Andy Weir, Allegory, and Applicability

About a month ago, Andy Weir shared an opinion on YouTube that has been making the rounds now that the (very good) movie based on his book has come out and he’s running the risk of getting some positive press:

I never put any politics or messaging in any of my stories at all. There’s no deeper meaning. There isn’t even any symbolism in my book. Even non-political symbolism, my stories are purely to entertain. You don’t have to worry about THE MESSAGE. (YouTube)

Of all the responses to this statement I have seen, the most salient and the most persuasive is that Project Hail Mary, at least, is a manifestly political story. In a nutshell, the sun is being slowly consumed by an exotic space microbe, and Ryan Gosling is sent on a one-way mission to a nearby star to try to discover how to prevent those microbes from rendering Earth uninhabitable. In the course of telling the story, several values are communicated implicitly: it is better to approach strangers with friendship than with hostility; it is better to cooperate than to compete; it is good to be selfless when you can make a difference.

I haven’t read Andy Weir’s book; I’ve been warned off his prose style by people I respect, but his story at least made for an excellent film written and directed by other people. I am going, for purposes of this argument, to treat things from the film as representative of Weir as an author. I am sure Weir won’t mind, because in the clips I saw of this interview, the host, Critical Drinker, behaves the same way.

There is one line in this story that is meant to be persuasive to us, the audience, and to Grace, the protagonist, when trying to convince him to take the one-way mission. The woman in charge of the program says something like “We will run out of food in thirty years. That is if the nations of the world work together to ration properly. Which they won’t.”

This is transparently a political observation: humans are bad at working together, especially different societies of humans.

So, contra my earlier post on Death of the Author, does this mean I have to ignore Andy Weir’s goofy comments to maintain my reading of Project Hail Mary as being in some sense about the politics of cooperation?

In short, no.

This is not a disagreement about the contents of the work; Weir doesn’t deny that a character says these words. Nor is it really, as far as I can see, a disagreement about the meaning of the work, whether the character who spoke those words is meant to be saying something true. This is just a disagreement about what constitutes politics.

Weir thinks a book where humanity is saved by science, cooperation, and sacrifice is not political; I think it is. This isn’t a disagreement about the book, it’s a disagreement about words.

Weir’s idea of politics is something like 2020s US culture war stuff—this is certainly Critical Drinker’s understanding of the word, and Weir says he thinks they are aligned on finding that stuff distasteful in art. My idea of politics is “everything to do with trying to live together in the same city/country/planet with strangers.” In Project Hail Mary, the program’s staff is made of an international team of scientists coming together to share their data. Weir doesn’t think this is political; presumably he thinks it just makes sense. But consider that the team trying to save humanity in Interstellar is not international. Weir could have gone another way. His choice says something, but what it says is not, to him, political.

I don’t quarrel with his own personal definition of that word. It makes sense he says he thinks his book isn’t about politics and I think it is: we’re talking about two different things. But we’re not disagreeing about the book. We are not disagreeing about its allegorical meaning; we are disagreeing about the applicability of what it says.

Allegory vs. Applicability

In the Preface to the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien writes something fairly similar to Weir’s remarks:

I should like to say something here with reference to the many opinions or guesses that I have received or have read concerning the motives and meaning of the tale. The prime motive was the desire of a tale-teller to try his hand at a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them. […] As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical.

What Tolkien certainly doesn’t mean here is that the narrative of The Lords of the Rings doesn’t reflect his values. You need read only a little way into his letters to see just how deeply every scene and every word is informed by his idiosyncratic but deeply-felt philosophy. In the same Preface, he explains at length why his book is not, despite evidently popular opinion, an allegory for World War II (primarily by explaining how his book resolves much more optimistically than that conflict did), but in fact we see in Letter 66—written in 1944, while he was still drafting The Lord of the Rings—that far from conceiving of his book in terms of World War II, he was conceiving of World War II in terms of his book:

For we are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs. Not that in real life things are as clear cut as in a story, and we started out with a great many Orcs on our side. . . .

Tolkien’s writing is meant to be realistic, as he understands reality; he understands that, if he succeeds, you will necessarily recognize reality as you understand it in what he writes. He is not here to tell you what you may or may not recognize. You may find what he recognizes odd; but when reading his book, you are not meant to find orcs similar to the Royal Air Force. Tolkien did not find orcs similar to the RAF; he found the RAF similar to orcs.

This phrasing may seem like a distinction without a difference, but I think Tolkien also provides us with the language to justify that distinction further. When you saw that I was going to quote the Preface to the Second Edition, or when you read the title of this piece, you probably thought I was going to haul out this old chestnut again:

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

Well, I was. You just had to wait for it.

