Shoved Down Your Throat

[Nerdanel]

I think a fiction author should NEVER start out with an intention to write a story with a message. (No, not even then.) I think the way to write fiction is to write a good, entertaining story first, so that any messages (which can be found in anything if one analyzes it intently enough) are those produced by the meeting of the author's and the reader's subconsciousness. That way anything doesn't get shoved down a throat, and if people see something in a story that the author didn't intend, I think that's perfectly good and healthy. Art thrives in the area of ambiguity between the boredom of pre-digested propaganda and the boredom of a meaningless random word generator.

[Guest Raidne]

To answer the OP, this happens when the reader realizes they are thinking about the author instead of the story and the characters in it.

A great example, IMHO, would be Kim Stanley Robinson. Since I am liberal and generally agree with Kim Stanley Robinson, I can only imagine that his socialism makes his books damn near unreadable for conservative people. He is also guilty of perpetually shoving game theory and evolutionary psychology down the readers throat. As the reader you stop and think, hmmm, I think this author really likes evolutionary psychology...That is when the writer has gotten carried away with themselves.

Well, it was Raidne's comment about The Prince of Nothing shoving Bakker's viewpoint down her throat that inspired this topic, if that serves as an example for some (though I never once felt Bakker was shoving a view point, since all of the philosophy and politics are woven into the characterization and plot)

Interestingly, the phenomena I described above is not at all what reading Bakker is like for me. As you say, it is totally interwoven into the story, into the setting even. Reading his books is like inhabiting a bizarro universe of wrongness.

My basic issue is that I don't think Kellhus would actually be capable of manipulating anyone, and obviously Bakker does. This is because we are starting from utterly different premises on the subject of social intelligence, which I believe does not even utilize the deductive functions of the brain. At all. This is what I feel Bakker is shoving down my throat. A totally backwards, outdated philosophical position on human behavior.

This is different than when, say, Nancy Kress wants to push a libertarian message in my face by outlandishly claiming that all socialists loathe exceptionalism in the Beggers series (which I really hope nobody but me has ever read). I also feel like Felix Gilman got a little carried away with the individualism/colllectivist also - for me, it seems obvious that Gilman thinks he's being balanced between the two when he's clearly a libertarian.

To the poster who said that a book is not worth reading if the author doesn't have a point: That is, IMHO, the wrongest thing I have read on this Board in some time. This is like saying art has no point unless the artist has an explicit message.

There is political speech, and there is art. An artist can choose to also engage in political speech with their art, but they better do it well. It is, however, by no means necessary. Or even, some would argue, preferable.

[Liadin]

I think a fiction author should NEVER start out with an intention to write a story with a message. (No, not even then.) I think the way to write fiction is to write a good, entertaining story first, so that any messages (which can be found in anything if one analyzes it intently enough) are those produced by the meeting of the author's and the reader's subconsciousness. That way anything doesn't get shoved down a throat, and if people see something in a story that the author didn't intend, I think that's perfectly good and healthy. Art thrives in the area of ambiguity between the boredom of pre-digested propaganda and the boredom of a meaningless random word generator.

Does this necessarily make a good book? Didn't someone point out earlier in this thread that C.S. Lewis started with the image of a faun, worked up to a story, and then wound up writing his take on the Bible? I didn't feel like Christianity was being "shoved down my throat" when I read them as a kid, but many people do find them overly explicit in the message.

Raidne: When I realize that an author has a completely different conception of how people function than I do, that's generally when I stop reading.

[Guest Raidne]

Raidne: When I realize that an author has a completely different conception of how people function than I do, that's generally when I stop reading.

You're a better reader than me, or I would have stopped PoN after the prologue.

[Spring Bass]

To answer the OP, this happens when the reader realizes they are thinking about the author instead of the story and the characters in it.

A great example, IMHO, would be Kim Stanley Robinson. Since I am liberal and generally agree with Kim Stanley Robinson, I can only imagine that his socialism makes his books damn near unreadable for conservative people. He is also guilty of perpetually shoving game theory and evolutionary psychology down the readers throat. As the reader you stop and think, hmmm, I think this author really likes evolutionary psychology...That is when the writer has gotten carried away with themselves.

Hell, I'm fairly liberal, and it got annoying to see his more or less thinly veiled political opinions in Blue Mars.

As for evo psych, that was mostly in the form of one incredibly annoying character in his "Science in the Capital" series. Honestly, that character's internal monologue was my least favorite in fiction.

