Symbolism, SF, and modern literature
Jan. 20th, 2010 11:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jsburbidgeFrom a post by Jo Walton over at Tor.com on the protocols of reading SF:
I wonder...
My experience in reading "literary" narrative does not lead me to expect metaphor as a dominant organizing mode. That is, I don't see it as such in Shakespeare or Milton (established typological tropes aside in Milton, but that is a very special case) or Swift or Austen or Joyce or Proust or Powell. There are metaphors there, of course - sometimes - but they are usually low-level tools.
Narrative which does consistently use metaphor as a structuring mechanism is, of course, allegory, and it has been out of fashion for some time (its golden age being from about the Fourteenth Century to the Sixteenth Century, with a couple of Seventeenth Century outposts like Pilgrim's Progress). These days you're likely to get people who think the Narnia books are allegory because Aslan and Jesus are different manifestations of the Second Person of the Trinity.
"These days I much more often have this problem from the other end—the literary end. The best example of this I remember came from Making Light in a thread called "Story for Beginners". A reviewer wanted to make the zombies in Kelly Link’s “Zombie Contingency Plans” (in the collection Magic For Beginners) into metaphors. They’re not. They’re actual zombies. They may also be metaphors, but their metaphorical function is secondary to the fact that they’re actual zombies that want to eat your brains. Science fiction may be literalization of metaphor, it may be open to metaphorical, symbolic and even allegorical readings, but what’s real within the story is real within the story, or there’s no there there."
I wonder...
My experience in reading "literary" narrative does not lead me to expect metaphor as a dominant organizing mode. That is, I don't see it as such in Shakespeare or Milton (established typological tropes aside in Milton, but that is a very special case) or Swift or Austen or Joyce or Proust or Powell. There are metaphors there, of course - sometimes - but they are usually low-level tools.
Narrative which does consistently use metaphor as a structuring mechanism is, of course, allegory, and it has been out of fashion for some time (its golden age being from about the Fourteenth Century to the Sixteenth Century, with a couple of Seventeenth Century outposts like Pilgrim's Progress). These days you're likely to get people who think the Narnia books are allegory because Aslan and Jesus are different manifestations of the Second Person of the Trinity.
