Thoughts on Theme

Theme is too often taught as the “philosophy” of the writer, but it strikes me that if a writer wanted to be a philosopher, he or she would write philosophy. Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes did not bother to imagine characters. Camus was a talented guy—if he wanted to write philosophy, he could have. Sartre wrote plays, and also wrote philosophy—he knew the difference. So did Shelley; so did Coleridge. William and Henry James were, respectively, philosopher and novelist. I hope I’ve made my point.

For those of you who teach, you are familiar with the unsophisticated student reader who approaches poetry or fiction as if it were a coded message from another planet, and the whine, “Why doesn’t he just say what he means?” says less about a text than it does about the reader. Unfortunately, too many teachers are themselves weak on this idea (no one in this class, of course) and sometimes such teachers lead students on a symbol hunting expedition, at the end of which everyone feels as though the text has been conquered. If Keats knew the damage high school teachers did to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he’d probably have burned the manuscript; the whirring noise you hear is Yeats spinning in his grave as teachers slog through “Sailing to Byzantium.”

But as producers, as opposed of consumers, of literature, we suspect theme and subtext do more than mystify 16-year olds. One novelist I studied with, Vance Bourjaily, said that subtext was what the writer put into the work to keep himself amused while he wrote it, but that if the writer was any good he’d get rid of it in the last draft and just leave the reader with a story.

I pretty much agree with Vance, but that said, some of us will from time to time decide that a good story ought to include our wisdom, and we’ll delude ourselves into thinking that the world needs to know what we think we do. With good luck, later, we’ll get through the fit and, perhaps, as Vance advised, have a decent story after we purge our work.

Where does theme come from? In fiction, it from the conflict and its resolution. That reductionist notion is worth exploring. The chain of logic can be tricky, but here it is:

A STORY engages a character in conflict (see Thoughts on Composing), AND
ACTION is created by how the character struggles with that conflict, AND
Acute DRAMA is a function of how equal the antagonistic forces are, AND
Story STRUCTUREbuilds to a mandatory scene where the elements of conflict confront each other (the climax or, crisis), AND
That confrontation creates a CHANGE IN STATE for the protagonist, THEN
The THEME is reflected in the resolution of the conflict or the change in character.

Remember that—no change, no story. If you don’t believe me, reread Shakespeare. All those corpses on the stage in the tragedies; all those marriages in the comedies. Get it?

For example: Ahab spends 600+ pages in mad pursuit of a whale, and for most of those pages Melville characterizes Ahab in scenes so that when this 160 lb. man who is half whalebone gets astride a 12-ton white whale, we believe the confrontation is dead equal. That’s high drama: the issue is in doubt. Ahab has pulled lightning from the air; he has tracked a whale around the world, a feat of seamanship that on the face of it is impossible; he has led his civilized and uncivilized men into a frenzy of devotion. The antagonists kill each other, the Pequod sinks, and a reader is left to wonder at the equivalency of the antagonists, good and evil, predestination or freewill, Black (Ahab) and White (the whale). There is an industry that interprets and reinterprets the themes ofMoby Dick, but one thing is certain—it’s a story about a great whale.

For another example: Gary Cooper in “High Noon” is married to Grace Kelly and receives word that the bad guy that he sent to jail is on the noon train with two friends, and they are intent on killing him. His wife says, “Let’s boogie,” but Cooper is the marshal and this is the Old West. The drama mounts, less from the ticking clock, but from the fact that everywhere Cooper goes to his friends and townsmen, they tell him he is on his own. We get to see each of these scenes and the marshal’s growing desperation. He is going to have to fight three men on his own, and the people he thought were his allies are willing o let him die doing it. His wife begs him to leave again, and Tex Ritter sings, “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling.” Noon comes; the guys get off the train. In the center of Main Street, we get our confrontation between Good and Evil, and Cooper miraculously triumphs, but this being a sophisticated western, as opposed to an oat-burner, instead of a theme about how Good triumphs over Evil, in the resolution we see the Cooper throw away his badge as he and Grace get on a buckboard and leave town. We have to conclude that the theme of the story is about the myth of community in the old west, how ordinary men would have allowed evil to triumph, and how the integrity of a single individual who feels he must do his duty has nothing to do with community loyalty.

