dimension—but not on earth.
This school includes all fantasies and all science fiction or general adventure thrillers which present issues without any possible counterpart in reality—issues without any application, abstract or symbolic, to the reader’s own life. It also includes the lesser costume dramas. The better ones do present some issue that applies to modern life (usually in a very generalized way); but the cheaper historical novels, which consist of nothing but duels and swinging from chandeliers, have no moral beyond the hero winning the girl or the buried gold.
Symbolism
Symbolism is the concretization of an idea in an object or person representing that idea.
An example of symbolic writing is morality plays. Just as fairy tales present the good fairy and the bad fairy, so morality plays present moral abstractions by means of human figures like an embodied Justice or an embodied Virtue. The figures do not represent characteristics [as in Romantic fiction]; they represent the abstractions themselves as a kind of Platonic archetype. This is a crude dramatic form, but legitimate if the symbolism is made clear.
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is symbolic insofar as physical shapes represent a psychological conflict, Mr. Hyde being a symbol of psychological evil.
The one absolute in the use of symbolism is that a symbol should be legible; otherwise, the form is a contradiction in terms. This applies also to symbolism within works which are not symbolic as a whole. My use of the dollar sign in Atlas Shrugged is an example: I establish its meaning, and when I later refer to it, I do so on that basis. Similarly, when writers of religious stories use the cross, it is clear what that cross stands for. But when authors introduce all kinds of triangles or sawed-off pyramids, and nobody knows what it means, that is outside the bounds of rational propriety. Or take Kafka, or any such modernist; if nobody knows what the alleged symbol represents, one cannot even call it symbolism.
When, at the end of Part II of Atlas Shrugged, Dagny follows Galt into the sunrise, that is symbolism. It is even a trite symbol, but so appropriate that it was legitimate. Literally, she is following his plane late at night, and by the locale of the action he has to go east (which I carefully planned long in advance). Symbolically, she has been in the dark during all of the story, but now she is about to see the sunrise—and the first light comes from the wings of Galt’s plane.
Using the sunrise, or any form of light, as a symbol of the good or the revelation is a bromide, but it is a bromide of the kind that love is: it is so wide and fundamental that you cannot avoid it. What will make your use of it a bromide or not is whether or not you bring any originality to the subject.
It is not a good method to introduce symbolic sequences into an otherwise realistic story. For instance, some books have dream sequences which are supposed to be symbolic, but which are always completely unclear. This is a bad mixture of methods. It cannot be justified because it destroys the reality of the story. (It is proper, however, in musicals. In musicals, anything goes, the only rule being imagination.)
Tragedy and the Projection of Negatives
The justification for presenting tragic endings in literature is to show, as in We the Living, that the human spirit can survive even the worst of circumstances—that the worst that the chance events of nature or the evil of other people can do will not defeat the proper human spirit. To quote from Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged: “Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is.”
Here I speak of philosophical justification, not literary. As far as literary rules go, you can present anything you wish—you can write a story in which everybody is destroyed, the theme then being that man has no chance and destruction is his fate. There are many such stories, some of them well written. But to present suffering for the sake of suffering is totally wrong philosophically; and literarily it makes for a pointless story.
In We the Living, all the good people are defeated. The philosophical justification of the tragedy is the fact that the story denounces the collectivist state and shows, metaphysically, that man cannot be destroyed by it; he can be killed, but not changed or negated. The heroine dies radiantly endorsing life, feeling happiness in her last moment