From: winston@ssrl01.slac.stanford.edu
Newsgroups: misc.writing
Subject: Re:    Theme ~ Moral
Date: 9 Nov 92 15:34:32 -0800
Organization: SSRL, Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab
NNTP-Posting-Host: ssrl01.slac.stanford.edu

In article <92314.140929KVJLC@ASUACAD.BITNET>, Jon L. Campbell <KVJLC@ASUACAD.BITNET> writes:
> 
>    Several people responded to my posting and challenged what my choatic
> theory or morality and theme.  I may be wrong about this, but I don't see
> a difference between morality and theme.  

First off, a "morality" and a "moral" are different things, and nobody
was talking about a "morality" in the responses to your posting.  A
"moral" is an explicit lesson to be learned from the story, presumably
to the benefit of the reader.  An explicit moral is usually found only
in fables for children, and is generally some particular lesson (and
usually a fairly cliched lesson).  The moral of "The Frog Prince" is
"Don't judge a book by its cover."

"Morality" usually applies to a whole structure of belief about how people
should behave, how society should be organized, and what rights and duties
people have.  Unless the author is really thinking about it carefully, the work
will reflect the author's own morality, no matter what it's about.

> A story with a theme is one that
> tries to leave an underlining message ~ subliminal message for the reader
> to grasp and apply (e.g. love conquers all, etc.).  

A theme is what the story is about, but it doesn't dictate the plot and
it doesn't have to be extracted by the reader into a little lesson.  One
possible theme for "Hamlet" is "It's hard to be a Renaissance man when
everyone around you is still in the Dark Ages."  It's difficult to take
that as a moral for the story.  A moral from "Hamlet" might be "Be
decisive" or "Make sure you're killing the right person."

One of the reasons "Hamlet" can seem so odd today is that it displays an
Elizabethean morality, which is different from the moral and different
from the theme, although it is embodied in the plot.  I can't sum it up
in a phrase, because it's a whole belief structure, but it includes:
Personal revenge appears to be not only a right but a  duty.  Messing
with the secession is a grave offense, and so on.

The theme of "Oedipus Rex" appears to be "You can't avoid what Fate has
planned."  If there's a moral, it may be something like "Keep your
temper," since Oedipus wouldn't have killed his father -- thus leaving
his mother a widow and available -- if he hadn't gotten into a fight
with him at the crossroads.

Note that the morality of the play differs from the moral or theme, and
also from the morality of modern times: Oedipus makes no secret of
having killed a man in a pointless fight at the crossroads, and his
society doesn't have any trouble with that.

> Morality in fiction is
> not really any different.  Take the morality of 'love conquers all' and
> apply it a story.  What you end up with is a theme with which the story
> is based.  Morality is an artistic work that teaches a moral lesson according
> to Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.  If this is true then what is
> the difference between theme and morality, nothing.  

You're confusing morals and morality.  A "morality play" is one designed
primarily to put across a particular idea of morality, usually by
showing someone who breaks a rule -- sometimes a commandment -- and
seems to prosper by it for a while, but either comes to a horrible end 
(tossed into the mouth of Hell, for example) or goes through remorse and
redemption.  Morality plays are specifically the ones where the moral is
the theme, and where that theme is meant to promote a particular
behavior or belief in line with conventional morality.


>Plain and simple when
> someone attempts to subvert a story with their own ideas of morality, then
> they are playing god with the mind of the reader.  

This is a very interesting remark.  First, writing fiction is
inherently "playing god with the mind of the reader."  The author is,
with the reader's consent, trying to fool the reader into believing that
this passel of lies is true, and to give her or him some idea of what
it's like to experience things that have not happened.

Second, do you feel that the story exists in some pure form outside of the
mind of the writer?  If the writer invents the story in line with his or
her ideas of morality, then how can the story be "subverted?"
    
>Because morality in the
> story is so subtle, it is subliminal and therefore, dangerous.  A means of
> invoking thoughts and prejudices, love and hate, right and wrong, but who
> among any writer has that responsibility.

Whether or not you consciously put your idea of morality into your
writing, it goes in there, unless you're very careful.  Not explicitly, 
but probably implicitly in the attitudes you take toward the actions of
your characters.  *Every* writer has that responsibility, like it or
not.

(An amusing novel based on this idea is Norman Spinrad's "The Iron
Dream," the bulk of which purports to be a science-fiction novel 
("Lords of the Swastika") by Adolf Hitler in an alternate universe in
which he was able to get somewhere with his painting and never got into
politics, but still had the same underlying personality and beliefs.)

>    A story is just that.  Nothing more than one persons idea of reality or
> un-reality (i.e. lack of reality).  High school english or college writing,
> it doesn't matter, but wherever theme is taught it is an abuse of mankinds
> free choice.  The freedom to choose what is moral or not, the freedom to
> decide for themselves what is morality and what is immoral.  To write a
> moralistic theme into a story is equlivent to artistic incest.  Think
> about it.

Do you mean that telling writers that they should have a theme is an
abuse of mankind's free choice, or that a writer imposing a theme on his
fictitious characters is an abuse of free choice?  If the latter, I
scarcely know what to tell you (but ask me sometime about "diceliving").  

If the former, I don't think that Crawford meant you had to pick up a
particular theme off the shelf and impose that on your story.  Rather,
choosing a sympathetic theme -- that is, something that you want to say
or at least agree with, makes sure your story is about something,
even if what it's about is "the benign indifference of the universe," as
in "The Stranger" by Camus.

-- Alan
Newsgroups: misc.writing