[Liadin]

You're a better reader than me, or I would have stopped PoN after the prologue.

Is it "better"? I have not and never intend to read any of PoN, but generally I figure people acting in ways people wouldn't actually act = poor characterization/bad writing, and I don't have time for that shit. If I'm well into a book before I realize it, then I might finish, but I'll give the book a poor review.

[Errant Bard]

Koolkat, read PoN, I compel you *jedi hand trick*

I think a fiction author should NEVER start out with an intention to write a story with a message. (No, not even then.) I think the way to write fiction is to write a good, entertaining story first

What do you make of Candide, Gulliver's travels, Brave new world, lord of the flies, Journey to the End of Night and similar?

My basic issue is that I don't think Kellhus would actually be capable of manipulating anyone, and obviously Bakker does. This is because we are starting from utterly different premises on the subject of social intelligence, which I believe does not even utilize the deductive functions of the brain. At all. This is what I feel Bakker is shoving down my throat. A totally backwards, outdated philosophical position on human behavior.

But Khellus is clearly alien to humanity, his social manipulation necessitates the same amount of suspension of disbelief that magic does, for me. It's just part of the "Fantasy" in the setting, just like one of the silly premises you accept when you start a thought experiment or start reading fiction.

This is like saying art has no point unless the artist has an explicit message.

He said nothing about the point being explicit.

But anyway, art has no point without a message :P. Art is about saying something to the world, it's about expression. At least that's how I see it: I don't consider everything to be art, it has to have a meaning behind it, that's the defining point.

[undertow]

I guess I'm having a hard time thinking of examples where I felt the author was shoving a "message" down my throat. There's Ayn Rand and Goodkind, and I can think of a couple books for younger readers that weren't subtle, but adult books? There are some where some non-essential point (like "all good people adore babies") becomes annoying because I don't agree with it, but stuff like Ender's Game.... when I read it as a teenager I didn't notice any real message.

Off the top of my head, Hard Times by Charles Dickens, Les Miserable by Victor Hugo, almost anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Rasselas by Samuel Johnson (who had some pretty condescending views of those who read fiction).

[Datepalm]

. I also feel like Felix Gilman got a little carried away with the individualism/colllectivist also - for me, it seems obvious that Gilman thinks he's being balanced between the two when he's clearly a libertarian.

Lol, is he actually? That explains some things. (like why he seemed so disinterested in what was clearly the most captivating character- the Line-guy with the obviously unmemorable name)

You're a better reader than me, or I would have stopped PoN after the prologue.

I actually thought the prologue was great, becuase, obviously, we would get a story of a person growing out of this horrible, ridiculous, opressive cult mentality hes been raised into.( In that sense the book was certainly surprising. ) But I think thats exactly where the most powerful message of a book lies, in the way the author concieves the very warp and weft of th way th world is and the way people are. I wonder if this is unique to SFF though - in anything set in the real world, the reader just fills in their own knowledge, and chalks weird behavior and daft logic to bad charactrization or plotting rather than regarding them as an inherent outgrowth of the way the author sees the world.

[MinDonner]

I guess with SFF there's much more scope for clumsy proselytising, given that the author can create the whole structure of society according to his/her own prejudices and strawman needs, when such things would never work or happen in the real world (look no further than Tairy's Land of Pacifists, or the Haken/Ander situation where the poor downtrodden majority are harshly oppressed by Political Correctness!). But, if the author is crap enough then I guess you can do the same thing with the real world too - Slacktivist's Left Behind reviews do a good job of showing how poor a grasp Jenkins & LaHaye have of what the world even looks like, or how people actually behave, and that's technically set in the "real world", even purporting to be a blueprint for the (near!) future.

For another bit of real-world fictional grandstanding, the Little House on the Prairie books are quite fun to read as an adult. I never noticed this as a kid, of course, but they are FULL of pretty blatant libertarian propaganda, about how taxes are eeevil and the government should just stay out of everyone's business.... :lol: - get your views in while they're young!

[Guest Raidne]

But Khellus is clearly alien to humanity, his social manipulation necessitates the same amount of suspension of disbelief that magic does, for me. It's just part of the "Fantasy" in the setting, just like one of the silly premises you accept when you start a thought experiment or start reading fiction.

Kellhus manipulates humans. Because of my understanding of cognitive science, I do not believe his type of manipulation would work on humans. At all. Now, if Bakker had told me that Achamian and Esme were non-human hominids like Ursula le Guin's characters, sure, but that was not my impression.

