There’s been a lot of ink and pixels spilled in the past decade or more, discussing how The Message is ruining our entertainment, and complaining that it’s impossible to find a movie, TV show, or book that doesn’t shove the latest political correctness in one’s face.
It’s an annoying trend, for sure, but it’s not a new one by any means. Message fiction- as in, fiction that contains an obvious moral lesson, often to the detriment of its power to entertain- is probably older than fiction that doesn’t contain an obvious message. It make sense; stories are a powerful tool for spreading information, and wrapping a lesson in more or less entertaining fiction makes it more memorable.
Writers of the Victorian Era loved their message fiction. The printing press was already a few hundred years old by 1800, then advances in mechanization and ink production, plus reducing the taxes on printed material (in Britain), led to a mid-century explosion of novels and magazines, teeming with stories, advertisements, and thinly-disguised advertisements in story form. American culture followed suit as the telegraph and railroads increased the speed of information travel.
I’ve speculated, along with other people, that because this phenomenon occurred alongside an increasingly mobile population- physically, monetarily, and socially- message laden fiction was used as a socially acceptable way to teach the nouveau riche how to act as they rose through the ranks- and the nouveau riche, always feeling insecure in their new social position, bought these books by the thousands, driving a market that wouldn’t have existed without them.
And holy mackerel, did the messages in those books have staying power. I’ve opined briefly about the subject here and in other venues- I’m fascinated by Victorian Era culture and specifically, how a million or so people, living over a couple of generations, managed to convince the next few billion people that their way of life was the only way, and had always been the only way. There are so many social and cultural trends in the West that everyone takes for granted, from the roles of men, women, and children, to the way we set our dining room tables, that were popularized- or sometimes invented out of whole cloth- by upper middle class Westerners living between about 1800 and 1900.
It was a time of great dynamism and advancement in so many ways, and people of the time were no stupider than we are today- they could see the tension between old and new, and that tension drove a lot of trends in literature and art, and the later backlash against those trends.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing around 1850, was right in the middle of this dynamic era, and was keen to make his views known via fiction. The Scarlet Letter was a huge hit, much to the disappointment of English Lit classes for decades to come, and he followed it up with The House of the Seven Gables.
You could reasonably argue that House of the Seven Gables isn’t message fiction; it’s merely obnoxious. I’d accept that argument. You could also argue that I’m a philistine with a short attention span, which prevents me from appreciating the beauty of the work. That’s slightly less true.
The vocabulary and phrasing are lovely, but there’s not enough story to support such extensive flights of poetical fancy. The plot could be told in a novella, and Hawthorne expanded it out to a little over a hundred thousand words.
This was a trend of the time- authors of serials got paid per installment, so they had a strong incentive to spin the story out as long as possible- apropos of nothing, I’m currently reading Little Dorrit, by Dickens- and the trend was so strong at that point that even authors publishing self-contained works, like House of the Seven Gables, adopted a similar style. That alone doesn’t make it message fiction, of course, but it makes the message more obvious, because it gets repeated over and over to fill up space on the page.
So you have multiple chapters of Hepzibah, an old lady from old money, lamenting her current lack of money and her inability to do anything so plebeian as keep a shop- the most agreeable face of the aristocracy that America was trying to leave behind at the time. On the flip side is her cousin Judge Jaffery, who is the alternately smiling and threatening villain. He’s also a symbol of old money, gone wrong, and falls victim to the family curse because of his own greed.
Then you have Phoebe, who’s repeatedly described as a ‘ray of sunshine’ archetype- the kind of young and cheerful person who everybody loves and quickly makes herself indispensable. She’s pretty obviously a symbol of both American youth and energy, and gentle, domestic Victorian womanhood; she’s very active, but only in the service of her dead-weight relatives. Her eventual love interest, Holgrave, is the mysterious lodger who might have radical philosophical views, until he doesn’t- more on that later.
The characters are archetypical to the point of stereotypical, so I think House of the Seven Gables falls into the message fiction category partly because the characterization is so obvious and repeated so often, and- simultaneously- because almost all of the characters act out of character one time, for the sake of drama. The contradiction hammers home how stereotypical and symbolic they are; they’re not real people; they exist solely to represent a series of traits the author wants to put on the page, to be thrown aside when the plot demands it.
