Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection
Part Three: On Writing Science Fiction Symbolism
To a child, a story is a story, and to many of us, as we grow older, a story remains a story. The good guy wins, the bad guy loses. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. We don't want anything beyond that-at least to begin with.
The trouble is that if that's all there is, one is likely to grow weary eventually. Children love to play tick-tack-toe, for instance, but it's such a limited game that, after a while, most children don't want to play it any more. In the same way, children, as they grow older, may stop wanting to read stories that are only stories.
Since writers get as tired writing stories that are only stories, as readers get tired reading them, it is only natural that writers begin to search for new and different ways to tell a story-for their own mental health, if nothing else.
A writer can try to find a new kind of plot, or he can indulge in stylistic experimentation, or he can strive for events that are ambiguous and conclusions that are inconclusive, or he can blur the distinction between good and evil, or between dream and reality. There are many, many things he can do and the one thing all these attempts have in common is that they annoy those readers who still are in the stage of wanting stories that are only stories.
Mind you, I don't sneer at such readers. For one thing, I myself still write stories that are primarily stories, because that's what I like. In my stories, there is a clear beginning, a clear middle, and a clear end, the good guy usually wins, and so on.
Nevertheless, you can't blame writers and readers for wanting something more than that, and those of us (1 include myself, please note) who are suspicious of experimentation and fancy tricks ought to make some effort to understand what's going on. We may fail to grasp it entirely, but we may at least see just enough to avoid an explosion of unreasonable anger.
One game that writers very commonly play is the one called "symbolism." A story can be written on two levels. On the surface, it is simply a story, and anyone can read it as such and be satisfied. Even children can read it.
But the simple characters and events of the surface may stand for (or symbolize) other subtler things. Below the surface, therefore, there may be hidden and deeper meanings that children and unsophisticated adults don't see. Those who can see the inner structure, however, can get a double pleasure out of it. First, since the inner structure is usually cleverer and more convoluted than the surface, it exercises the mind more pleasantly. Second, since it is not easy to detect, the reader has the excitement of discovery and the pleasure of admiring his own cleverness. (You can easily imagine what fun the writer has constructing such symbolic significance.)
I suppose the best example of something written on two levels is the pair of books popularly known as Alice in Wonderland. On the surface, it's a simply written fantasy, and children love it. Some adults reading it, however, find themselves in an intricate maze of puns, paradoxes, and inside jokes. (Read Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice, if you want to increase your pleasure in the book.)
Or take J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. On the surface, it is a simple tale of a dangerous quest. The small hobbit, Frodo, must take a dangerous ring into the very teeth of an all-powerful enemy and destroy it-and, of course, he succeeds. On a second, deeper level, it is an allegory of good and evil, leading us to accept the possibility that the small and weak can triumph where the (equally good) large and powerful might not; that even evil has its uses that contribute to the victory of the good, and so on.
But there is a third level, too. What is the ring that is so powerful and yet so evil? Why is it that those who possess it are corrupted by it and cannot give it up? Is such a thing pure fantasy or does it have an analogue in reality?
My own feeling is that the ring represents modern technology. This corrupts and destroys society (in Tolkien's view) and, yet, those societies who gain it and who are aware of its evils simply cannot give it up. I have read The Lord of the Rings five times, so far, and I have not yet exhausted my own symbolic reading of it. I do not agree with, and I resent, Tolkien's attitude and yet I get pleasure out of the intricacy and skill of the structure.
There is another important point to be made concerning symbolism.
A writer may insert it, without knowing he has done so; or else, a clever interpreter can find significance in various parts of a story that a writer will swear he had no intention of inserting.
This has happened to me, for instance. The middle portion of my novel The Gods Themselves, with its intricate picture of a trisexual society, has been interpreted psychiatrically and philosophically in ways that I know I didn't intend, and in terms that I literally don't understand. My Foundation series has been shown, by apparently careful analysis, to be thoroughly Marxist in inspiration, except that I had never read one word by Marx, or about Marx either, at the time the stories were written, or since.
When I complained once to someone who worked up a symbolic meaning of my story "Nightfall" that made no sense to me at all, he said to me, haughtily, "What makes you think you understand the story just because you've written it?"
And when I published an essay in which I maintained that Tolkien's ring symbolized modern technology, and a reader wrote to tell me that Tolkien himself had denied it, I responded with, "That doesn't matter. The ring nevertheless symbolizes modern technology."
Sometimes it is quite demonstrable that an author inserts a deeper symbolism than he knows - or even understands. I have almost never read a layman's explanation of relativity that didn't succumb to the temptation of quoting Alice because Lewis Carroll included paradoxes that are unmistakably relativistic in nature. He did not know that, of course; he just happened to be a genius at paradox.
