Occasionally I find myself thinking back to this 2009 blog post on Tolkien by China Miéville. (Although the post is still up, most of the text is missing for some reason; hence the Wayback Machine link.) Emphasis is mine:
Tolkien explains that he has a ‘cordial dislike of allegory’. Amen! Amen! And just to be clear, there is no contradiction at all between this fact, and the certain truth that his world throws off metaphors, can and should be read as doing all sorts of things, wittingly or unwittingly, with ideas of society, of class, the war, etc. But here is precisely the difference between allegory and metaphor: the latter is fecund, polysemic, generative of meanings but evasive of stability; the former is fecund and interesting largely to the extent that it fails. In his abjuring of allegory, Tolkien refuses the notion that a work of fiction is, in some reductive way, primarily, solely, or really ‘about’ something else, narrowly and precisely. That the work of the reader is one of code-breaking, that if we find the right key we can perform a hermeneutic algorithm and ‘solve’ the book. Tolkien knows that that makes for both clumsy fiction and clunky code. His dissatisfaction with the Narnia books was in part precisely because they veered too close to allegory, and therefore did not believe in their own landscape. A similar problem is visible now, in the various tentative ventures into u- or dystopia by writers uncomfortable with the genre they find themselves in and therefore the worlds they create, eager to stress that these worlds are 'about’ real and serious things–and thereby bleeding them of the specificity they need to be worth inhabiting, or capable of 'meaning’, at all.
This is not a plea for naivety, for evading ramifications or analysis, for some impossible and pointless return to 'just-a-story’. The problem is not that allegory unhelpfully exaggerates the 'meaning’ of a 'pure’ story, but that it criminally reduces it.
Whether Tolkien himself would follow all the way with this argument is not the point here: the point is that his 'cordial dislike’ is utterly key for the project of creating a fantastic fiction that both means and is vividly and irreducibly itself, and is thereby fiction worthy of the name.
A couple of years later he published Embassytown, which is one of my favorite examples of this. The political relationships depicted in the novel strongly evoke various real-world phenomena, but are not exactly analogous to any of them. It’s a metaphor for colonialism, not an allegory of colonialism.
