I may or may not have a reputation around here for being a communist, furry, and someone who does a lot of fiction writing and worldbuilding (which has largely been the last thing keeping me on Reddit because there isn’t a large enough writer/worldbuilder community on Lemmy.)
Well, this is something I’ve been thinking about this on and off about some of my works. Generally I try to put some socialist or leftist elements into my story premises since it’s something I care about so much, but I also rarely have normal, human worlds where the ideology can be seamlessly fit into the setting without some heavy modification. Since I write mainly sci-fi and fantasy with non-human characters, it seems that since those premises are so far removed from reality, readers tend to almost instinctively draw tons of implications paralleling human society (I definitely do this as well whenever I read someone else’s sci-fi or fantasy work), and to be honest I’m worried about people looking at my works, and thinking I’m trying to send a message that I absolutely didn’t intend to.
I write a lot of things that involve intelligent animals, especially predator and prey species trying to live in harmony despite their history. I’ve already gotten a few comments asking if my characters of different species represent human races or predator-prey tensions is akin to racism, which I never intended for these things to be interpreted this way (in fact, I’ve been interested this animals living harmony concept since I was a kid, long before I even knew what race and racism was). I think it also doesn’t help that the well-known pop culture thing my world is compared to the most, Zootopia, does actually attempt to compare different species to human ethnicities and failed pretty hard at it with tons of bad implications in its message. But I’m not trying to do that at all, I genuinely just wanted to create a world where different species of animals live together and I just think it would make sense if different species of animals had their own culture, ways of doing things, governments that represent their unique interests, politics and political interactions with other species, etc; since different species obviously do have real biological differences that are relevant to how they live their lives (also, it should be noted that I’m also not claiming that the characters in this are infallable or live in a society that does everything right, but I feel that too many times when a story has a “good guy” organization or country/society that is seen by the characters as a good place to be, readers think the author wrote it that way because that’s their idea of a perfect society with no major issues), which human ethnicity obviously do not have such differences since we’re all the same species. Again I bring this up because I’ve literally been asked if this is trying to parallel real human racial issues which it is not (cause if it does, the unfortunate implication would be that human ethnicities do have differences and should have separate governments and). I just really love animals and want to use them in a meaningful way in my writing, and I don’t even think comparing different species of animals to human ethnicities even makes sense precisely because different species have real biological differences, but it’s not like I can make that known to the reader.
What do you think of all this? Is unintended implications/interpretations of fictional works something to actually be concerned about? Do you concern about it when doing worldbuilding of your own? I’m mainly worried that people are going to assume that because I wrote a fictional story whose message was interpreted in a certain way, people are going to think I personally hold those opinions. Which, especially as a socialist who shouldn’t be tolerating any form or degree of racism, do you think a risk of unfortunate race-related implications in a (somewhat overtly) leftist story would be problematic?
People make meanings. It’s second nature. They fill in the gaps to make sense of the world.
On the one hand, you can provide the right details to forestall people adding their own ‘wrong’ details. On the other, you can not care too much, and just let people do what they’re going to do. The political economics of it all will be there whether you intend them to be or not. As I think it’s impossible to separate art from reality, I don’t think one should try to do so.
I do worry about this kind of thing. I want people to come away from anything I write and be a step closer to being a Marxist. I wouldn’t want to leave it up to liberals and fascists to fill in the gaps in such a way that my writing becomes a manifesto for them. (Not that they won’t try. They’d happily read a Marxist animal farm and pretend the grumpy old dog Marx wasn’t even in the story or was there as some kind of warning. Liberals gonna liberal.)
This can be very subtle, though. Emphasising the way that material features influence the way that that different animals would have to organise their societies could be a Marxist way of writing. For example, a squirrel society is going to find life harder if the beaver society chews down all the trees to make dens; but some of the squirrels might benefit from this and some of the beavers might not like it. Their ways of life may be contradictory but they could live in harmony if they weren’t motivated to dominate the landscape in a capitalist kind of way.
The race thing is interesting because it reveals problematic attitudes of readers. If the first thought to a reader is that different animal species represent races, they need to ask themselves why they implicitly accept race science and the biological basis of race. So if that’s what critics are pushing you to do, I’d steer clear of their suggestions (it seems you’re already doing this).
(Strangely, when liberals use animal species, I do sometimes assume they are using them as an analogy for race and I criticise them heavily for it, like Rowling and her house elves and banker goblins or Tolkien and his dwarves and elves. I probably assume this when/because writers do little to make my think they’re trying to do something else.)
It’s probably okay to have animals represent nations or states. But if you do this, liberals will certainly interpret these as ethno-states, because liberals are, again, unfortunately, gonna liberal.
If you did want to make more of the politics of race or class or gender or sexuality, etc, there will be a way to do it. China Mieville (a Marxist) uses animals in his work. You might want to see how he does it, as a published example. I’m thinking Perdido Street Station.
Or, dare I suggest another example Orwell’s Animal Farm: A Faery Tale. The problem that reveals the curse there is, even if you put ‘faery tale’ in the bloody title, liberals are going to treat it as gospel if it could be used as a bludgeon to bash Stalin. I suppose that’s how anti-communist snitches are bound to be interpreted, though.
You wrote:
I wouldn’t worry too much about this. The point of fiction is that it’s fictional. Not everyone understands that. That’s why interviewers often ask writers, ‘And do I get a sense that this book/film is autobiographical?’ And why writers can always reply, ‘Well I suppose it is semi-autobiographical, yes, how did you know?’
The answer is that we’re human and there’s a dialectical relationship between art and reality but they rarely/never say that. It’s better business to keep some mystique and get people to buy your book to read it and try to guess which parts were lived. I wouldn’t let this fear change your story.
People are going to put words in your mouth whatever you do. The theorists and critics get paid for it, like good little propagandists. You could get ahead of it and leave clues to lead them to put the right – at least better – words in your mouth?
You could do this by showing variety within species and show the reader that those differences aren’t, in themselves, the determining factor in well-being, as opposed to material conditions. This could turn your work into a weird and garbled political tract, but you can fix this by rewriting.
These kinds of questions might be answered by Marxist literary critics and theorists. We’re doing literary theory when we engage in these debates about what writers mean. You could read some Terry Eagleton to see the kinds of things that Marxists say about non-Marxist texts. If you agree with the criticism, you can avoid doing the thing that was criticised?
I’ll give you a quote from the conclusion to his Literary Theory: An Introduction (it’s one paragraph but I’ll split it up for ease of reading online):
(Emphasis added:)
In sum:
Keep writing! Your work sounds interesting and it would be a real shame if you let liberal critics put you off (or me, if anything I’ve said has put you off).
Edit: grammar
liberal sees “The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation”, thinks “surely this must be a serious journalistic work”
😔