You might interpret Tolkien’s words here to mean, “I don’t like it when an author tells me what to think about their work; I want to read the book and make up my own mind what I think about it,” but I don’t think that’s quite right. A book isn’t an allegory merely because an author says in a tweet or an interview or a letter that such-and-such a thing has such-and-such a meaning. A book is an allegory when its entire structure is designed around providing a metaphorical context for exploring an idea indirectly.

You can tell when a book is really allegorical without having to ask the author; it bleeds through the pages. It is not the author’s intention that irks Tolkien when he reads an allegory, it is what happens to the story when it is made an allegory that he dislikes. It becomes phony, and it doesn’t respect the people and places in the story for their own sake; it uses them as puppets for the ideas it is playing with. This is the “purposed domination of the author”: not the author extra-textually sending you a Twitter DM with their intentions fully laid out, but the text itself twisted and broken by being wound around the ungainly limbs of the author’s hobbyhorse. It isn’t enough to note some similarities between one element in the story and some part of the real world to make that story an allegory—you have to find the whole structure, the whole pattern, all the twistings and windings. If you don’t have that, you just have similarities.

To call a book an allegory is to subordinate its literal meaning as a story to its hidden meaning in the real world, because that is the function of an allegory. Reading an intentional allegory that way is meeting it on its own terms, but those are not the terms on which most stories are presented. Tolkien and Weir are presenting “history, true or feigned,” and you may find similarities between their histories and real life just as you may find similarities between the past and the present. That is not to subordinate one to the other.

Let’s take, for an example, Frodo’s inability to find peace after the War of the Ring. His literal wound in his shoulder still hurts him, and he does not find the same joy in the Shire that he did before. If you were to say, “Frodo’s weariness represents the Shell Shock of World War I soldiers returning from the horror of the trenches”, you would be making an allegorical reading and, in my view, a mistake. You are ignoring the author’s intention, but nevertheless handing him purposed domination, and attempting to wield it on his behalf to boot. You would look in vain for the additional allegorical connections to that war until you entirely forgot what those short hairy guys were doing with that ring or whatever.

But if you were to make the deceptively similar statement, “Frodo’s weariness reminds me of the Shell Shock of World War I soldiers returning from the horror of the trenches”, you would be making an observation of applicability. You would be exercising your freedom as a reader. You need not look for any authorial or even textual support to justify this observation, because it is not a statement about the author or even about the text. It is a statement about you.

Frodo’s weariness is not an allegory or a metaphor for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: it is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, though Tolkien didn’t have a name for it. Because it is done well, it might remind you of other cases of PTSD, people with diverse traumas from diverse circumstances. Tolkien’s understanding of PTSD, such as it was, was very likely informed by World War I, but perhaps also by personal tragedies in his own life and those of his loved ones, in ways that we can only guess at. Trying to pinpoint which of these or any traumas most resemble Frodo’s is a waste of time. Frodo’s trauma is Frodo’s; if it reminds you of something or somebody else, that’s because it’s well-written.

The rich and varied facets of Tolkien’s work should remind you of many different things, and they should stand on their own as meaningful merely to themselves, just as if the story had really happened. It is normal to think of similarities between what you are reading and what you already know, but if you spend all of your time reading The Lord of the Rings thinking about World War I, you are robbing yourself of the opportunity to think about Middle-earth.

So Project Hail Mary. In this story, the world is facing an ecological crisis. Only by coming together, making sacrifices, and letting scientists do their jobs can we overcome it. Not to observe the obvious parallels with anthropogenic climate change would be, well, unobservant; but to call the story’s astrophages a metaphor or an allegory for climate change is to refuse to take the story seriously on its own terms—to use those similarities to erase the differences and the details that make the story its own thing. It is to view art on a ruthlessly instrumental level, to disassemble its beauty and rebuild it as a tool. It is to take an opportunity to look at something new, in a new way, and distort that new thing until you can carry on looking at whatever it was you were looking at before.

Of course, its beauty is not purely abstract, not merely pleasing to the senses. Project Hail Mary is a moving story in large part because of what it has to say about people. It does no disservice to that beauty to find its characters, events, and themes applicable to the real world. It is a compliment to its fidelity that you recognize reality in its contours. One friend might remind you of another, but they would be rightfully offended if you said they were a metaphor for the other one.

In short, it does not change my reading of Project Hail Mary that Andy Weir says he did not intend for the book to be political. He means he did not write an allegory. When I say I found politics in it, I mean I found its story applicable. Those statements are not really in conflict.