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Irvine Valley College Online Creative Writing Workshop Writing 10 - Introduction to Creative Writing Spring 2012 - Ticket # 64580 Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, Instructor |
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Filled with the Light of Truth Online Lecture for Week 6: Theme Lesson (greater truth) When a piece of writing is finished and published, if the author is lucky, the story, poem, or book will be reviewed or used as a source for critical work. At that time, the "theme" rises to the forefront. Theme is described in many modalities. A reviewer might say: "This is a story about a girl who grows up poor in a coal-mining town" - which really does not tell us the theme at all, rather gives us an idea of the protagonist and the setting. Understood, here, though, is a theme of triumph over adversity. It's a kind of default to the theme, as we are pretty sure that this girl didn't grow up poor and stay poor. In general, you can spot a formula book by the fact that the theme is a default. In other cases, the "theme" is encapsulated in a genuine thematic abstract: "When his father dies, a young man learns to face life on its own terms." Here, you see, the focus is not on where this happened, but on the trajectory of the character. All of these theme descriptions are useful for readers who want to choose or evaluate a book - is that a theme I like? Is that really the theme of the book? But these questions do not represent the way a writer needs to look at theme. We do best if we don't let the default themes dominate our thinking as we write. If you are going to write about a poor girl in a mining town, for example, unless you want to write another rags-to-riches story, or even if you DO, you probably want to share your own, unique philosophy about the course of life that this girl might follow, what she might learn. And so, for a writer, a predictable theme is a trap of sorts as long as the writing process is underway. [Once the piece is finished, you will need to find a capsule statement that you can use to talk about the work to agents, publishers, etc.] While we are in the process of writing, though, we need to be still searching for, not the theme in the above sense, but the greater truth. If you already know you are writing a story about a young man learning about the brutality of war, for example, what you are looking for is the truth of his discovery, and the way that truth manifests itself in the physical world. The Greater Truth is always more shaded and complicated than the "theme." There are, for example, several (hundreds of? thousands of?) novels I can think of that fall into the category of "coming of age" stories. A young man of about 18, protected and loved or overloved, goes out into the big world. He finds out about deceit, sex, indifference, money, discipline, whatever. But the theme is usually summarized as "coming of age." Yet, the reason why we keep reading these books is because the "greater truth" is often quite surprising. Nineteenth century novels like David Copperfield are centered around the entry of the young man into responsible adulthood - the project was to see how this young man would resolve himself to society. Holden Caulfield, however, in Catcher in the Rye, does not resolve himself to anything. He ends up in a mental institution. The theme might be coming of age, but the greater truth that Salinger leaves us with is that there is not a way to enter into adult society without a breakdown of the old personality. When, and if, Caulfield exits the institution, he will be a different person. In fact, in almost every theme category, we can find a wide range of "greater truths" being developed. Each piece of writing we treasure gives us not only entertainment and sensory delight, but a chance to consider another "greater truth." The question for the writer, then, is not "what is the theme?" Rather, the writer needs to ask: What is the greater truth and when do I need to know it? In general, we define the "greater truth" in the writing process. Writers are prone to say that writing IS the discovery of truth - and that happens to some extent. But any good piece of work needs to have a firm basis in some kind of world-view and also in some moral and ethical convictions. Every time we posit, in a poem or a story, ANY action and consequence, we have defined a universe and a moral basis for that universe. Take an example of moral world-view in a simple tale: Let's place a lovely old lady standing on a corner in a big city. Let's have a young man come along and offer to escort her across the street. When she is safely across (a) the young man finds a $5 bill on the sidewalk; (b) the old lady offers him a much-needed job gardening at her house; (c) he gets hit by a car when he turns to re-cross the street; (d) he grows another step towards manhood; (e) a huge strongbox falls from a window overhead and smashes him to pulp. There you are - each of these consequences already establishes a law of the universe for each event history. We can have a universe where (a) random good happens from good (b) you earn what you earn (c) random bad happens anyway, and so on.... Good writers tend to think about the world they inhabit and intend to portray all the time - what does life mean? how is it that we learn to be human? And, in the case of a memorable work, that particular work usually has a consistent ethical and moral system. That is, if the author is telling us in Chapter One that the world is "random bad," we aren't comfortable with Chapter Two breezing along with examples of "you do what you do and you