The most glaring example of this comes near the end. Hepzibah and Clifford are older people who hardly ever leave the house. For them to suddenly decide they’re going to take a train ride to nowhere is extremely out of character. Yes, they’d discovered a dead man in the house, but two elderly, passive, and house-bound people aren’t going to suddenly acquire the energy and drive to send them out of the house and to the train- which was a fairly new technology at the time and not intuitive to navigate. Then they decide to come back, again for no reason. Well, they probably returned because they had no money and no where to go, but that’s not stated, and in a book where everything is spelled out ad nauseum, the lack of detail is jarring.
A lesser example, and probably more noticeable because I was looking for it by that point, is Holgrave, who starts out as a free spirit and becomes domesticated in the last few chapters, as his love for Phoebe is revealed. Yet another example of how Victorian women were supposed to be a moral and domesticating influence on their wayward friends and relatives.
For such a long and poetic book, there’s not much subtlety in this thing. Which is kind of the definition of message fiction.
And now that I’ve taken you on this long rant about history, culture, and literary trends that are way older than most people realize, tell me your thoughts, on old message fiction, new message fiction, and how to make fiction-with-a-message, rather than writing a screed disguised as a story.
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “More on Message Fiction”
Aesop’s Fables are message fiction. How should you behave? Listen to my story and you should be able to figure it out.
Message fiction so labeled, or called fables and folk tales, is fun for moderns. We read them, nod at the the ones that still fit, sometimes wince or chuckle at the ones that are dated (or painfully dated), and take them for what they are.
Message fiction slipped in as entertainment, or that starts as a fun story and then the message bat slams down on the reader … Those get walled. I am always reminded of what could have been a fun alternate history book about hippos in the swamps of Louisiana. The author tried so, so very hard to check all the character boxes that even left-of-center and PC readers commented that she’d gone too far being inclusive and diverse. Or the novel I put right back on the shelf about a generation ship where the brown people had become indentured servants and slaves to the pale people, because reasons, and … Nope! Someone sold his birthright for a pot of message. [RAH, PUBH]
“…complaining that it’s impossible to find a movie, TV show, or book that doesn’t shove the latest political correctness in one’s face.”
It is impossible. No longer a mere complaint, now the true fact of the matter. With some precious exceptions, the PC Message is all-encompassing. No book, movie, TV show or even song is exempt from The Message.
And they’re all going bankrupt, so that tells us what we need to know about The Message and it’s popularity in modern society.
“…tell me your thoughts, on old message fiction, new message fiction, and how to make fiction-with-a-message, rather than writing a screed disguised as a story.”
Old message fiction can be quite uplifting, see Narnia for details. C.S. Lewis had a beautiful and spiritually nourishing message. I will eat it up all day long.
Current Big M Message fic is intolerable, I do not progress past the book jacket.
As to my own efforts, I avoid Message as much as possible. The story IS the message. Civilians doing their best against towering odds and impossible opponents, while the Offical Powers That Be are either spinning their wheels uselessly or are co-opted by the enemy. Good Guys Win, Bad Guys Lose, and the nerd gets the girl.
Because when you save the world, chicks dig it. ~:D
Foreign entertainment isn’t nearly as bad. Hence, the rise of manga and k-dramas.
Honestly, the only way to write good messages is to write living characters and let them live.
David Drake was probably ones of the best I’ve read, and one of the ones I’ve probably taken more from than anyone else. I doubt he planned to write message fiction at all, and would quite likely be horrified at it being suggested that that is what he created.
Instead, what he did was write war, and what it does to people, in all its forms, in all its ways. He did not have an axe he was trying to grind, just wrote what it was with unflintching honesty.
What I ultimately took away from his books? War has a terrible price. There are some things that are worse. But that does not mean war does not demand it’s bill. Did he preach that? Not once that I can find. Rather he let the characters live in that world, and by extension the reader experience it as directly as possible.
I think most message fiction fails in that because they focus on the message, rather than letting the events speak for themselves. They act like they need to rub your nose in it like a misbehaving puppy. Better to present the world as it is with real people.