Well, sometimes this magazine publishes stories that must not be read only on the surface, and, as is almost inevitable, this riles a number of readers.
I am thinking, for instance, of the novella "Statues" by Jim Aikin, which appeared in our November 1984 issue, and which some readers objected to strenuously. There were statements to the effect that it wasn't science fiction or even fantasy, that it had no point, that it was anti-Christian, and so on.
To begin with, the story, taken simply as a story, is undoubtedly unpleasant in spots. I winced several times when I read it, and I tell you, right now, that I wouldn't, and couldn't, write such a story. But I'm not the be-all and the end-all. The story, however difficult to stomach some of its passages may be, was skillfully and powerfully written. Even some of those who objected had to admit that.
And it was indeed a fantasy. Aikin made it clear toward the end that the statues were not pushed about, and that their apparent movement was not a delusion. They were on the side of the heroine and were cooperating with her, trying to rescue her from her unhappy life.
But that is only the surface. A little deeper and we see that it is a case of the old gods trying to save the young woman from the new. It is a rebellion against the rigid Pharisaic morality of some aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition and a harking back to the greater freedom of some aspects of paganism.
The story is in the spirit of that powerful line of A. C. Swinburne in his "Hymn to Proserpine": "Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray from thy breath."
Looked at this way, the story is not anti-Christian (surely the "Christian" characters in the story are not all there is to Christianity), but is against hypocrisy-in-the-name-of-religion, which I imagine no one favors, least of all Christians. The great French dramatist Moliere took up his cudgels against that same foe in his masterpiece Tartuffe and you can't imagine the trouble he got into as a result.
But if you go deeper still, you will find the story is one more expression of the longing for the old.
In this story it is expressed by contrasting the frowning new god with the kindly old ones. In The Lord of the Rings it is expressed by contrasting the evil technology of the Dark Lord, Sauron, with the pastoral life of the simple hobbits. (Of course, it is much safer to make of the enemy a Devil-figure than a God-figure, so Tolkien got into no trouble at all.)
You can see the value of symbolism when you compare either of these with Jack Finney's famous "The Third Level," where he demonstrates his longing for the old by a straightforward contrast between 1950 and 1880. It leaves nothing to discover and, in my opinion, therefore, is a weak story.
But "Statues"-like it or not-is a strong story that makes an important point with great skill.
The trouble is that if that's all there is, one is likely to grow weary eventually. Children love to play tick-tack-toe, for instance, but it's such a limited game that, after a while, most children don't want to play it any more. In the same way, children, as they grow older, may stop wanting to read stories that are only stories.
Since writers get as tired writing stories that are only stories, as readers get tired reading them, it is only natural that writers begin to search for new and different ways to tell a story-for their own mental health, if nothing else.
A writer can try to find a new kind of plot, or he can indulge in stylistic experimentation, or he can strive for events that are ambiguous and conclusions that are inconclusive, or he can blur the distinction between good and evil, or between dream and reality. There are many, many things he can do and the one thing all these attempts have in common is that they annoy those readers who still are in the stage of wanting stories that are only stories.
Mind you, I don't sneer at such readers. For one thing, I myself still write stories that are primarily stories, because that's what I like. In my stories, there is a clear beginning, a clear middle, and a clear end, the good guy usually wins, and so on.
Nevertheless, you can't blame writers and readers for wanting something more than that, and those of us (1 include myself, please note) who are suspicious of experimentation and fancy tricks ought to make some effort to understand what's going on. We may fail to grasp it entirely, but we may at least see just enough to avoid an explosion of unreasonable anger.
One game that writers very commonly play is the one called "symbolism." A story can be written on two levels. On the surface, it is simply a story, and anyone can read it as such and be satisfied. Even children can read it.
But the simple characters and events of the surface may stand for (or symbolize) other subtler things. Below the surface, therefore, there may be hidden and deeper meanings that children and unsophisticated adults don't see. Those who can see the inner structure, however, can get a double pleasure out of it. First, since the inner structure is usually cleverer and more convoluted than the surface, it exercises the mind more pleasantly. Second, since it is not easy to detect, the reader has the excitement of discovery and the pleasure of admiring his own cleverness. (You can easily imagine what fun the writer has constructing such symbolic significance.)
I suppose the best example of something written on two levels is the pair of books popularly known as Alice in Wonderland. On the surface, it's a simply written fantasy, and children love it. Some adults reading it, however, find themselves in an intricate maze of puns, paradoxes, and inside jokes. (Read Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice, if you want to increase your pleasure in the book.)
