Permanently Deleted
I’m well aware lol. Just started reading Grundrisse and the forward by Martin Nicolaus makes this exact point (using mainly citations from Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks). The Hegalian method relies heavily on language and terms that might seem superfluous on first glance but actually hold a lot of meaning. Like the concept of “suspension” which if read uncritically is meaningless, but in the context of the dialectic, is super powerful because of it’s double meaning of both ceasing movement and also maintaining the process of movement.
All meaning comes from some form of contradiction and if you only ever see one side of the contradiction, you haven’t really seen anything.
Lol, I was just using that as an example because that happens to be what I’m literally reading right now. The only reason this particular book is written that way is because it was essentially his notes, it was never published.
He basically took these and wrote Capital with them, even that’s a bit rough, but it’s also not full of terms that are used as placeholders for contradictions.
:jesse-wtf:
I agreed with your OP but now I feel like you’re going off the rails. Show don’t tell is fundamental writing advice and I don’t understand how it’s supposed to be anti-communist. Fictional works obviously contain many different messages which can be meaningful and worth analyzing regardless of whether or not they’re intentional.
It sounds more like you had a teacher who either didn’t understand the material or was bad at teaching it, than a problem with “show, don’t tell” or encouraging people to draw their own (informed) conclusions, which are both good things.
I might be more willing to hear you out if you didn’t make it personal.
Did I?? I thought I just said that I didn’t agree with or understand where you were coming from.
I suppose these guys also went off the rails.
https://mattiasinspace.substack.com/p/is-show-dont-tell-a-cia-psyop
But does this mean that, to fight off the malign influence of the military-industrial complex, we must reverse the advice and begin telling instead of showing?
When I think of fiction writers who are infamous for favouring telling over showing, I think of Ayn Rand. I can’t think of any other writer of enduring fame who is so committed to propagating a specific ideology in the pages of her novels. John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged is ninety pages long, and for all intents and purposes might as well be the voice of Rand herself. Yet Rand’s non-communist credentials are hardly in doubt.
What’s missed in the opposition to “Show don’t tell” on this basis is the reason it is so successful. When applied moderately, without stripping necessary telling, it naturally produces more impactful writing. Novels that, in service of communicating a thesis, ignore the sensory and emotional world of their characters do so at the expense of those characters. They prematurely end the life those characters would have had in the reader’s mind.
I think that link agrees with me? They say that show don’t tell is good advice, in moderation.
Editing in because, wow, even moreso
“Telling” can also mean “telling the reader what to think”. In my view, this truly is bad creative writing. If it is obvious to the reader that you want them to hate a certain idea, or a certain character, the reader will lose his sense of agency. Reading, too, is a creative process. Ultimately, a novel is a series of collaborations between the writer and each of her readers, the end result of which are interpretations that live on in those readers’ minds. To tell the reader how to interpret one’s novel as he reads it is, put simply, a violation of his boundaries.
It is useful writing advice for modern audiences (in part because that’s what modern audiences, like you,
Who’s making it personal again?
have come to expect so it becomes self-reinforcing) but I wouldn’t call it fundamental, considering how the “show, don’t tell” mandate is relatively new when it comes to the very old canon of literature and literary analysis going back thousands of years.
Aristotle, Poetics
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents…. Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kind of things a man chooses or avoids. Speeches, therefore, which do not make this manifest, or in which the speaker does not choose or avoid anything whatever, are not expressive of character.
Averroes, 12th century Spanish writer
Poetry should not employ the weapons of rhetoric or persuasion. It should simply imitate, and it should do so with such vivid liveliness that the object imitated appears to be present before us. If the poet discards this methods for straightforward reasoning, he sins against his art.
I’m sure I can find more examples, if you like. Isn’t show, don’t tell, like, the entire idea behind poetry?