For a third: In the short story by Flannery O’Connor, “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” a son antagonizes his mother in the recently integrated South about her racist attitudes while they are on a bus ride to her exercise class—a class she is taking because she has high blood pressure. Julian is an arrogant little twerp, but he does not know that, and O’Connor never tells us anything—she shows all. Unsophisticated young readers will read Julian’s point-of-view estimates of hi mother and sympathize with hi, agreeing that his mother is inadequate, without ever realizing that Julian is a prig, breaking at least one of the ten commandments, and blames everyone in the world for his shortcomings, especially his mother. Why would one antagonize someone with high blood pressure? She gets off the bus as she has a stroke, and in last gesture, her eye “rakes” him. His epiphany from that confrontation changes him; he realizes how he needs her, and he cries, “Mother! Mother!” as she dies in his arms. It’s too late: he will never tell her he loved her, he sees how he has depended on her, and he sees his entry into a world of grief and sorrow. It’s hard to avoid O’Connor’s always Catholic themes—the notions of charity and grace evading those of us engaged by unthinking, bad behavior.

Last example: In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s lovers are embroiled with each other in Italy during World War I. Lt. Henry, a noncombatant ambulance driver, falls in love with Catherine, a nurse, when he is wounded. He recovers and goes back to driving his ambulance, but when in a general retreat he is nearly executedby the Italians, the guys on his own side, he escapes back to Catherine. She is now pregnant, and the two resolve to “make a separate peace.” They will row across LakeComo at night to Switzerland, an act of desertion for them both, but they have had their ideals pounded out of them by the war. Catherine nevertheless dies in childbirth, and so the conflict—the lovers vs. a hostile universe—is won by the universe. Hemingway’s famous articulation of this theme in the novel reads, “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Sure, it is a dark vision, but the theme is Hemingway’s, not ours.

I’d not agree that the difference between great writing and good writing is the density or complexity of the theme, though I am sure the case can be made. Sure, Dostoevski has it all, as do Tolstoy and Shakespeare, but while Robert Louis Stevenson is a “lightweight” at theme, his novels, especially Kidnapped, simply rip.If you want to learn how to get readers to turn a page, read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a brilliant novella with a shallow theme, the basis of a comic book, The Hulk. Who’d charge the doorstop-novelists of the late 19th century to be second rate? Galsworthy, Bennett, Trollope and, in France, Balzac. Joyce Carol Oates is possibly our most prolific writer, the Balzac of our time, and she seems to have a major theme that she returns to again and again—the profound violence that violence does to women’s lives. Well, just because one has read one of her books with this theme, does it follow one need not bother with the others?

A special word might be added about theme in genre, or “category,” fiction. If the point of such literary product is to deliver what the readers expect, this is true on the level of theme as well. Genre writing is what it is—a product. One does not open a box of Oreo Cookies in hope of finding filet mignon; no one reads chick-lit, westerns, romance, fantasy, or sci-fi to be enlightened by theme. The wisdom of such books is always common knowledge. Girls will go to the city, make jokes about periods, spend too much on shoes, have a friend who is a lesbian, and make hysterically funny remarks about the dorky men they encounter; good guys will win the west with gunplay because that is the American myth; young women will fall for older men who at first seem like scoundrels because that is the fantasy so many impressionable women readers want to believe is true, good wizards will foil evil wizards with the help of flying dragons and talking lions so we can be assured that evil can never triumphand so we can maintain our hope that our world will be all right, and sci-fi will always show us a future that despite technological change really is a reflection of our own time. I’m of two minds on mysteries. All have the same subtext—what seems inexplicable in human affairs can be made sensible. Raymond Chandler is the master of the form, and the connection between the urban detective who is a loner to the American western hero who is a loner is a critical commonplace—but some experimental mysteries leave us without solutions. The point of our best mysteries remain character, not theme or even plot. Alcoholic detectives; lesbian detectives; gourmet cook detectives, detectives in wheelchairs. The point is personality, and all the writer needs is to put a corpse on the floor and go. Don’t confuse “mystery” with police procedurals—TV shows like “CSI,” for example, trade on blood and gore, and there are plenty of books that are designed for voyeurism, the recent flood of material about serial murderers is a case in point, much of it popularized by Thomas Harris and his character, Hannibal Lecter, and the lovingly rendered killings, including a touch of cannibalism. Ewwww, gross!The theme is always the same—life is fragile and some people are crazy, huh?

What’s this mean for beginning writers? Well, take Vance’s advice. If you have a message people need to hear, don’t write; buy a billboard by a well-traveled highway—you’ll reach more people in a single rush hour than you will in years with any book or story. The second important lesson is to be aware that no matter what you do, your readers will assign your story “meaning,” so be sure you create stores that are “of a piece.” If you set up a conflict and lead us to a resolution where the outcome is in doubt—great. But if you load the case on one side because you wrote the story to prove a point, well, expect the whale to surface only once, grin, and swallow Ahab with one gulp before swimming away, laughing.