Permanently Deleted
I wish I remembered more specifically, but there was a book we read in high school that had super heave handed symbolism, like embarrassingly so, and this guy in my class insisted that it only meant what the text literally said.
The consequences of the proliferation of “the curtains were fucking blue” can be seen in the fairly common belief that the only good art is only photorealistic drawings
I see this too, right wingers hate art that isn’t purely representative
Yeah I’ve seen some of his paintings, they’re entirely unremarkable, like better than someone whose never/barely practiced but that’s about it
Yeah there’s plenty of room for criticism when it comes to people reading into a thing that aren’t really there, but my god there are some types of people that you can slather on the symbolism so hard that anyone with an analytical mind instantly hates it for being too pushy and they still won’t understand.
Like yes color language is a real thing that real authors often use in writing, sometimes even unconsciously because that’s just how we group with the colors of symbols in our head. Red often means stop, danger, or passion. Even if a writer didn’t think about it actively, you probably don’t see bright yellows and pinks in a situation that is meant to be dangerous. They’re likely to use some form of red just because that’s what comes naturally to us.
whenever someone goes “the curtains were fucking blue!!1!1!” I usually just assume they’re some stupid teenager who just hates doing their English homework
or if confirmed not a literal child, then I think they’re just too dense to understand art that isn’t spoonfed to them on TV. reductionist indeed
Convincing people that words don’t actually mean anything is how capitalists keep the workers from understanding dialectical materialism.
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.
: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.
