Must a story have a message?

In my English literature class this term, we have been working on writing theme statements. When we read the two novellas in Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, we wrote something like this: “Yoshimoto expresses the idea that we can move towards healing from grief by forming human relationships and seeking acceptance.” The theme statement helps us wrap our minds around the characters and plot. It gives the text a clear purpose. In a very practical sense, students will have to show eventually in their exams that they “understand the text.” This theme statement is a central piece of that.

Yet I recognize that such theme statements are necessarily oversimplifications. They are interpretations of readers that perhaps help us assimilate a work of literature into a practical kind of meaning in our own lives. But we’re wrong to say that the theme statement is ultimately the full, distilled meaning of the story. I wrote once before about this tension. Today, let’s take another look.

Telling a story, or political statements

Yesterday I was reading an interview in The Guardian with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The interviewer made a distinction between Adichie’s political statements and her acclaimed novels: “In [her novels], her overriding agenda seems to be the urgency of the story.”

This idea, that a work of literature is at its core telling a story, reminded me of Vladimir Nobokov’s afterword to Lolita, in which he describes himself to be “the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book.”

In the recent writing classes I’ve done, we have talked about the idea of a story’s movement, the idea that stories are about change. We do not ask ourselves, “What are we trying to say with this story?” We have a story in our minds, and we endeavor to birth it onto the page (and I am thinking here of Anne Bradstreet’s poem, “The Author to Her Book”).

There is a wonderful purity to this idea. If our singular purpose is to tell a story–not to persuade, to raise awareness, not to present an argument, but to tell a story only, then we must do everything in the text not in service of a political message; instead, we sacrifice whatever political ambitions we might have about a story on the alter of verisimilitude to life. Characters must be as real as possible. Their conflicts are not there to teach an audience a lesson but because a person as close to alive as a group of words on a page can be has a conflict, and they must work through that conflict in the truest and most human way.

And yet. I pause here. Adichie’s Americanah is unquestionably political. Its engagement with race in America, its presentation of different ways of being in Lagos and the USA, its long passages from the protagonist’s antiracist blog posts–the idea that Adichie’s goal here is “the urgency of the story” skates over the essential question of whose story we are telling and what story it is that we create for them. Nobokov’s claim that Lolita is only a story he is trying to “get rid of” serves to exonerate him from the novel’s apparent condoning of pedophilia.

A story is inevitably a political object. We write from a particular position, and readers will inevitably interpret the story as a statement. A text communicates whether or not we intend that communication. Everything from the social identities of our characters to our choice of subject matter to representations of place and language will make a statement.

What does this mean for writers?

Verisimilitude of character and action is more persuasive than caricature. Entering the writing process with the theme statement already decided is to shoot our stories in the foot. You know it when you are reading a political novel. The politics moves characters like a puppeteer. The descriptions vilify or lionize too obviously. Nuance gives way to too much clarity. We read too allegorically. Perhaps the stories that persuade the best will subordinate that message to the story.

Must a story have a message? If it is read, then yes, I think so. But that message may be best determined after it is written, not before.

I often begin a story wanting to show something. As I write, perhaps I need to shed some of that and let the story be a story first. What do you think about these questions? How should we navigate the tension between story and theme? Is it naïve for us to claim the primacy of story, or is it exactly what we should be doing?

Thank you for reading. Thanks for stopping by. When I write again, I’ll be en route to the US for the winter break. We will be visiting family in Montana and Wisconsin. How good it will be to be there again. Best wishes to you all,
Jimmy