When I was taking a mediocre English class, one of the things that I was taught, one of the things I subsequently rejected, was that a story must have a message. Some while afterwards, I changed my mind: I decided I was wrong to have rejected this idea, that a story ought to have a message but that this message needn’t be simple or obvious, could be a complex and open-ended question.
This, too, was wrong.
A story must have a message. This is not a normative injunction, this is not a command, not a formalistic constraint: A story must have a message simply because it is not possible to write a story without one. Each word is a message with a meaning, each pairs up with another to create a more complex meaning, a sequence, a narrative. What could result from this if not a message?
Okay, sure. Very pedantic, you may say, obviously words have meaning, but that doesn’t imply that the story as a whole must have a message. So we come to the core of it: What is a message? I mean, the story itself is a message, so what component of this message, what message within a message are we addressing when we discuss the “message” of the story? Something like the moral of Aesop’s fables, a single-line takeaway which neatly sums up the story? What’s the point of the story, if such a message is adequate and available? Mere rhetorical force?
Every narrative is a mess of messages though. Each character’s action and each result of that action implies a worldview, argues for an underlying system of beliefs and consequences. If, say, each character in your story meets an immediate and grisly demise after having premarital sex, then this implies a world view, a persuasive argument, a model of reality or desired reality, that exists in between the characters themselves, a product of the author. That example is pretty obvious, but authors create structures like this all the time, scaffolds of crime and punishment, action and consequence, sex and violence and hurt and forgiveness, networks of meaning. The way I now interpret that classroom instruction, “a story must have a message”, is simply this: Your story will have a message, and your job is to do your damnedest to understand what that message is and to ensure it’s one you are comfortable putting out into the world.
Most of us have some degree of media literacy. We’re able to identify such puritanical ham-handed scriptural strictures and structures as the above and to feel insulted and condescended to by them. Of course, some people have a very limited critical vocabulary – many a viral thread now is premised on understanding the message of a story entirely in terms of what the protagonist does, of interpreting every action this protagonist takes as being morally endorsed regardless of outcome and surrounding commentary. This is an impoverished but sadly popular method of engagement, which raises another point: No matter how well you know your own message, how clear you think it is and how nuanced and incisive its expression, someone will always read the dumbest and most obvious possible version of it and judge you for it. To worry about this too much is to constrain oneself to only saccharine nothingness as artistic outcome. Some audiences are best left ignored.
My frustration with most art I encounter these days, though, is simply that it seems to have no understanding of or commitment to its own message. Most storytelling I encounter seems to either do its damnedest to engender no viewpoint whatsoever – to have no throughline, to reject its own themes and try to make its message as empty and insipid as possible to avoid any possible critical reading – or to instead to be so crammed full of reactionary messaging as to be unpleasant to engage with in any way. One could easily read this choice, between the obviously, aggressively, cruelly reactionary and insipidly positive with no actual ethos, as representing some other such social dilemmas, perhaps encountered at a voting booth – I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Of course, any such resemblances are no coincidence, but emerge as properties from the environment this art is created in and for: When you create for a wide audience, when you modulate your message to their perception rather than to your own model of meaning, you pour your ideas into the mold of their worldview.
I have my own standards, though. I detest art which struggles against its own meaning, which seeks to walk without rhythm. The metric of good music is not merely avoiding dissonance, the metric of a good painting is not merely the maintenance of perspective and anatomy, and anyone who evaluates these in such a way does so out of cowardice, of fear of deeper meaning, of contradiction. To say anything worth saying is to say things that will be received as stupid or off-putting, will create dissonance, instill doubt, generate conflict. This is not an endorsement of crass cynicism – to the contrary, the message of the cynic is all too often a way of avoiding meaningful messaging, of avoiding conflict, by devaluing and demeaning everything so much that all conflict becomes trivialized and pointless. My demand is much more difficult: To care, and then to continue caring, and to create an entire narrative that is, start to finish, tied to a passion for the same idea, the same thread, the same – for lack of any better term – message.