Allegory: Threat or Menace?
"I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." – J.R.R. Tolkien"I don't like allegory." – China Mieville"The future, in fiction, is a metaphor." – Ursula K. Le Guin
There's been a general dislike of allegory in science fiction and fantasy for decades. It's one of the things you pick up from the writing advice culture that has accreted like a snail's shell around the soft, squidgy centre of the genre – show don't tell, write every day, allegory bad, etc. In fact, "allegory bad, smash allegory!" is one of the tenets we most often leave unquestioned.
When we talk about science fiction stories as representing real-world things, we toss around softer words – even Le Guin's "metaphor" is too much for some, we often say that SF is "about" the present. We talk about theme a great deal.
But allegory? Get thee behind me, Satan!
Allegory is theme's crude older brother, the one who leans in close enough for you to smell his breath, and says "DO YOU GET IT, MAN? HUH? DO YOU GET IT?"
But what if allegory made a story stronger?
This is a long, roundabout way of saying we're going to be talking about Ian McDonald's 1992 novel The Broken Land, published in the British Isles as Hearts, Hands and Voices.
Grandfather was a tree.
Father grew trux, in fifteen colours
Mother could sing the double-helix song, sing it right into the hearts of living things and change them. Around we go, and round…
A house ran amok in Fifteenth Street the day the soldiers of the Emperor Across the River came to Mathembe's township.
This is the start of The Broken Land, and story of Mathembe, and how her family was driven out of their ancestral village, turned into refugees, scattered, traumatized, and at last, partially, reunited.
It's quite good. You can go read it now. It's cool, I'll wait.
Done?
Okay.
The Broken Land is set against the backdrop of two nations and two religions. Mathembe's people are Confessors, who use biotech and speak Old Speech, and but their lands have long been under the political control, and partly colonized by, the Empire, whose people are Proclaimers and use New Speech and conventional technology of metal and electricity and hydrocarbons. Imperial oppression is met with Confessor acts of resistance, which are met with reprisals, which is met with terrorism until the land is at war and…
Yeah, it's Ireland. Confessors = Catholics, Proclaimers = Protestants, the whole story is The Irish War of Independence and the partition of Ireland with shades of the Troubles. It's not subtle. It's not even allegory, it's ALLEGORY, shouted from the rooftops, spelled out in letters of fire 200 feet high. It's so clear that even Dumb Teenaged Me got it back in the 1990s; that's a bad sign in some ways.
And yet… it works?
To understand why I think The Broken Land works, and yet why there is a lot of (often justifiable) hostility towards them in SFF, you have to take a look beyond this one book.
We all know the story of the literary author who decides to write a science fiction or fantasy novel.
Sorry, I meant they wrote something that is "fabulist" or "speculative fiction" or "in the tradition of Borges," etc. Not a grubby commercial genre! Heaven forfend! This story is going to be about something.
This is not universal, but when literary writers dip a toe into SFF, they are often Trying to Make A Point, and yes, we know, the rocketship is a phallus, the dragons are racism, the lengthy digression about a wicked gnome is about your hated rival who said something snippy about you in The Paris Review, WE GET IT ALREADY!
The lit fic assumption at work here is that commercial SFF is incapable of metaphor or theme; our rocketships are just literal big metal explodey-go-fasts, our dragons are just big fire breathing lizards, etc, just a bunch of big plot devices to fling characters about for 500 pages and/or until the publisher writes a cheque for the advance.
Actual SFF, even before it escaped its larval form as pulp fiction, has grasped for metaphor and theme quite often. The difference is, mainstream SFF allows, indeed requires, dual interpretation. The dragon can represent hatred or racism or environmental destruction, but it must first function as a dragon. We must take its dragon-ness seriously within the context of the story. Its thematic functions must be allowed to emerge organically, within the context of a world shaped to contain dragons.
SFF, at its best, asks its readers to hold both the literal and the thematic in their heads at the same time, to understand that C'est ne pas une pipe is a liberating statement, that meaning can be found in a palimpsest, not a simple X=Y equation.
Hence, the rejection of allegory. If you're going to aim high in SFF, this is the well-trodden way, but no the less difficult for all that. Weave your meanings into the story with some subtlety! Build your world so that themes emerge like shoots in the springtime! Allegory? You wanna talk about a clomping foot of nerdism, kid, let me tell you about allegory! Leave it to the lit fic authors, who can't handle real SFF, amirite?
But allegory is a tool, and one of the reasons I love SFF is that, unlike any other kind of writing, you can use every tool in the toolbox. Used badly, allegory is ugly and obvious and boring. Used well…
How does McDonald use it in The Broken Land?
He does two things from the beginning that makes it work:
1) The situation is allegorical, the characters are not. They're fully realized, within their world.
2) He takes the SFnal elements seriously on their own; the Confessor biotechnology is not some weird, tortured metaphor for Catholicism – thought it has some thematic connections to a people's connection to their homeland, it's as thought out as any other SF idea.
These two decisions give McDonald the ability to tell a story that we don't see very often in science fiction – the story of a small person swept up in great events, just trying to stay alive and find their family. (This is something I may have ranted about recently, in fact.)
Mathembe isn't going to save the day. She's not even capable of saving her father when he's marched off by soldiers, or her brother as his anger drives him into the embrace of sectarian violence. She is acted upon as often as she acts. Her agency is small, even at the end of the novel (when McDonald gestures towards breaking his allegory and letting the SFnal conceit run wild, forging a path away from history as it was) she only discovers a measure of power as part of a group, already established, in which she finds refuge.
It's within the structure of an allegory that McDonald finds a story of great flexibility and scope. Mathembe's refugee exile and search allows him to explore both Mathembe's family – her guilt-wracked mother, her parochial, sometimes cruel, sometimes kind grandfather (who, yes, is a disembodied head, it's a biotech thing) her increasingly murderous brother, along with poets, soldiers, bureaucrats, riverboaters, lawyers, con artists, criminals, barkeeps, zealots, and all the others they run across during their travels.
Throughout, Mathembe does what she does as a character, not as some symbol for colonialism or refugees or the horrors of war. Those things are there, and they are felt more deeply because Mathembe refuses to be allegorical. It's a good use of the tool, in other words.
Self Promotion Corner
Oh hey, Tangent Online reviewed The Acheulean Gift, let's see what they had to say… Hmmm… "a reasonably enjoyable diversion…" "not especially novel… and the conclusion was rather predictable." Oh, Tangent. You kidders.