No proselytizing in fiction?
Here's a great interview with fantasy writer Tim Powers (via The View From The Foothills and Mixolydian Mode). Powers is a Catholic writer, and though he writes from that worldview, he doesn't write proselytizing books...
At one point in the interview he says:
Reminds me a debate we once had about whether proselytizing belongs in fiction -- you said yes, I said no, and though your argument was better than mine, I'm still not convinced that my position wasn't better than yours. (I'll try and dig up the copy and post it here later.)
In any case, thought this might be of interest. I read Powers' Drawing of the Dark, by the way, and loved it.
At one point in the interview he says:
I was on a panel once in which a woman said, "Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th-century women," to which I replied, "No, it’s about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood – don’t take my word for it, check it out." As a reader, if I can sense a "message" unfolding in a story I’m reading – if I get the idea that the writer is trying to make some point beyond the characters and events of the story – my "suspension of disbelief" is just gone. This is especially risky in science fiction and fantasy, because all our disorienting effects, our ghosts and our starships and our time-travel – which are the main point of our stories – become just "let’s pretend" devices, not meant to be mistaken for "what the story’s really about.
Reminds me a debate we once had about whether proselytizing belongs in fiction -- you said yes, I said no, and though your argument was better than mine, I'm still not convinced that my position wasn't better than yours. (I'll try and dig up the copy and post it here later.)
In any case, thought this might be of interest. I read Powers' Drawing of the Dark, by the way, and loved it.
posted by Ernesto at 10:20 AM
4 Comments:
Ernesto, I'd like to see the original posts before I get into any kind of new defense of my position, because I'm not sure I remember what it was. I think your position was that of Powers, that any taint of "message" ruins a work of fiction. Mine was that some works wear their messages on their sleeves, come as part of the price of admission into the fictional world. You implied that a writer with a message is not a true "writer" but a propagandist. I said every story told is a sales job. The skill of the salesman determines if the technique is apparent before the close. Something like that. Anyway, it will be fun to get back into it.
Especially since I’ve got a bit of new ammo. Backing my point (you call your experts, I’ll call mine... as you once explained) is Harold Bloom, who points out (I very roughly paraphrase) in his The Western Canon that inability to rise beyond ideology is one of the things that renders otherwise good books non-canonical. This, I think, is why I am rereading Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude right now and enjoying it more than I did as a teenager, while I can’t get through Tom Robbins or Kurt Vonnegut these days, despite my ardent affection for them once upon a time. Robbins and Vonnegut are both ideological moralists whose work strongly reflects this. Marquez’s work, while I’m certain he possesses personal ideologies, transcends those to tell a true story. Which makes me think of our posts on contradiction... (More on Marquez and this thesis, from a non-religious POV, on ernestoburden.com soon...)
To me there's a fundamental difference between fiction that is blatantly preachy and fiction in which moral and ethical elements are woven into the fabric of the work. I've seen some "Christian fiction" in which the writer effectively stopped the story to preach directly to the audience, either through the mouths of the characters or directly with the narrative voice. These were so intrusive that it did effectively destroy suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, I cannot think of a single great work of fiction that did not have at its foundation a moral and ethical view of the world, a sense that there is such a thing as right and wrong and that the protagonists must struggle to do the right thing. "Everything goes" indifference results in flat, lifeless fiction, because if everything's OK, nothing really matters, and nothing's a struggle.
Tattercoats, I agree mostly with what you are pointing out. Any good work of fiction has to represent a worldview (how else can you express anything true, and great fiction always tells a "true" story). Where I quibble is in whether a story can be good when it sets out to prove a worldview, as opposed to when it grows organically within a worldview.
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