But anyway, art has no point without a message :P. Art is about saying something to the world, it's about expression. At least that's how I see it: I don't consider everything to be art, it has to have a meaning behind it, that's the defining point.

I don't think expression = message. I mean, what is the "message" of cubism? What is the meaning behind it?

Also, by your definition, things with value as political speech but not much artistic value become more "art" than, say, the Mona Lisa. So, I guess I think it's overinclusive (i.e. things that we don't consider "art" become art under your definition, because they have a message) and leads to absurd results (a campaign poster has more artistic value than the Mona Lisa).

Maybe you mean that having a message is a necessary condition but not a sufficient one? Okay, then what's the sufficient condition? I think that's the key thing here.

To give an example of author, I like John Irving and he is generally well-regarded as an author in our era. His books do not have messages.

[Jon Sprunk]

Kellhus manipulates humans. Because of my understanding of cognitive science, I do not believe his type of manipulation would work on humans. At all. Now, if Bakker had told me that Achamian and Esme were non-human hominids like Ursula le Guin's characters, sure, but that was not my impression.

I agree with your points about meaning in art, but on the above: if SFF can alter the laws of physics, why can it not alter the laws of psychology?

[Errant Bard]

Kellhus manipulates humans. Because of my understanding of cognitive science, I do not believe his type of manipulation would work on humans. At all. Now, if Bakker had told me that Achamian and Esme were non-human hominids like Ursula le Guin's characters, sure, but that was not my impression.

I understand where you're coming from, it was just my personal take. I can tolerate big divergences from verisimilitude if I find them to be a premise of the worldbuilding. I care less than you do about cognitive science in that kind of work, all that matters is consistency.

I don't think expression = message. I mean, what is the "message" of cubism? What is the meaning behind it?

I don't think there's any more message behind cubism than there is behind Fantasy. The message is behind each individual art piece

Also, by your definition, things with value as political speech but not much artistic value become more "art" than, say, the Mona Lisa. So, I guess I think it's overinclusive (i.e. things that we don't consider "art" become art under your definition, because they have a message) and leads to absurd results (a campaign poster has more artistic value than the Mona Lisa).

Depends on the value you put behind each kind of meaning. Expressing the beauty of the world, whatever, is certainly more important to me than trying to sell me crap.

I certainly think that a work that's only showing technical mastery is not art, soulless as it is.

Maybe you mean that having a message is a necessary condition but not a sufficient one? Okay, then what's the sufficient condition? I think that's the key thing here.

No, it's sufficient. For me, at least.

To give an example of author, I like John Irving and he is generally well-regarded as an author in our era. His books do not have messages.

He's not doing art then, merely entertainment.

[Guest Raidne]

I agree with your points about meaning in art, but on the above: if SFF can alter the laws of physics, why can it not alter the laws of psychology?

See previous sentence #2. I enjoyed it a lot when Le Guin did this, actually.

Bakker doesn't give any indication that that's what he's doing, and, in fact, I'm certain that he is not doing that, because Bakker has a point to make about human psychology that he's carried with him from his time as a philosophy student. That's my hypothesis. Or, to put it really simply, Scott is convinced that most people are idiots and can therefore be manipulated according to some kind of decision tree of (my characterization) tired trops that people who routinely overestimate their intelligence think are effective means of manipulating people.

Let's say Karl Rove masterminded 9/11. That would be about one of the most effective mass manipulations in history, because, after that, 90% of the population supported Bush. But not for very long, and 10% still really, really didn't. Compare that to Kellhus' near-universal support. It's just not possible. Anyway. Check this article by Bakker. Every time, I want to be like, okay, yeah, do you think nobody else has thought of this before? Marketing companies use their understanding of neuroscience to make you buy their products! No! It can't be! Anyway. I am the kind of person who is constantly amazed at the ability of humans and at the complexity of the neural network and its capacity to adapt. I am also totally horrified by group psychology, sure. But where I might say that a person is smart, but people are stupid, Bakker would say that a person is stupid because people are stupid. Okay, really, anyway.

Bakker's stated goals, on his blog, are to: "1) to prove that there is in fact no intrinsic antithesis between pulp genre and literary conventions; and 2) to prove that consumers of popular culture actually have a hunger for fiction that challenges."

Those are perfectly admirable and appropriate to being a novelist, IMO, in the sense that even if I sensed the existence of those goals while reading the book, it probably wouldn't bother me or pull me out of the story, although people have certainly said otherwise about other writers with similar goals.

