From the Themes Files: political novels

In his inaugural Substack post last month, Tim Powers recounted this story:

I was on a panel about vampire stories one time, and one of the panelists said, “Well you know, Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th century women.” And I said, “No, it’s actually about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.”

“Dracula wasn’t a metaphor,” Powers continues. “He was a vampire.”

That’s been on my mind because, earlier this week, a Substack note by novelist Aaron Gwyn—whose novella The Cannibal Owl I read last week and loved—turned into yet another Substack tempest in a teapot. Gwyn’s claim:

The political novelist is a fiction writer in diminished form. The great novelist’s intentions, motivations, and biases are forever obscured behind a rhetorical mask. The great novelist doesn’t aspire to be a political actor, but a ventriloquist.

I would tend to agree. See this post from last year about “the novel of ideas,” in which the novelist as artist becomes subservient to his message.

Well, Gwyn’s note got a lot of Substack litterateurs huffing and puffing. When Gwyn supplied a list of novelists who didn’t “engage politically,” one scandalized response read “You can tell someone hasn’t read Proust when he’s included on a list of writers who didn’t ‘engage politically.’” This observation is only slightly marred by the fact that no one should read Proust.*

More to my point, consider these comments by others:

Blood Meridian is about the military conquest of the west, whats more political than that?

Gilead is about religion and war and race and how all the above affect a family and has characters openly discussing whether or not they support Eisenhower.

The core conceit of Moby-Dick is treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility. . . . it’s explicitly an interrogation of American society and values.

Is it, though? Is that actually what any of these—novels in which ill-fated filibusters and scalphunters kill and are killed in the desert, in which an old man faces his mortality and yearns to leave something behind for his son, in which an obsessed sea captain dooms his entire crew—is “about”?

This topic sits squarely at the intersection of several of my driving interests and concerns, including two I’ve written about several times this year already: themes and particularity. Back in the spring I wrote about the overemphasis on “themes” in the study of literature, and this is what I mean. These specific examples, provoked by what I suspect is a bit of trolling on Gwyn’s part, are politically inflected and therefore even less tolerable than the usual.

Take Moby-Dick. Is that really “about” the working class and is it really “interrogating” anything? Or is it about one man’s obsession? To ask a question I asked back in the spring again with Moby-Dick in mind, would you rather read a novel about “treating the disrespected working class with the same dignity as the nobility” or a novel about a maimed captain so bent on revenge against one whale that he drives his entire crew to their deaths in a round-the-world hunt? Which one of those sounds more interesting as a novel?

Let me put it this way: Visit Barnes & Noble and look at the many different editions of Moby-Dick that they will have in stock. What’s on the cover? Socioeconomic interrogation? Or a white whale large enough to endanger a ship?

Perhaps Melville, to stick with this example, really is doing what Gwyn’s politically-minded commenters say he is—though his thematic interests strike me as much more theological than economic or political. I don’t know. But whether Moby-Dick is actually “about” anything political, it would fail if it were not first about the captain and the whale. Particularity.

This is what I think Gwyn meant in his original note. A respectable theme must emerge organically from what is purposefully, deliberately a novel, a work of art. Approaching the work with a programmatic message in mind simplifies or sells out the art. It is “diminished” and “obscured” behind the rhetorical pose required of the message. Politics is the Procrustean bed of any form of art. It imposes on stories a shape that requires distortion.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example is Ayn Rand. Read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged with an open mind and you can’t help but be struck by 1) the talent she had in imagining and constructing vast stories and 2) the way she contorted and butchered her own art in the service of her risible messaging.

Gwyn, puckishly pressing one critic for his definition of a “political novel,” was answered with: “Presenting a view of how society and culture is organized through power structures, war, socioeconomics.” Gwyn rightly replied that “If you define ‘politics’ in that way, you’ve constructed a definition that’s sufficiently broad enough to encompass everything. In other words, you’ve emptied the term of all meaning.”

That’s what theme talk, especially of a political variety, does. Its vagueness as much an enemy of good interpretation as the political is of honest art.

* What I have written, I have written.

Three items on learning by doing

Item: This morning Alan Jacobs shared a short post on Allan Dwan, who happened into the director’s chair by accident in 1911 and directed his last film in 1961. Along the way he gave Lon Chaney his break, discovered Carole Lombard, and—like many such early filmmakers—innovated both artistically and technically, those two aspects being deeply intertwined in filmmaking. Jacobs:

It’s fascinating to see how this industry—this art form—developed when nobody knew how to make movies. Dwan himself was the first to figure out that you could dolly a camera backwards, putting it on rails or a truck and backing up. (This actually disoriented viewers at the time, made them feel woozy). He helped D.W. Griffith figure out how to do a crane shot for Intolerance. All such techniques had to be improvised—and when an improvisation worked it became an invention. You basically had to think like an engineer, and Dwan was an engineer.

Item: Also this morning, Ted Gioia shared an essay on children and music lessons with a special focus on why so many kids quit not only the lessons but the instrument. In his own experiences with lessons, despite hating and quitting his piano them he kept playing on his own. Then:

I made up my own songs. I learned other songs I liked by ear. I actually played the instrument more after those awful lessons had been terminated. . . .