earn what you earn." Now, it may be that the protagonist will come to see the world differently - that is always a viable thematic structure. A person, usually middle aged, will start out thinking this world is "random bad" and end the novel seeing that all was, in fact, earned. [I am not saying that any one "greater truth" is the only one - there are many "greater truths" and new ones appear all the time.] But, the author is always responsible for the imaginative universe in which a "greater truth" can be illuminated. {An aside here about movies. Since so many folks today have seen far more films than they have read books, they assume that literature and movies work the same way. That is not really accurate. There may be many ways to interpret a book: social, psychological, historical, feminist, Marxist, stylistic, and on and on. But, at least for books that have survived, there is almost always a trajectory of "greater truth" that stays fixed. You can think that Flaubert was a beast or a brilliant writer, but the fact remains that he leads poor Emma (in Emma Bovary) to a bitter end. The consequences of her actions, within the world of the book, follow a certain pattern of judgment. Movies, on the other hand, are often collaborative. Each of the participants who has a hand in the shaping - from the script (often several screenwriters) to the final cut - probably has a slightly or radically different world-view. Thus, we have movies where the pattern of actions-consequences is nearly incoherent. Movie viewers and reviewers dismiss this with something like "the plot didn't hold together." But in the case of most movies, the problem is more severe than a plot glitch. For many movies, the "greater truth" is lost entirely. Each participant surely wanted his "greater truth" to come through, but in the collaboration, we get only a profound confusion. Sometimes, if you watch a movie carefully, you can see the operation of different world-views from scene to scene. The cult of the auteur director is partially based on the fact that a strong director can, at least, preserve a recognizable greater truth.} Back to our writer, who does have a chance to establish a coherent imaginative world. One of the problems of writers is that they can't write everything in the last two years of a 100-year life, or in the last years of time. We grow and change, as individuals and as cultures, and our values change, too. You can only write from the world you know (I am not saying you can only write what you know - although that is true in some ways). When we are in our early twenties, for example, we tend to see the "value" of our parents as relatively small. And that is natural. Young adulthood is a time to make new discoveries, reconcile our potentialities with the adult world of our own time and place. Somewhere in late middle age, we begin to see how deep our ties are to the past, to our families. Thus, the same writer who once placed an ethical imperative on a character to break away from home might turn around 30 years later, in another book, and show the necessity of a character's ability to return home. Similarly, we are influenced by the value systems of our culture. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound have been demonized by their unacceptable political attitudes; we "read around" the communistic dogma in George Orwell's 1984. I would venture to guess that, had Eliot or Orwell been writing today, their political attitudes would have sounded more like what we consider enlightened. The key thing here is that our culture, values, and attitudes do change over time. Sometimes they even change in the course of writing a short poem. What the writer wants to do, then, is simply to be mindful of the fact that she/he is creating a world. Any created world holds within itself the "greater truth." Once this world is created, the pattern of events/consequences should acknowledge this "greater truth." Let me end with an example of what I mean - one long-lasting popular novel is Candide*, Volatire's "coming of age" tale of the innocent abroad. Candide, the protagonist, goes out into the world a happy, trusting, generous, honorable and naive young man - well you get the picture. Everything conspires against him in a very cruel world. He is beaten, cheated, his sweetheart is kidnapped into slavery, ohmygawd. Each of these disasters is a lesson in realpolitik - he learns that the world is not the benign paradise he had anticipated. At the end, Candide and his love, now old and battered, settle down to tend their own garden. Candide, the character, assures us that "all is well." But, of course, all is not well. Voltaire is satirizing the grim truth of the way that life beats us down, but he in no way intends to endorse the process - he writes so that we may say, Oh, I think NOT. And maybe, once the reader has admitted that the world needs a few improvements, the reader will be more willing to stray on the side of reason when issues of tolerance, religion, and aggression arise in their own lives. Candide has been interpreted in many ways, so perhaps a good way to think of the greater truth is not to imagine that there is only one - but rather to be sure to ask a coherent version of the question: what are we here for? If your answer is already "go from rages to riches," then the piece should be about how that happens. If your answer is "to go to heaven," then the piece should show the way. If the answer is yet unknown, then the first step is to observe the world you do live in carefully, as you go. Good luck!!!
Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California
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