EB: I think you have a serious Occam's Razor problem, but if it works for you, carry on. A common solution for the problem you've got now that you've split and multiplied definitions is to call all things claiming to be art that don't meet your definition, like John Irving books or masterful counterfeits, "not-art."

The other problem is getting anyone to care about your personal definition when talking to you. See, as soon as I'm done typing this, I'm not going to note that I'm talking to you and distinguish between "art" and "not-art" in that conversation, and I probably won't remember that Last Night in Twisted River is a "not-book" according to you either. I will probably just stick with the art and "political speech" distinctions that I always make because they seem to have meaning to a wide range of people. So, you and I will just not be able to talk to each other about art.

That I can probably remember.

I personally just really enjoyed an exhibit of counterfeit pieces at the Detroit Museum of Art (which I guess should be renamed the Detroit Museum of Not-Art?). Don't worry I won't try to talk to you about it. ;)

[Errant Bard]

The other problem is getting anyone to care about your personal definition when talking to you.

:) That's the problem, isn't it? I don't think even artists agree on what art is. But I know what the word means in general and what it means for me, with a narrower definition, so it's all good. At least, I think it is. (And I really think entertaining is not enough to qualify as doing art)

[kuenjato]

See previous sentence #2. I enjoyed it a lot when Le Guin did this, actually.

Bakker doesn't give any indication that that's what he's doing, and, in fact, I'm certain that he is not doing that, because Bakker has a point to make about human psychology that he's carried with him from his time as a philosophy student. That's my hypothesis. Or, to put it really simply, Scott is convinced that most people are idiots and can therefore be manipulated according to some kind of decision tree of (my characterization) tired trops that people who routinely overestimate their intelligence think are effective means of manipulating people.

etc.

except that Kellhus doesn't achieve near-universal dominance, as the next book shows (in fact, resistance to his rule is one of the major conflicts of the second series). He fools them for a while, under extreme crisis and with some neat tricks, but it isn't all-persuasive.

Still, it's nice to see your reasons explained, as originally, it sounded like the usual "Kellhus couldn't fool me and thus PON sucks."

[slim da reaper]

It's an extremely fine line for an author. Err to far on one side and be accused on bludgeoning your readers; fall too far to the other and you'll be relegated to the ranks of "meaningless entertainment."

Isn't the second where the art is? To be so subtle, so compelling, so believable, stealth mode enabled? Because Art is all about exploration.

A bash on the head certainly has it place, to bring something out in the open as an idea.

If there are messages there are two types of people one likes the limiting final answers the other likes open final answers.

Humans are seperate from animals (limiting final answer)

Humans are a species of animal like all the others (open f.a)

The second admits the art into science.

[Guest Raidne]

except that Kellhus doesn't achieve near-universal dominance, as the next book shows (in fact, resistance to his rule is one of the major conflicts of the second series). He fools them for a while, under extreme crisis and with some neat tricks, but it isn't all-persuasive.

Still, it's nice to see your reasons explained, as originally, it sounded like the usual "Kellhus couldn't fool me and thus PON sucks."

Well, thanks for letting me know, since I won't be reading them.

Bakker seems to have ideas about the importance of "crisis" also. I'd probably know what it was if I'd kept reading or subjected myself to more of his blog.

Also, if you read his blog, I think you'll find that there are a lot of similarities in personality between Bakker and Kellhus.

ETA: Can I say this though? R. Scott Bakker is a great talent, to be sure. And I admire and appreciate what he's trying to do with his literary goals, and I think he has succeeded. But I don't like reading his books. What I have talked about here is one of many reasons.

[Guest Raidne]

You know, I just want to add that I'm reading The Dying of the Light right now, and George is just amazing at raising complex and interesting philosophical questions in his fiction. Just incredible.

[Brandon Stark]

I think the real problems arise when a message is conveyed through characters, as opposed to events. This is especially true when the character is the protagonist. When dialogue and speech making continually tell us exactly what we're supposed to be getting, as opposed to reaching the end of the book and being able to look back at all the things that happened within the story that reinforced a certain theme, I just don't think it works as well. Taking advantage of a captive audience to force them to read your philosophy essay isn't exactly slick.

For the record, I'm a big Bakker fan somewhat in spite of this. For me, the writing, characterization, and interesting nature of the ideas help me get over how great an effort is being made to make sure the reader gets it.