So I developed without jazz teachers, both as a musician and as a music historian. There’s some irony in that. I had access to amazing professors at illustrious universities, but jazz wasn’t part of the curriculum. In the field in which I made my reputation, I had to teach myself.

I’m not especially proud of that. Too much of what I’ve done in life has happened outside official channels. I’ve missed things by not accessing the right teachers at the right time. Things I did learn, I might have learned faster with proper guidance.

On the other hand, you learn very deeply when forced to invent your own pedagogy. And I take some comfort in knowing that there were almost no jazz teachers for the generations that came before me. Many of the jazz pioneers learned by doing—and they turned out okay.

The improvisatory, trial-and-error quality of both stories is fascinating, and both Jacobs and Gioia more or less directly point out that learning this way takes a long time—but one learns “very deeply.” Think of one of the greats in any field—filmmaking, music, writing, painting, science, even law, politics, and war—and they will almost certainly have started at the bottom, learning the nuts and bolts. Here’s a short list of directors who started off as gofers on the crew of low-budget director Roger Corman, for example.

But when you learn by doing, once you’ve mastered your art—insofar as that is possible in any art—a funny thing happens: your expertise translates into style. Which leads me to this third and final piece:

Item: Last week I saw this interesting Substack note from novelist Aaron Gwyn (whose excellent novella The Cannibal Owl I’ve just read and loved):

We all love a stylish writer, whether mannered and showy like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy or “invisible” like Elmore Leonard. But how will a writer or artist of any kind know what his strengths and weaknesses are without doing the work?

I remember learning once, when our kids were small, that playtime dangers are not to be avoided but embraced. Climbing trees, going up slides the wrong way, jumping off of swings, doing pretty much anything on a trampoline—these are how children learn what their bodies are capable of. It both teaches them limits and gives them confidence in what they can do. But they have to do it.

This is what I hate most about AI “writing”: by offering finished products without the process, it robs writers of all kinds—whether novelists, students, or office drones drafting e-mails—of the work. It tricks people into thinking they’re able-bodied adults while bypassing the whole childhood playground experience. It’s not only instrumental and pragmatic, it weakens the person who uses it without their even realizing it. But perhaps worst of all, the work, the nuts and bolts, is not only how you master the craft and art of writing, it’s one of the most fun parts of it.

Perhaps more thoughts on that later. But for now, read all the items above and note especially the importance of play and enjoyment in Gioia’s post on music lessons, and consider how AI advocates consistently portray writing—or whatever the process in question—as time-wasting drudgery. Someone is lying.

Archetypes vs particulars

F1 and Top Gun: Maverick—both movies about men wearing helmets in vehicles? Or more?

“That’s just like Top Gun: Maverick.” This from my daughter halfway through my explanation of the plot of F1, which I finally saw Tuesday night. I had just finished describing the way veteran driver Sonny Hayes was brought in to teach cocky young driver Josh Pearce and the conflict that brewed up between the two of them. This, to her, instantly brought to mind Maverick and Rooster.

She didn’t mean this declaration as snark or criticism, just old-fashioned excitement at recognizing a parallel, and the thing is, she’s right. I love both movies, and their stories do, superficially, have a lot in common. Does that mean that Top Gun: Maverick and F1 are, at base, the same story? Or that they’re in some way inferior or unoriginal?

I’d say no, and that both succeed magnificently as entertainment on the strength of something I’ve preached about over and over here: particularity.

Back in the spring I railed a bit against overemphasis on vague “themes” and “archetypes” and especially “the Hero’s Journey” as interpretive schemes for stories. These approaches fixate on similarity to the detriment of the specific stories they interpret, which are often oversimplified in the service of strained, banal, misleading comparisons.

And yet, whether archetypes in the full Jungian sense exist, the human mind was designed to recognize and respond to patterns. We generalize for reasons beyond time-saving heuristics. And comparing stories—tens of thousands of them over thousands of years—does reveal recurring patterns, motifs, stock characters, and structural conventions. Here is one early pitfall: those who argue that because there are really only X number of plots, creativity and originality are illusions and nothing but rearranging what has been done before. This plays nicely into the rise of the AI lovers, who argue for AI “art” and “writing” by dismissing actual art and writing along similar lines. But that’s another error for another day. For now: ye shall know them by their fruits.

That said, I’ll call these recurrent patterns and conventions archetypes for now. But like Plato’s forms, these don’t exist in any undiluted version anywhere. We have to discern them within the particulars of stories—vivid detail being “the life blood of fiction.”

Every story, then, must balance the archetypal and the particular, the general and recognizable with the concrete and specific. We understand this intuitively and condemn stories that don’t strike this balance well. A story that leans too heavily in the direction of archetype, of familiar patterns, or that fails to develop believable specifics and defaults to the archetype, we call stereotypical or clichéd. Both of these words come from the world of printing, of reproducing precisely the same thing over and over.

