First and before I go into this post, I want to make it clear that I don’t believe in writing-with-a-message. I am in full agreement with whoever said “if you want to send a message, use western union.” Since everything became infused with “message” which somehow always comes down to politics and since everything local became political, (it never was the other way around. Or at least they never believed it.) they’ve done their best to politicize that most localized of personal events – the thoughts in your head. Which are supposed to be worthwhile and useful and… socially relevant.
The obvious problem with “message literature” is that it requires the message to be open and obvious. It also requires it to be in full accord with the visions of the gatekeepers. In fact, message-literature only invaded the field when the publishers and editors themselves started believing literature should send messages. Since, of course, most of the artists doing message-art nowadays view themselves as counter cultural, there’s a delicious irony there. It’s just that it hurts when I laugh.
However, I also want to point out that of course every piece of REAL art HAS a message (or several). The message might be as simple as “I’ve got a serious Jones for Greco-Roman tradition” (which in itself was fraught with all sorts of subtexts for the culture of the Renaissance, including the implicit assumption that the human body was beautiful) or as complex as “this is how humans grow up, with a foot in reality and one in myth.” (I’m thinking of The Amazing Maurice And His Educated Rodents – though many other books fit this “message.”)
Art creation, at least in my experience, happens somewhere halfway between the conscious and the subconscious, in a war between who we think we are and who we really are, what we think reality is and what reality really is. It is from that tension that real art is born. (I did not consciously put any “message” in Darkship Thieves, but all sorts of people are finding message in it, anyway. And even I can see all sorts of messages in it, in retrospect. Things that shape the artist try to leak through.)
While this does not invalidate self-consciously-aimed messages against whatever the current regime/society is, or stories that echo recent events and TWIST to make you see the artist’s point of view, to my mind art only happens when the subconscious adds yet something else, so the whole book has a deep resonance and doesn’t have that quality of learned-and-regurgitated accepted truth. (For instance, Ursula LeGuinn’s The Left Hand Of Darkness was aimed – I’m fairly sure – as a blunt argument on the nature of sex and gender, but what actually emerged echoes with deeper resonances of the subconscious which I’m sure she (or anyone) could neither have planned nor put in.)
But even when “messages” become art despite themselves few consciously aimed messages remain art after being vetted for ideological purity by gatekeepers. At least, I don’t think so.
Which is why an establishment that requires “message” or an establishment that requires any type of conformity – an establishment that has become concentrated and holds all the power of the purse, in fact – tends to produce very bad art… or good art ONLY despite itself. It also tends to produce a “reaction” art that is vibrant and full of energy… and held at bay as long as possible.
This is perhaps easiest to see in the French nineteenth century where art was encouraged and promoted by the State.
I recently took a course that echoed the methods they used to learn at the time – notably drawing from the cast (a plaster cast of a classical statue). I found it useful, but of course I wasn’t forced to spend year after year doing just this. I wasn’t forced to believe that only classical or biblical themes were acceptable and that color was a dangerous tempting demon. And I didn’t draw the cast over and over again for years, till I learned to see people like that, in the “correct” proportions and NOT as they really were.
Most of all, though, it became a competition of virtuosity. Using the permitted methods, themes and forms, artists vied with each other to make each painting more complex and “difficult.” One expression of this was the paintings with multitudes of people and animals, which given the fact they had to draw from life (or stuffed. Er… animals. Not people. I think.) because they couldn’t otherwise record images, became very difficult indeed. (It was usually done in stages, of course.)
It occurred to me, recently, that a lot of science fiction and fantasy and even mystery have become like that. “And now, for my next feat, I will attempt a completely alien world where the aliens communicate only through their salivary glands!” Okay, that’s exaggerating, but I’ve seen stuff that “reaches” almost as much. There certainly is fantasy set in almost every time period, striving to remain both believable/true to history AND magical. And there are mysteries using every profession under the sun as detectives.
