Metaphor and Speculative Fiction
by Joshua Fagan
All fiction is to a certain extent metaphorical. The setting and plot points of a story matter, but they matter in that they create a foundation for the passions and laments and psychological tensions that give a story the capacity to captivate its audience. Theorists from Aristotle to Percy Shelley have discussed this idea, but a basic form of it is common knowledge. A story that only has plot points and no emotional resonance beneath them would be, in common opinion, a bad story. Narrative storytelling uses a layer of artifice, relating the facts of a made-up situation, in order to better communicate a layer of truth: feelings and yearnings that relate to the world we inhabit. Those story-facts have a metaphorical value, and that value is why they make us care.
Succession, for instance, is externally a story about three maladjusted adult children of a brutal news magnate fighting for control of his company, but if that was primarily what it was about, few would watch it. In reality, the essence of the story is about those maladjusted children trying and largely failing to balance their desperate desire for their father’s approval with the knowledge that such striving is both practically futile and emotionally destructive.
Yet the metaphorical value of fiction is most clear in speculative fiction, which posits another world outside our own. The basic ethos of speculative fiction, from Lord of the Rings to Blade Runner, is that rejecting the obligation to depict the external, physical realities of the world creates the opportunity to depict its internal, essential realities in a different and new way. Such a lofty statement does not, of course, imply that this ethos is always consciously present. A studio greenlighting the newest piece of Star Wars or Harry Potter media likely does not act from any motivations loftier than convincing a group of ordinary people who want a break from the mundanity of their lives to spend their money on an exhilarating adventure. Yet that ethos remains implicit in speculative fiction for the simple reason that speculative fiction would have little lasting value to us if what really mattered were all those starships and magic wands.
There are, of course, still people who believe non-realist fiction is fatuous because what it depicts does not physically exist, but these people are less influential than in days past. In an age where superheroes and space operas dominate the big and small screens, the influence of these people is not what it was, that mass of practitioners of what Ursula Le Guin wryly called “anti-genre bigotry.” Even Edmund Wilson, a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and one of America’s finest literary critics, mocked The Lord of the Rings as childish triviality. Wilson died a half-century ago, and the cultural attitude toward the fantastical he espoused has slowly withered.
The problem is that while the visceral disdain toward speculative fiction has waned, the intellectual foundation of that old disdain largely remains. Realism’s lobotomized ghost, stripped of the dignity and vigor of George Eliot and Charles Dickens, continues to shamble forward. The demand that a Star Wars movie explain exactly how every gadget or scheme operates is the same demand that a film adaptation of Portrait of a Lady portray late-Victorian dress and manners accurately. In both cases, what matters are the external elements of the narrative, its decorations and trappings. The pathos and aspirations of the characters and the actions they take, despite creating the inner spirit of a narrative, has in this perspective only a secondary role. This perspective is, in the literal sense of the term, superficial: as in, concerned foremost with surfaces.
The oeuvre of no less a luminary than Shakespeare demonstrates the inadequacy of relying on historical accuracy as a corollary for artistic quality. Using Antony and Cleopatra as a historical source to learn about the distant past is as foolish as viewing a collection of Camelot tales as a true and exact history of England. Shakespeare, while he had historical sources, used them creatively, as a means to explore poignant tales of ambition and despair, desperate yearning against an uncaring world. Very few read Hamlet because of a passionate interest in the Denmark of the distant past. Hamlet remains a classic not because its setting is particularly luminous but because Shakespeare uses that setting to explore conceptions of malaise and anxiety that continue to have relevance.
For speculative fiction, the overwhelming fixation on the external elements of the world becomes not only supercilious but actively absurd. Depicting Victorian dress accurately has, if nothing else, antiquarian interest, as the Victorian period was a real time that can be observed and studied. Viewing adaptations of Victorian novels only for “accuracy” conveys the same paucity of imagination as those who view Succession only as a portrait of an America corporate boardroom, but it is not innately absurd. Explaining in baroque detail the history of every sci-fi gadget in Blade Runner, conversely, has zero relevance because the gadgets have no external reality. The external elements of a speculative world have relevance only in how they illuminate the essences of the characters and their choices. That internal essence is what captivates our attention, because it reaches beyond made-up scenarios to the deeper and more broadly applicable truth contained within those scenarios.
As the critic Matthew Arnold long ago wrote, the concern of Shakespeare is with the “inner man,” the part of the psyche that remains largely unchanged even as civilizations rise and fall. The psychological and emotional force of Shakespeare’s plays is why we still read them. Their plots and settings have value, but that value is largely metaphorical. Hamlet uses ancient Danish politics because it provides a particularly amenable world for discussing certain feelings and sensations. Speculative fiction goes a step further. It uses not just a different time but a different and ethereal world. Blade Runner uses a certain set of aesthetics that we have come to call “cyberpunk” not because they look cool, but because they offer a particularly affective way to comment on ideas ranging from unchecked corporate power to the existential crises deriving from the inability to maintain a solid, fixed sense of self in a chaotic postmodern world.
The realist novel, despite its many accomplishments, helped propagate the understandable but mistaken idea that fiction can depict the world as it materially is. Stendhal famously described the novel as “a mirror which goes out on a highway,” reflecting everything that passes. In reality, fiction will never be able to depict the physical realities of the world as well as a documentary.
Yet fiction is a special kind of mirror, one glowing with the capacity to acutely portray the internal, latent essence of an environment, from old Denmark to the Victorian drawing-room, and it is that essence that has significance after the environment itself becomes a historical footnote. Speculative fiction should be prized because, at its best, it shocks us into a confrontation with this truth, the delightful and dizzying understanding that stories that have no obvious, external significance to the details of our everyday lives can nonetheless have immense metaphorical resonance because they describe feelings that will always be relevant.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.