle slowly up the winding staircase, grunting, encouraging each other, afraid of the dark, panting, one asking the other have you the brawn, praising God and the Blessed Virgin, threatening to come down, peeping at the airslits. Glory be to God. They had no idea it was that high.
Their names are Anne Kearns and Florence MacCabe. Anne Kearns has the lumbago for which she rubs on Lourdes water, given her by a lady who got a bottleful from a passionist father. Florence MacCabe takes a crubeen and a bottle of double X for supper every Saturday. When they have eaten the brawn and the bread and wiped their twenty fingers in the paper the bread was wrapped in they go nearer to the railings. But they are afraid the pillar will fall. They see the roofs and argue about where the different churches are: Rathmines' blue dome, Adam and Eve's, saint Laurence O'Toole's.
But it makes them giddy to look so they pull up their skirts and settle down on their striped petticoats, peering up at the statue of the onehandled adulterer. It gives them a crick in their necks, and they are too tired to look up or down or to speak. They put the bag of plums between them and eat the plums out of it, one after another, wiping off with their handkerchiefs the plumjuice that dribbles out of their mouths and spitting the plumstones slowly out between the railings.
by the same author: The Sisters, August 1904