While this might seem like a logical post-modernistic affliction, the result of everything having been said, I don’t believe that’s the case. After all, every creature, by nature, has something new to say – as new and individual as his journey. The thing is that OVERTLY all these books HAVE to say exactly the same thing. That’s why, to keep the artist motivated, they are set in such varying places and have such varying stratagems. They have to distinguish themselves, somehow, but the industry that banned a still-vigorously-selling John Norman AND still brags about it, will not let heretical messages flourish (not that I personally could ever understand WHY Gor should flourish, but then I don’t understand the popularity of its polar opposite type of series, one of which, at least, started a whole subgenre of fantastic literature.)
So in this multiplying wilderness of form and virtuosity, symbolism flourishes too – to get less approved-of messages through the gatekeepers – and as in the nineteenth century painting field, in France, it is sometimes so obscure that only the author “gets” it fully.
The problem with this, as the problem with most French art of the time when the monetary rewards went to those who followed the “correct” form and fashion, is that it’s become a dialogue amid the artists. We might find it fascinating, but the public has largely tuned out. Because art that echoes the establishment is never very exciting. (Gag – Soviet art. Gag.)
So, where do we go from here?
Well, fortunately technology is likely to lend a hand by removing control from a handful of gatekeepers residing in a square mile of terrain or so. But even without technology it would probably have happened – albeit not so fast – since it is part of the cycles of how art “dies” and is reborn.
Note, in favor of my thesis that Baen – which is not in that square mile – publishes a lot of old science fiction and fantasy memes (that’s a topic for another post. In SF/F there is a certain need to ‘reincarnate’ certain types of stories, for new generations) there isn’t a proliferation of the “and now, still more difficult” type of books. Writers write largely for their public, not other writers or the gatekeepers – a lesson I think more and more midlisters are learning in the stuff they put out on their own.
This is very exciting, of course – a fun and terrible time to be alive and writing, the very definition of “interesting times.” And they’ll only get more interesting.
I look forward to writing without trying to aim messages or disguise messages or in general self-consciously head off my subconscious from forbidden subjects and opinions.
I look forward to freedom and an engaged reading public again.
Am I wrong? Is there no great hunger for stuff where the message doesn’t clobber you over the head? Should I just start thinking of a science fiction about aliens who communicate with their salivary glands?
*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club and Classical Values*
According To Hoyt 
Actually, I have a great fondness for certain types of stories with a very powerful and overtly stated message. Of course, these tend to be extremely simple, humanist messages along the lines of, “Don’t mess with mama bear” or, “People do very silly things, but sometimes there’s a reason for it.”
Terry Pratchett excels at this. Lois Bujold also comes to mind. But there’s a definitely a resonance going on there. There’s also, in these cases, less of an attempt to convert the reader to a particular way of thinking, and more just a… I don’t know, a color or a flavor that the message gives to the story. It’s not an argument, its a fundamental human truth that makes the characters motivations stronger and gives the story greater “punch”.
Of course, not everyone agrees on something like “fundamental human truth,” but when the setting is real enough to be engaging, the issues as complicated as they are in real life and the simple answers never work out how they should, there often needs to be something simpler and clearer that the reader can grab hold of and say, “Yes. That makes sense. I’m with you now.”
And, as with all things, only about 10% of the people doing this do it well.
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Aaron,
Yes, but actually that’s not the message I meant. Pratchett does that excellently, transmitting messages like “you care for them because they can’t care for themselves — it’s what makes you human” in the Tiffany Aching series. That’s the type of message I mean are an intersection of the author’s conscious and subconscious and are what the story is ABOUT. Writers can’t help putting in THAT sort of message. Not good ones. It’s how minds work.
What I’m talking about here is more the sort of message that goes “All men are bad and everything bad that happens in the world is man’s fault.” — It’s something that is NOT a fundamental truth about life. It’s reality twisted — most of the time purposely — and fashioned into a club to beat the reader over the head with. Mystery books are far less subtle about this. Well, some. They take three page breaks in the middle of the story for a character to expound on what you should be doing NOW to save the world. When the books are twenty years old, the result can be unintentionally hillarious.
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Oh, yes.
I have been smacked along side the head one too many times by thematics and tropes that dictate plot and characterization. On my blog I rant about this about once a quarter.