The problem is not fiction with a message. Almost any story has some kind of a thematic point inherent to the tale being told, or else it would be boring. The problem is when the message overwhelms the story and makes everything else subservient to it.
Novels in the Victorian era included message fiction for a reason you do not point out: the moral panic that happens when any new artistic medium becomes popular with the “lower” classes (i.e., Those People, the ones Not Approved by the self-appointed elites). The pattern is consistent: new medium becomes popular; elites decide that their inferiors are not smart enough to separate fantasy from reality and declare that the new medium will encourage terrifying antisocial behavior; social crusades are begun against the new medium in toto; purveyors of the new medium do something to appease the witch hunters.
It happened with cinema in the 1920s (leading to the creation of the Production Code, which started getting enforced in earnest in 1934 after a second-order moral panic occurred). Comic books in the 1950s, lead by the despicable Frederic Wertham and his book Seduction of the Innocent, leading to the instituting of the Comics Code Authority. Role-playing games in the 1970s and 1980s. Video games in the 1990s.
The same thing happened with novels, though organized self-censorship didn’t happen (that I am aware of). However, pretty clearly, publishers sought out fiction with Good Messages For The Benighted Poor to learn from. And, naturally, American puritanism likely lead to it being more pronounced on this side of the pond. Horatio Alger did not happen in a vacuum.
William Wallace Cook, a pulp author from over a hundred years ago, wrote a how-to book called The Fiction Factory that’s worth reading in general, but offers some insights to what publishers were expecting in the 1890s and 1900s. He mentions contributing a story to a nickel library for boys, a magazine featuring stories starring a house character who appeared in every issue, and the editor accepted the story with an admonition. He had included a scene where the hero pretended to be a statue in a museum, fooling his friends, as a bit of (not remotely believable) comedy. The editor told him that the character had to be more moral than that, as a good example for the boys who read him.
The pulps for adults also had guidelines that included morality requirements; in part to stay on the right side of the postal censorship laws of the time, but also because there was a cultural obsession with morally clean fiction, to the point that Street & Smith’s Western Story Weekly included on its cover the legend “Big Clean Stories Of Outdoor Life” for at least a decade.
But that doesn’t mean everything was hectoring and scolding. Serialized novels enabled a kind of fiction that had never been attempted before. Authors would be getting feedback on the opening parts of the novel before they were finished with the end, and could react and adjust the story on the fly (which is why Martin Chuzzlewit suddenly jaunts off to America). It also encouraged what might be called “the improvised novel”. Dostoevsky published Crime & Punishment serially in a Russian newspaper, and had no idea where the story was going when he began. Once it began to be published, he couldn’t go back and change what was already out. Tolstoy did the same with War & Peace, and a number of other memorable books came about the same way. (Plus, it wasn’t just novels that began as serials in newspapers or periodicals. The Victorian era also had the triple-decker novel, which were also published serially and allowed for some level of reader feedback.)
C&P inarguably has a message. But it is also inarguably a great novel. W&P arguably does not have an easily-stated message. (I would also argue that it’s not that great, but I tend to really dislike Tolstoy, so I’m biased.)
Most fiction has some kind of a “message”, or theme, or point. The problem is when The Message is put ahead of everything else, and everything else is drained of life because of it.
Looking back to my school days in the 80’s, I remember just how much message fiction there was on the school library shelves. With most of it being how “The oppressed ethnic group of the moment is going to kill all you crackers come the revolution”. I recall some amusing conversations with my teachers (who were all white) where I asked them if that meant they deserved to get the axe too.
Thank heaven they had some books by Poul Anderson, Andre Norton, and Manly Wade Wellman around to read and keep myself sane with.
And then there was the other message fiction given to my by well-meaning intensely Christian relations, Archie’s Christian Comics. Even as a young boy I could recognize how insincere and manipulative it was.
I got “nuclear war/environmental disaster/both we’re all going to diiiieeeeeeeeee” as the message fiction. So I read everything else, including a lot of “pioneer fiction” like the Little House Books, military history, and so on. And mythology, because it was fun, and a different message.
I heard “The Message” with a Scottish accent. For me, I like my fiction (books, comics, games, shows, and movies) to be escapist and message filled stories crush escapism. If I want read critiques of society, history, religion, politics, etc. … I prefer nonfiction for that.