Symbolic Drive: Using Allegory in Fiction
If a form of storytelling is deserving of a renaissance, it’s allegory. Allegory’s association with fable has done it a disservice, unintentionally relegating it to the realm of children’s stories and heavy-handed moralizing. Though a classic tool for teaching the young, it remains a vital form for political critique, an elegant genre in its own right, and a reliable engine for the novel. It’s also the place from which I write.
What Is Allegory?
Allegory is an instrument for plot, character, and play. Rather than beginning from a place of voice or setting, allegory allows a writer to begin from something that warrants picking apart—a revolution, societal failures, or even a universal experience like the loss of a loved one. Allegory becomes a tool of shape, helping to define which characters represent what aspects of an idea.
(Fable vs. Parable vs. Allegory.)
The easy critique is to view this as flattening, but it’s helpful to think of it as a method of grounding. Melville’s Ahab and Morrison’s Beloved are born from allegory, rich symbols that are anything but flat, and more lasting for all the ways they’re recognized. The power of an allegorical character is the thread of the universal.
Using Allegory for Plot
As for plot, the advantage of working from a place of long-form symbolism is the clarity of intent, which becomes a scaffold for the work. For some, scaffolding grows out of character-building work like the often-lengthy exercise of Proust’s Questionnaire. Allegory demands that a writer be more concise.
You begin with a thesis statement in the sense of clearly defining what you’re exploring and what you believe you need to say about it. Beginning from a place of building an argument is, for me, more active and a better map than strict outlining; it’s a loose form of plotting. If one character is representing a specific form of altruism, it necessitates a scene where that concept is confronted, perhaps even broken. From there comes conflict or discovery, and forward movement.
In my debut, I used allegory to dissect the experience of inherited mental illness. My second novel was an allegorical examination of different forms of grief. My newest novel, We Lived on the Horizon, grew from symbolic exploration of nanny states and altruism. Though the novels’ worlds and characters are larger than the strictly allegorical, the first pulse of the writing is rooted in the symbolic.
Just as logic lines clash and drive debates, long-form symbols clash to make narrative. It’s framework. Once a framework has been established, there’s endless room for nuance, character, specificity, and real contemplations of how we exist in the world. That’s less moralizing than it is the root of learning.
Misperceptions of Allegory
Perhaps some misperceptions of allegory are tied to it being a preferred form for scathing political critique. The Crucible for McCarthyism, Animal Farm for the Russian revolution and eventual rise of Stalinism, Glory for the coup against Robert Mugabe. These are writ large works where the correlations are shouted, and the real provides structure and movement for the fictional.
The fictional gives both freedom of thought and a veneer of protection. These are just witch trials from history, these are just animals. This too is more sophisticated than direct correlation and commentary, it’s engagement and recognition, and perhaps a call to action—all with a wink.
In introductory craft teaching, allegory is often reduced to the concepts of theme and metaphor. Theme is fuzzier and not always tied to narrative drive, and metaphor is too focused a trope for allegory’s range. It’s helpful to think of allegory as metaphor and theme squeezed together and drunk on maximalism.
It should be catnip for novelists, yet readers and writers alike still fear it. In our earliest encounters with the form, we’re taught to see it in broad strokes and to intentionally look for moralizing, not for the nuance and depth the works themselves have. When we’re first taught to read for the symbolic, it’s too often at the expense of reading for everything else. The whale is knowledge. The horses are the workers. That early teaching overlooks what’s been made beyond the symbol, the art that the symbolic allows.
A Final Word on Allegory
A final pleasure of allegory is that you need never say you’re working in it, as has become necessary with satire. I say that I write from place or voice, which is true—but the kernel of it is allegory and the way it worms into the mind. Understanding is fluid, and there are as many meanings for the white whale as there are editions of Moby Dick.
Novels and their interpretations are a long, long game. A reader may walk away from a book thinking they’ve just read an odd story about pigs. Years later, that same reader might hear a politician echo one of those farm animals, and shiver. That’s allegory’s gift.
Check out Erika Swyler’s We Lived on the Horizon here:
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