To return to Top Gun: Maverick and F1, they do have many similarities. In both, an over-the-hill legend butts heads with an arrogant but gifted upstart before both learn how to work together to succeed at a goal. This is a story familiar not just from these two movies, but from many, many other action and especially sports movies. No debate there.

What keeps these two movies from being rehashes of old clichés is their attention to the particulars, not just with regard to the highly specialized worlds in which they take place in order to feel realistic but also with the characters invented to tell the story. Sonny Hayes and Maverick are both veterans in their fields who are called back to action, but under different circumstances and vastly different pressures. Both might be loners, but Sonny literally wrecked his burgeoning F1 career and went on to decades of aimless waste and Maverick, whatever has happened in the years between his two films, is still successful, in fact at the top of his game. Sonny, a freelance race car driver, is called back as a personal favor to his old friend Ruben. Maverick is ordered back because he is in the military. His personal drama comes through his relationship with Rooster, son of his dead co-pilot Goose, while Sonny has no history with Josh Pearce and their relationship develops as a professional rivalry. And the overall stakes could not be more different—financial ruin for Ruben or nuclear war with Iran.

The two films also explore different thematic territory, but the particulars, the specific details that make this story itself and not that story, that make this character a memorable individual distinct from that character, could be listed at much greater length.

Particularity not only makes stories and their characters feel real—what would either of these movies be without their attention to naval aviation or Formula 1 racing?—but keeps them fresh. Stories that simply hew to the archetype fail as stories. Compare Star Wars, which, despite being famously archetypal, still feels real and vital, both lived in an living, and something like Eragon, which does many of the same things and fails.

Stories that lean too far into the particulars are much rarer and usually incomprehensible. You hear much more complaint about cliché, and for good reason. But a story that feels familiar but attends studiously to its vivid, concrete specifics can be not only well-crafted art, but a crowd-pleaser.

* * * * *

I’ve written about particularity several other times over the years: with regard to Song of Songs, romance, and “humanity;” Cormac McCarthy’s novels, which could not have taken place anywhere but where he set them; and James Bond and Honeychile Rider, a particular man and a particular woman with particular histories, not stand-ins for “men” and “women.” Particulars being “the life blood of fiction” comes from John Gardner, whose concept of fiction as a “fictive dream” has profoundly shaped my writing. I wrote about that in some detail here.

It was all a dream

I’m currently working on a review of an old book that successfully pulls off the “it was all a dream” twist. The revelation that all or a significant part of a story was actually a dream is one of the oldest and most venerable conventions in fiction. Or, if you’re not a fan, it’s a hoary cliche. There’s a reason both that it eventually became a sitcom staple and that writers keep coming back to it.

That the book I’m reviewing did it well got me thinking about the difference. What separates stories that do “it was all a dream” well from those that only exasperate the reader? I can think of a few things:

One approach is to avoid making the reader feel like they’ve been tricked by a cheap twist by not making it a twist at all. This can be done in two ways by:

• Stating explicitly that it’s a dream from the beginning. Pilgrim’s Progress does this.

• Suggesting that it’s a dream from the beginning. Subtler than Pilgrim’s Progress. The narrator of The Great Divorce hints in the first line (“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue…”) that his story is, if true, then still not quite real.

It helps that both of these stories are obviously dreamlike, so the revelation that they are dreams is not a shock. The point of these stories lies elsewhere. Ditto A Christmas Carol, which plays skillfully with this convention.

But if you still want that sense of surprise, I think the detective novel concept of “fair play” is important. The book I’m reviewing, in which a soldier wounded in battle “lives” several days in a limbo state between life and death before awakening in the spot where he was shot, does several things that keep the surprise from feeling like a cheat:

• It is heavily foreshadowed.

• Dreamlike elements are present from the moment the dream begins, but presented in such a way that the narrator is both surprised by them and can think of perfectly reasonable explanations for them.

• The dreamlike qualities intensify toward the end, when the narrator wakes up. This is a common enough feature of bad “it was all a dream” twists, but seldom done skillfully.

• Double entendre—throughout the story, both the narrator’s own foreshadowing as well as the things other characters tell him have different meanings depending on whether you know he is dreaming or not.

• Related: other characters, who have also been wounded but will not survive, know what has happened and tell the narrator, but he misunderstands them.

• Despite all of the above, until the narrator awakens from the dream, the dream feels real—just like real dreams.

On a second reading, I was stunned to see that the narrator tells the reader almost from the beginning what happened but still manages to make the revelation a surprise. But beyond the specific techniques above, the most important aspect of the successful use of “it was all a dream” is that:

• The dream is thematically relevant.

The dream, in this story, is the whole point. It is not a twist, a final surprise for the reader, but the undiscovered center of the story. A second reading is the best proof. This one not only held up, unlike some of the schlockier Shyamalan movies, but improved upon a second reading. Every moment was loaded with a dramatic irony that made it profoundly poignant. A really remarkable achievement.

I haven’t named this story but hope to have a review written for it and posted on Substack soon. Once I do, I’ll be sure to update this post with a link. In the meantime, I’ll be trying to think of other stories that successfully end with “it was all a dream” for comparison.