Or take J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. On the surface, it is a simple tale of a dangerous quest. The small hobbit, Frodo, must take a dangerous ring into the very teeth of an all-powerful enemy and destroy it-and, of course, he succeeds. On a second, deeper level, it is an allegory of good and evil, leading us to accept the possibility that the small and weak can triumph where the (equally good) large and powerful might not; that even evil has its uses that contribute to the victory of the good, and so on.
But there is a third level, too. What is the ring that is so powerful and yet so evil? Why is it that those who possess it are corrupted by it and cannot give it up? Is such a thing pure fantasy or does it have an analogue in reality?
My own feeling is that the ring represents modern technology. This corrupts and destroys society (in Tolkien's view) and, yet, those societies who gain it and who are aware of its evils simply cannot give it up. I have read The Lord of the Rings five times, so far, and I have not yet exhausted my own symbolic reading of it. I do not agree with, and I resent, Tolkien's attitude and yet I get pleasure out of the intricacy and skill of the structure.
There is another important point to be made concerning symbolism.
A writer may insert it, without knowing he has done so; or else, a clever interpreter can find significance in various parts of a story that a writer will swear he had no intention of inserting.
This has happened to me, for instance. The middle portion of my novel The Gods Themselves, with its intricate picture of a trisexual society, has been interpreted psychiatrically and philosophically in ways that I know I didn't intend, and in terms that I literally don't understand. My Foundation series has been shown, by apparently careful analysis, to be thoroughly Marxist in inspiration, except that I had never read one word by Marx, or about Marx either, at the time the stories were written, or since.
When I complained once to someone who worked up a symbolic meaning of my story "Nightfall" that made no sense to me at all, he said to me, haughtily, "What makes you think you understand the story just because you've written it?"
And when I published an essay in which I maintained that Tolkien's ring symbolized modern technology, and a reader wrote to tell me that Tolkien himself had denied it, I responded with, "That doesn't matter. The ring nevertheless symbolizes modern technology."
Sometimes it is quite demonstrable that an author inserts a deeper symbolism than he knows - or even understands. I have almost never read a layman's explanation of relativity that didn't succumb to the temptation of quoting Alice because Lewis Carroll included paradoxes that are unmistakably relativistic in nature. He did not know that, of course; he just happened to be a genius at paradox.
Well, sometimes this magazine publishes stories that must not be read only on the surface, and, as is almost inevitable, this riles a number of readers.
I am thinking, for instance, of the novella "Statues" by Jim Aikin, which appeared in our November 1984 issue, and which some readers objected to strenuously. There were statements to the effect that it wasn't science fiction or even fantasy, that it had no point, that it was anti-Christian, and so on.
To begin with, the story, taken simply as a story, is undoubtedly unpleasant in spots. I winced several times when I read it, and I tell you, right now, that I wouldn't, and couldn't, write such a story. But I'm not the be-all and the end-all. The story, however difficult to stomach some of its passages may be, was skillfully and powerfully written. Even some of those who objected had to admit that.
And it was indeed a fantasy. Aikin made it clear toward the end that the statues were not pushed about, and that their apparent movement was not a delusion. They were on the side of the heroine and were cooperating with her, trying to rescue her from her unhappy life.
But that is only the surface. A little deeper and we see that it is a case of the old gods trying to save the young woman from the new. It is a rebellion against the rigid Pharisaic morality of some aspects of the Judeo-Christian tradition and a harking back to the greater freedom of some aspects of paganism.
The story is in the spirit of that powerful line of A. C. Swinburne in his "Hymn to Proserpine": "Thou has conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown gray from thy breath."
Looked at this way, the story is not anti-Christian (surely the "Christian" characters in the story are not all there is to Christianity), but is against hypocrisy-in-the-name-of-religion, which I imagine no one favors, least of all Christians. The great French dramatist Moliere took up his cudgels against that same foe in his masterpiece Tartuffe and you can't imagine the trouble he got into as a result.
But if you go deeper still, you will find the story is one more expression of the longing for the old.
In this story it is expressed by contrasting the frowning new god with the kindly old ones. In The Lord of the Rings it is expressed by contrasting the evil technology of the Dark Lord, Sauron, with the pastoral life of the simple hobbits. (Of course, it is much safer to make of the enemy a Devil-figure than a God-figure, so Tolkien got into no trouble at all.)
You can see the value of symbolism when you compare either of these with Jack Finney's famous "The Third Level," where he demonstrates his longing for the old by a straightforward contrast between 1950 and 1880. It leaves nothing to discover and, in my opinion, therefore, is a weak story.
But "Statues"-like it or not-is a strong story that makes an important point with great skill.
