Ras: Big Ideas, Part 1

“American creative writing instruction, in my experience, tends to discourage would-be novelists from working with philosophical concepts. Large, abstract ideas are seen as the province of scientists and Nobel laureates. Everyone else, the thinking goes, should stay squarely in the realm of concrete troubles like adultery or thievery or murder.”
Maud Newton, “In defense of Big Ideas in fiction”

“Of course any novel worth more than a cursory glance contains ideas, provokes ideas, and can be discussed in terms of ideas.”
David Lodge, The Art of Fiction

In chapter 44 of his 50-chapter book on fictional techniques the British novelist David Lodge gets round to dealing with ideas, and he says that the “novel of ideas” is far more common in the European tradition than in the English novel. A roman a these the French call this kind of novel. Think Dostoyevsky, Sartre, or Kundera versus Austen, Dickens, or Arnold Bennett.

Maud Newton in her blog post makes the same point about recent American novels, even as she argues for more openness to ideas in fiction.

Most of us do think of character, plot, point of view, voice, and setting before we think of ideas when beginning to work on a story. Of course, exceptions spring immediately to mind – Donald Barthelme, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon. But there is something about ideas that seems alien to the unspoken assumptions of realism that underlie the mainstream of contemporary fiction.

If a story’s goal is to refract reality and to present something credible to the reader, well, then we know that reality is chaotic, contradictory, unstructured – at least so far as most humans have been able to figure it out. Ideas, however, are nothing if not consistent. The nub of it: If a story is too heavily governed by a schema of ideas, it won’t seem true to the blooming, buzzing confusion that is life. And yet, I’d agree with Lodge that it’s difficult to write a story worth reading that does not bring ideas into play.

Theme” is the term we teach ninth-graders to use for analyzing the big ideas in a story. As one education site puts it, a theme is “a central idea, concern, or purpose in a literary work.” There’s an Internet term-paper industry built around providing students with papers that lay out the themes of the great works and plenty of  Web sites that will you tell you the 12 most common themes in literature. I like #4: “Crime Does Not Pay: A popular theme played out in books throughout time is the concept that honesty is honored and criminals will eventually be caught. Crime and Punishment and ‘The Telltale Heart’ are two stories written on this theme.”

In a recent interview with the Baltimore Sun’s Michael Sragow, the filmmaker and screenwriter Barry Levinson talked about the importance of themes in movie story telling:

Levinson had no fear of flying solo on a script. But he realized he needed a firmer idea of what the film would be about than he ever did before. Critics often praise the textures of his Baltimore movies. What’s essential for Levinson from the get-go is grasping their underlying themes.

In Diner, set in 1959, it was “all the guys hanging out like a tribe that didn’t understand the other tribe” – the opposite sex. Tin Men, set in 1963, took that idea farther into “the death of the Rat Pack” and its ideal of masculine glamour as practiced by aluminum-siding salesmen. With Avalon, set mostly in 1948 and 1949, it was “the breakup of the extended family with the rise of television.” And Liberty Heights, set in 1954 and 1955, explored “the racism and class distinction and anti-Semitism in that period.”

Still, Levinson doesn’t make message movies. For Levinson, the theme provides a framework in which to conjure conflict and emotion. “The theme is for me,” he says. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t know what I was writing about. But the fun of it is wrapping it all in larger behavior and in character.”

Levinson’s quickie theme summaries may not be on the same intellectual level as the themes you could extract from, say, Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but Levinson is onto something when he says, “The theme is for me.” Once you know what your theme is, it helps you make choices.

(to be continued tomorrow)