Readers yearn for honesty in science fiction, and when I say honesty, I mean about writing how things are, not how the author wants them to be. Science fiction isn’t about using the future as some world-building excuse to present a (often flawed) vision of a person or society. What I look for is the visceral, the naked and the raw.
A classic example is the science fiction come-of-age story that used to be popular up to the 80’s, like Enchantress from the Stars. There is quite the visionary themantic running through that marvelous book, but at its core it’s a rite-of-passage journey. The main character yearns and loves the idea of becoming an adult, but when faced with that, can see the beauty of her childhood fading away under the onslaught of responsibility and even falling in love.
Such is a “universal truth” about growing up in a world of the future, and these stories are wonderful and stand the test of time. Who can resist a bittersweet coming-of-age story? I cannot.
Enchantress from the Stars is not, however, about carbon offsets and a lecture on (false) collective responsibility for individual actions. Such books are merely transitory, each fading away into irrelevancy.
“Am I wrong? Is there no great hunger for stuff where the message doesn’t clobber you over the head?”
There is, there is. That’s storytelling. It’s why I buy Baen books, and use Baen as brand to buy, more so than any other publisher.
When authors write how things are in an honest (even if brutal) reflection, these books are persuasive because I am treated as a thinking person.
When authors do not write this way, it’s elitism. And elitism between the author and the reader is wrong.
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The mind boggles – I just have to know. The “polar opposite” of Gor would be … ?
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Books which objectify and demean men and make them “enslaved sex objects.” This book I’m referring to is NOT quite that — it is, just, one of profound DISGUST for anything vaguely male, and glorification of women. I’m not giving the title, because it was a bestseller right off the bat and it spawned an entire cottage industry of followers.
I confess most of what I know of it is from reading a summary. By page eight, I walked to the trash can, lifted the lid and dropped it in. And considering I grew up to treasure books, this was only one of three books I’ve ever done that to.
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I think Sarah might have been referring to the earth that travels on the opposite orbital path of Gor?
In any event, the Gor books, in addition to being naughty, are a huge study in compelling world-building based on outstanding research. Norman picked a time/culture and explored it quite thoroughly through his story telling.
Norman, by the way, is having the last laugh on the industry with his ebooks. I even saw his reprint trade paperbacks in a book club flier, so now his ebooks are spurring physical copy sells.
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I actually remember the Gor books being sold in the local Waldens Book store, and no one thought a thing about it – the first few were not anything objectionable. As a kid some of the weird stuff went over my head, I paid more attention to the sword fights, a la “John Carter of Mars” wannabe stuff. I think they went bad slowly, over time, it’s been many years and I stopped reading them when the author’s fetish became so in your face as to be sick making. I think not too long after that most book stores stopped carrying them and they died a well deserved death, or so I thought at the time. Turns out they just went underground. Whatever, it’s a free country.
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I can’t remember what book I stopped reading at. It got repetitive, that’s for sure.
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I’m not disputing that they were icky — I never managed to finish one! — I’m saying that people brag of killing the series DESPITE its still making money. Which is just weird. (Okay, maybe justified if he were actually hurting people to WRITE them, but since he wasn’t…)
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The chief problem I have with “message” stories is that science fiction authors, sadly, aren’t all that original. They tend to harp on the same issues.
For instance, there’s a tremendous bandwagon effect in future dystopias and apocalypses. I recall back in the 1980s it was all Nuclear Winter disaster stories. Now it’s all Global Warming. The dystopias were Fundamentalist Dictatorships, then Evil Corporate Oligarchies. I don’t know what the current fashion in dystopias is because I’ve dropped all my magazine subscriptions.
Given the sales figures for SF books and magazines, I wonder if the pool of readers who agree uncritically with the authors and editors is what’s shrinking, while the others have simply given up.
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Cambias,
It’s more of a problem of gatekeepers than writers themselves. If I tried to write say… about an ice age, or a DEARTH of population, instead of excess,most houses would tell me it wasn’t “scientific” and reject it. Writers are… writers and wildly creative. (Well, many of us.) If you see only one voice, it’s being controlled in publishing and/or distribution. And I think your last paragraph is a great part of the issue. And yes, my problem is NOT the opinions so much as the fact that they get boringly similar.
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